Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918–1923 9781472578785, 9781472578778, 9781474205894, 9781472578792

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Women Activists between War and Peace

ii

Women Activists between War and Peace Europe, 1918–1923 Edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Ingrid Sharp, Matthew Stibbe and Contributors, 2017 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7878-5  ePDF: 978-1-4725-7879-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-7880-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sharp, Ingrid, editor. | Stibbe, Matthew, editor. Title: Women activists between war and peace : Europe, 1918-1923 / edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016046314| ISBN 9781472578785 (hb) | ISBN 9781472578808 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism–Europe–History–20th century. | Women political activists–Europe–History–20th century. | World War, 1914-1918–Social aspects–Europe. Classification: LCC HQ1587 .W624 2017 | DDC 305.42094–dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2016046314 Cover Image: Derivative image of ‘Frauentag Plakat’ © SPÖ Presse und Kommunikation used under CC BY-SA 2.0/Removed original text ‘Den frauen ihr recht’. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23 Introduction: Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918–23  Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe 1 Suffrage and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective: Britain, Hungary, Finland and the Transnational Experience of Rosika Schwimmer  Julie V. Gottlieb and Judith Szapor, with Tiina Lintunen and Dagmar Wernitznig 2 Internationalism, Pacifism, Transnationalism: Women’s Movements and the Building of a Sustainable Peace in the Post-War World  Ingrid Sharp with Judit Acsády and Nikolai Vukov 3 Women and Socialist Revolution, 1917–23  Matthew Stibbe with Olga Shnyrova and Veronika Helfert 4 Mediating the National and the International: Women, Journalism and Hungary in the Aftermath of the First World War  Maria DiCenzo, Judit Acsády, David Hudson and Balázs Sipos 5 Women’s Movements, War and the Body   Alison S. Fell and Susan R. Grayzel Further Reading Index

vi viii xii xiii xv

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29

77 123

173 221 251 257

List of Illustrations Figure 1

Flora Drummond (‘The General’) and Phyllis Ayrton campaigning in Smethwick for Christabel Pankhurst, the Women’s Party candidate, in the British general election, December 1918 40

Figure 2

Cécile Tormay, Countess Ambrózy Migazzi and Countess Ráday, leaders of MANSZ, with Ambassador András Hóry on a visit to Rome, 1932 53

Figure 3

A female Red Guardist during the Finnish Civil War in 1918 59

Figure 4

Rosika Schwimmer, Hungarian-born pacifist and feminist, c.1927 63

Figure 5

Bulgarian women’s rights activist Ekaterina Karavelova, pictured in March 1934 87

Figure 6

German delegation to the WILPF International Women’s Congress, Zurich 1919 95

Figure 7

Postcard, Hungaria 896–1918, c.1920, published by MANSZ (the National Association of Hungarian Women) 98

Figure 8

International group at the WILPF International Women’s Congress, Vienna 1921 105

Figure 9

The head of the Women’s Department of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Alexandra Kollontai, with fellow party activists in Moscow, 1 January 1920 130

Figure 10 Campaigners for the USPD and Luise Zietz during elections to the German National Assembly, January 1919 141 Figure 11 Soviet Russian women soldiers c.1922 148 Figure 12 Front cover of the Austrian communist women’s newspaper Die Arbeiterin, November 1929 155 Figure 13 Front Cover of Jus Suffragii. Monthly Organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 15 July 1911 180

List of Illustrations

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Figure 14 Front cover of the Hungarian feminist periodical A Nő (The Woman), 15 January 1918 190 Figure 15 Photocopy of a passport issued to Eleanor Franklin Egan by the United States Food Administration, 14 January 1919 204 Figure 16 Alice Riggs Hunt at the New York State Fair in 1915 208 Figure 17 Funeral for the children of the Upper North Street School, Poplar, East London, killed during a raid by German Gotha aircraft, June 1917 222 Figure 18 Fred Spear’s ‘Enlist’ poster, produced by the Boston Committee of Public Safety, June 1915 235 Figure 19 Amelia Earhart posing for cover of Sphere magazine just after her transatlantic flight, June 1928 241 Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Notes on Contributors Judit Acsády, PhD, is a sociologist and works as a researcher at the Institute for Sociology in the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her main research topics include the history of Hungarian feminism, public discourse about gender roles, gender relations in transition, social movements and civil society. She has taught courses about gender and culture as part of the Sociology Institute and the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the Eötvös Loránd University, ELTE, and the University Corvinus, Budapest. She has taken part in a number of international projects concerning gender issues and women’s movements. Her work has been presented at a number of conferences and has been published widely. Maria DiCenzo is a professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She has published widely on the early twentieth-century feminist press in Britain. She is co-author of Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (2011) and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period, to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Alison S. Fell is a professor of French Cultural History at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on French and British women and the First World War, and is currently finishing a monograph entitled Back to the Front: Women as Veterans in France and Britain, 1916-1933. She also leads a First World War Centenary project called ‘Legacies of War’, http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/legaciesofwar, and is a co-director of the AHRC Gateways to the First World War Engagement Centre, based at the University of Kent. Julie V. Gottlieb is a reader in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She has published widely on women’s political activism between the wars. Her publications include two monographs, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923-1945 (2000) and ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-war Britain (2015). She has published a number of special issues and edited collections, including (with Richard Toye) The Aftermath of Suffrage (2013) and Feminism and Feminists after Suffrage (2016).

Notes on Contributors

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Susan R. Grayzel is a professor of History at the University of Mississippi. Her books include Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), Women and the First World War (2002), At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (2012) and The First World War: A Brief History with Documents (2012). She is completing a monograph entitled The Age of the Gas Mask: Chemical Warfare and Civilian Bodies in Imperial Britain, 191545, and in 2014–16 was an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellow with Dr Lucy Noakes (University of Brighton) for a new project on gender, citizenship and civil defence in twentieth-century Britain. Veronika Helfert is an assistant professor (pre-doc) for Modern History/ Women’s and Gender History at the University of Vienna, and is working on a dissertation with the provisional title ‘Towards a Gender and Women’s History of the Councils’ Movement in Austria within a European Context, 1916/17-1924’. From June 2016 to July 2017 she is the recipient of a grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Research, Science and Economics (the Marietta-BlauStipendium), involving extended research placements at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and at the University of Berne, Switzerland. David Hudson is a professor of English at Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota where he teaches Literature and Journalism. He has written on the soldier narrative and its relation to the canon of First World War literature. His recent work examines the intersections between journalism, propaganda and literary and personal responses to the war, including several essays on the pioneering journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan. His most recent article, on Egan’s reporting of the 1922 Russian Famine, will appear in 2017 in a special issue of Women’s History Review, ‘Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe. Tiina Lintunen is a lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Turku, Finland. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 2015 on the wartime activities, post-war imprisonment and subsequent lives of working-class women who participated in the Finnish Civil War in 1918. Her article ‘Women at War’, was published in The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy, edited by Aapo Roselius and Tuomas Tepora (2014). She is currently investigating the personal experiences and emotional responses of upper-class women during the Finnish Civil War.

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Notes on Contributors

Ingrid Sharp is an associate professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds. She researches the areas of gender representation and cultural history in Germany, with a particular emphasis on First World War and Weimar Germany. She leads the Resistance to War strand of the Legacies of War project at the University of Leeds and is currently researching German opposition to the First World War. She is co-editor, with Matthew Stibbe, of Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (2011), and of a forthcoming special issue of Women’s History Review on ‘Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’. Olga Shnyrova is an associate professor in the Department of History and International Relations at Ivanovo State University. For many years she also led the Ivanovo Centre for Gender Studies. Her research interests revolve around the history of feminism in both Russia and Europe. She has contributed to several recent essay collections devoted to women’s history from a transnational perspective, including Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923, edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (2011); and Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global, edited by Clare Midgley, Alison Twells and Julie Carlier (2016). Balázs Sipos is an associate professor in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. He also heads the Research Centre on Women’s History at ELTE. His research interests focus on the history of modern and contemporary Hungarian media as well as modern women’s history. He is currently writing a monograph about the Americanization of interwar Hungary. Matthew Stibbe is a professor of Modern European History at Sheffield Hallam University. He has published widely on twentieth-century German, Austrian and European history, and is currently writing a study of civilian internment during the First World War. He is co-editor, with Ingrid Sharp, of Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (2011), and of a forthcoming special issue of Women’s History Review, on ‘Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’. Judith Szapor teaches Modern European History at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She has published widely on Hungarian women in the twentieth century and the intellectual migration from Hitler’s Europe. She is co-editor of Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe, 1860-2000 (2012) and

Notes on Contributors

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‘Gender and Nation’, a special issue of the Hungarian Studies Review (Spring– Fall 2014). Nikolai Vukov is an associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. He has published extensively on monuments and museum representations in Eastern Europe after 1945; communist rule and post-communist transition after 1989; and the history, memory and commemorations of the dead of the two world wars in Bulgaria. He is author, with Luca Ponchiroli, of Witnesses of Stone: Monuments and Architectures of Socialist Bulgaria, 1944-1989 (2011), and co-editor, with S. Kazalarska and I. Mishkova, of a forthcoming volume in Bulgarian, Museum beyond the Nation (2016). Dagmar Wernitznig holds a PhD in American studies and graduated in 2015 with a doctorate in history from the University of Oxford, UK, where she was previously a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. She has also worked as a university lecturer in Austria for several years in American, cultural, postcolonial and gender studies. Her DPhil thesis deals with the life and activism of feminist, suffragist and pacifist Rosika Schwimmer (1877–1948). She is currently preparing Schwimmer’s biography as well as her unpublished writings for a commemorative edition.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which funded the interdisciplinary, international network of scholars who have been working together on Women’s Organizations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of the First World War, led by Ingrid Sharp as Principal Investigator and Matthew Stibbe as Co-Investigator. The research network grant enabled us to meet in Hamline, United States, in May 2012; in Budapest, Hungary, in May 2013; and in Leeds, United Kingdom, in November 2013. Grateful thanks are also due to the local organizers of these conferences, David Hudson in Hamline and Judit Acsády in Budapest, and for the very generous support of their institutions. Emerging from the conferences and editorial workshops were a number of themes and questions around suffrage, socialist revolution, nationalism and post-war relations within the national contexts of defeat and victory on the one hand, and on the other the highly international focus on the activities of organizations and individuals as they responded to urgent global problems, such as health, social justice and overcoming the causes and consequences of war in the interest of a sustainable peace. While our focus in a forthcoming co-edited special issue of the journal Women’s History Review is on varieties of female cross-border and international activism in the interwar period, this book instead emphasizes the specificity of national contexts, using the multi-authored chapters to reflect on the commonalities and differences in national responses to the identified themes.

Abbreviations BCP

Balgarska Komunisticheska Partiya (Bulgarian Communist Party)

BDF

Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Associations)

BRSDP

Balgarska Rabotinicheska Sotsial-Demokraticheska Partiya (Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party)

Comintern Communist International CSP

Christlichsoziale Partei (Christian Social Party, Austria)

CWGC

Commonwealth War Graves Commission

CWS

Chemical Warfare Service (United States)

ECCI

Executive Committee of the Comintern

FE

Feministák Egyesülete (Hungarian Association of Feminists)

ICW

International Council of Women

ICWPP

International Council of Women for a Permanent Peace

IFUW

International Federation of University Women

IWS

International Women’s Secretariat (of the Comintern)

IWSA

International Woman Suffrage Alliance

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party)

KP(D)Ö

See KPÖ

KPÖ

Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (Austrian Communist Party)

MANSZ

Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége (National Association of Hungarian Women)

MSPD

See SPD

MWIA

Medical Women’s International Association

NEP

New Economic Policy (Bolshevik Russia)

NUSEC

National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (Britain)

NUWSS

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies

xiv

Abbreviations

OLK

Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (Women’s Voluntary Legion, Poland)

RCPb

Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

RFKB

Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters’ League, Germany)

RLWE

Russian League for Women’s Equality

RWMAS

Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society

SDAP

Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party)

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democrat Party)

SRs

Social Revolutionaries (Russia)

USFA

United States Food Administration

USPD

Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent German Social Democrat Party)

WCA

Women’s Citizens Association

WFL

Women’s Freedom League (Britain)

WIL

Women’s International League (Britain)

WILPF

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

WPP

Women’s Progressive Party (Russia)

WYWCA

World’s Young Women’s Christian Association

Events specific to women’s activism

1913 (June) 1913 (June)

Women in Norway are granted the vote at national level. IWSA stages its Seventh International Congress, its last before the outbreak of war, in Budapest.

1888 (March/April) The International Council of Women (ICW) is founded. 1904 (June) The International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) is founded. 1906 (September) Jus Suffragii, the official monthly organ of the IWSA, begins publication. 1906 (October) Women are granted the right to vote and stand in parliamentary elections in Finland, making them the first women in Europe to receive unrestricted access to both active and passive suffrage at national level. 1907 (August) The First International Conference of Socialist Women takes place in Stuttgart. 1911 (March) International Women’s Day is marked for the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland following a proposal made by Clara Zetkin at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1910; by 1913/14 on 8 March (23 February in Russia), this event was being marked by left-wing women and socialist movements across Europe and was used to promote both voting rights for women and broader social and economic rights.

Year/Month

1912–13

Year/Month

(Continued)

The centenary of the Napoleonic Wars is celebrated in Germany.

The First and Second Balkan Wars take place.

Background events in European history

Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23

Events specific to women’s activism

The first German aerial attack on Paris occurs: one man is killed, three women and one man are injured.

The Third International Conference of Socialist Women is held in Berne; zeppelin raids on Paris claim an eight-yearold child victim, among others.

The International Congress of Women at The Hague takes place, leading to the formation of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, later renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

Women in Denmark are granted the vote at national level, as are women aged 40 and over in Iceland.

Year/Month

1914 (30 August)

1915 (March)

1915 (April–May)

1915 (June)

1915 (October) 1916 (March)

1915 (September)

1915 (May)

1915 (April)

An international conference is held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland by anti-war socialists, leading to the formation of the Zimmerwald movement and the Zimmerwald Left; the latter was associated with Lenin. Bulgaria enters the war on the side of the Central Powers. Conscription comes into force in Britain.

The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat occurs (7 May). Italy enters the war on the side of the Allies (23 May).

The first use of chlorine gas as a weapon of war is implemented by the Germans during the Second Battle of Ypres.

Turkey enters the war on the side of the Central Powers.

The outbreak of the First World War takes place. The initial belligerent states were Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers), and Serbia, Russia, France, Belgium and Britain (the Allies).

1914 (August)

1914 (November)

Background events in European history

Year/Month

xvi Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23

Women workers in Germany and Austria-Hungary take part in mass strikes against the war.

Further industrial unrest is present in Austria, again involving women workers. The food situation in Germany and Austria-Hungary is now increasingly desperate.

1918 (January)

1918 (June)

1917 (June)

1917 (April)

A demonstration in Petrograd in favour of women’s suffrage takes place; Russian women are able to register as voters in municipal elections (April) and for forthcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly (September). The first mass strike waves in Germany and Austria involving women workers occur. A German air attack on Poplar, London, leads to the death of eighteen children when an infant school is hit.

1917 (March)

Bolsheviks seize power in Russia; an armistice is signed on the Eastern Front.

The anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) is founded in Germany.

Romania enters the war on the side of the Allies. The United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany and subsequently declares war. The first Russian Revolution leads to the overthrowing of the Tsarist regime.

1918 (September– November)

(Continued)

The collapse of the Central Powers, leads to armistices on all fronts, including the Western Front on 11 November. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the revolution in Germany leads to the declaration of a republic.

1918 (January–May) The Finnish Civil War between the Reds and the Whites erupts. 1918 (March) The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia ends the war on the Eastern Front.

1917 (October– December)

1916 (August) 1917 (February– April) 1917 (February)

Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23 xvii

The Second International Congress of Women is held by WILPF in Zurich. The French Senate rejects women’ s suffrage.

The International Federation of University Women is founded. The Zhenotdel, the women’s section of the ruling Bolshevik Party in Russia, is formed.

1919 (May)

1919 (July)

1919 (August)

The Inter-Allied Conference of Women, consisting of IWSA 1919 (January) and ICW members from victorious nations, meets in Paris with the aim of influencing the peace talks. The formation of a right-wing National Association of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége, MANSZ), marks a turn away from pre-war traditions of liberal feminism in Hungary. 1919 (March– August)

1919 (January)

1919 (September)

1919 (June)

1918–20

Women granted voting rights in several countries, including Austria, Belgium (with restrictions until 1948), Britain (restricted to women aged over 30 until 1928), Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, Hungary (with restrictions, which were tightened after 1922), Lithuania, Netherlands, Sweden and the United States

1918–20

Year/Month

Events specific to women’s activism

Year/Month

The Treaty of St. Germain between Austria and Allied powers is established.

Germany signs the Treaty of Versailles; the Allied economic blockade is subsequently lifted (12 July).

The Soviet Republic is formed in Hungary – followed by the White Terror and the establishment of a dictatorship under Admiral Horthy (1919–20).

The Russian Civil War takes place. Also, fighting between the Poles and the Ukrainians (1919) and war between Poland and Soviet Russia (1920–1) occur. The victors’ peace conference opens in Paris (but international women delegates as well as representatives from defeated nations are not allowed to participate).

Background events in European history

xviii Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23

The Ring of National Women, a new right-wing women’s organization, is founded in Germany.

The International Women’s Secretariat of the Communist International (Comintern) is founded in Moscow. The IWSA’s Eighth International Congress, and the first since the end of the war, takes place in Geneva.

The ICW holds its first post-war international congress in Christiana, Norway.

1920 (January)

1920 (April)

1920 (September)

1920 (June)

The Medical Women’s International Association is founded in New York.

1919 (October)

1920 (November)

1920 (August)

1920 (June)

1920 (March)

1920 (January)

1919 (November)

(Continued)

Tombs to the ‘Unknown Warrior’ are unveiled in national ceremonies in Britain (Westminster Abbey) and France (l’Arc de Triomphe) to mark Armistice Day. Similar ceremonies took place in Washington DC, Rome and Brussels in 1921; in Prague, Belgrade, Warsaw and Athens in 1922; and in Sofia, Bucharest and Vienna in 1923.

The Treaty of Trianon between Hungary and the Allied Powers is established. The Treaty of Sèvres, between Turkey and the Allied powers, is established and subsequently annulled by the Treaty of Lausanne (July 1923).

The League of Nations is founded, with its headquarters in Geneva. Austria and Bulgaria are permitted to join in December 1920, and Hungary is permitted to join in September 1922, but Germany was not admitted until September 1926. The Kapp Putsch, the abortive monarchist coup, is attempted in Berlin

The Treaty of Neuilly between Bulgaria and the Allied powers is established.

Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23 xix

The Third World Congress of the Comintern takes place in Moscow; Clara Zetkin, the secretary of the International Women’s Secretariat (IWS), gives a major speech. The Third International Congress of Women is held by WILPF in Vienna.

The Ninth International Congress of the IWSA takes place in Rome.

The Fourth International Congress of Women is held by WILPF in Washington DC.

1921 (June–July)

1923 (May)

1924 (May)

1921 (July)

Events specific to women’s activism

Year/Month

1923 (September)

1923 (July)

1923 (January)

1922 (October)

1922 (June)

The Treaty of Lausanne between Turkey and the Allied powers, ending the Greek–Turkish war of 1919–22. A communist-led uprising takes place in Bulgaria.

The Washington Naval Disarmament Conference takes place – President Harding permits four women delegates to attend as part of the American advisory commission, including Eleanor Franklin Egan. The assassination of the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau by right-wing extremists is carried out in Berlin. The ‘March on Rome’ leads to the Fascist seizure of power in Italy. The Franco–Belgian invasion of Ruhr takes place, following Germany’s default on reparations payments. The hyperinflation crisis reaches its peak in Germany during the course of the year.

The Treaty of Riga ends the Polish–Soviet war.

1921 (March)

1921 (November)– 1922 (February)

Background events in European history

Year/Month

xx Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918–23

Introduction: Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918–23 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe

The last three decades have seen the publication of a number of important, and in some instances, trail-blazing anthologies, surveys and introductory texts on women in European history.1 Many of them place the First World War centre stage in their narratives. Not only were women mobilized to fight in this conflict in unprecedented numbers, whether on the home fronts or in medical and combat positions behind the front lines, the war also led to new ways of thinking about women’s relationships to work, family, household management, reproduction, patriotic service, domestic and international politics, journalism, letter writing, public health and citizenship and, by extension, their relationship to men.2 In some, but not all of the belligerent states, women were granted the vote after the war, although whether this was in ‘reward’ for wartime service, or the result of more chance factors, such as attempts by male-led political parties to establish an electoral advantage over their rivals, remains a matter of intense scholarly debate.3 Suffice it to say that even in European countries where women could now vote and stand in elections, there were still many cultural barriers to the achievement of full gender equality, even in the narrow sphere of parliamentary politics.4 The formation of the League of Nations in 1920, and of various ancillary bodies, nonetheless provided women with new opportunities to campaign for peace and social justice, as well as for equal rights for their own sex, within and across state frontiers.5 This book seeks to add to the existing literature by examining how women’s movements and individual female activists helped to mould, interpret and communicate key political, social and cultural developments in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. While we would acknowledge the existence of a broader continuum between the pre-war, wartime and post-war periods, especially as far as the history of feminist, internationalist and/or socialist campaigns for women’s rights is concerned,6 at the heart of the project lies the

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Women Activists between War and Peace

claim that the years 1918–23 represent a distinct period in the history of modern Europe in which the existing gender order remained more open to challenge and change than has previously been recognized. The project builds on an earlier book, also edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, titled Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (2011). However, whereas the latter was made up of short, single-authored contributions on individual countries or activists, this book offers something quite distinctive: five lengthy, dual- or multi-authored chapters which allow for an in-depth and integrated approach with more direct and explicit comparisons between developments in particular countries and an exploration of the similarities and differences between them. Our aim is not to offer an encyclopaedic survey of all European countries and all their interconnections, but rather to present some exemplary case studies designed to reflect broader, European-wide concerns and issues: suffrage and nationalism, international organizations and transnational peace activism, socialism and revolution, women and journalism, and war and the body. Given the particular focus of the book, there are some issues which we do not claim to cover directly. Two of them are worth flagging here. First, we do not offer another detailed account of women’s mobilization for, and participation in, the First World War in all its various guises. Rather, our focus is on women’s political and social activism after the war. Secondly, while the contributions are certainly interested in, and influenced by, gender as a category of analysis, and the notion of war as a gendering activity, we do not ourselves offer a gendered history of the immediate post-war years in the sense that we do not explore issues around masculinities and their construction in relation to femininities.7 Instead, the focus is on women activists and their efforts to shape and represent the new, post-war Europe in line with their own experiences, memories, femalecentred political concerns and world views. In some instances this meant directly resisting male prejudice and challenging male authority, while in other contexts it meant ignoring, transcending or circumventing masculine agendas and priorities. What exactly, then, is being compared in these multi-authored chapters? A common criticism of standard comparative studies of women or women’s movements – particularly where the focus is on just two countries and their multilayered differences and similarities – is that they tend to ignore or at least obscure the importance of supranational processes, local and global entanglements and cross-border transfers of knowledge for understanding

Introduction

3

developments in women’s history.8 The writing of new transnational women’s histories has emerged in recent years, in part to address such issues.9 However, while the contributors to this book are aware of, and sometimes engage directly with, transnational networks of female campaigners, first and foremost the essays compare women’s activism within particular national settings. If this carries with it the potential danger of reifying the nation state above other objects of political identification, then we consider this necessary in order to underline what we see as the distinct and unusual historicity of the period from 1918 to 1923. More specifically, we follow Eric Hobsbawm’s characterization of the immediate post-war years as marking the beginnings of a worldwide ‘apogee of nationalism’, spreading out from Europe to other continents and lasting from the end of the First World War through to 1950.10 According to Hobsbawm, nationalism manifested itself most clearly through direct efforts, at the peace conference in Paris from 1919 to 1920, and in subsequent international treaties and negotiations, to ‘redraw the political map on national lines’.11 The vision was inspired by US president Woodrow Wilson’s call for selfdetermination for all the peoples of Europe, and particularly for those nations that had previously had their independence and democratic rights suppressed by the rapidly collapsing Russian, Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian empires.12 Ultimately the vision failed, not least because, in practice, power politics, and especially the distinction between victorious and defeated nations, also played a crucial role in determining where the new borders of Europe were drawn and where they would be most heavily contested. Some European countries, notably Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, were completely excluded from the peace talks, while historic nations like Poland and Lithuania were deliberately revived by the victorious Allies. New multinational constructs such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were also created, in part to meet Western security needs for viable, anti-German and anti-communist states in Central and Eastern Europe with easily defendable frontiers. Italy too was able to acquire territories on its northern and northeastern borders with majority Slovene- and German-speaking populations, but not the formerly Hungarian port of Fiume or the southern part of Dalmatia on the Adriatic coastline where small but vocal Italian communities lived side by side with their Croat and Slovene neighbours. As Margaret Macmillan argues, rather than allowing ‘the decomposition of Europe and the Middle East into further and further subdivisions based on

4

Women Activists between War and Peace

nationality’, the peacemakers in practice allowed a situation where ‘in Europe alone, 30 million people were left in states where they were an ethnic minority’.13 Even so, the idea of national self-determination as a universal, if gendered, principle had an extremely important impact on political mindsets during our period, including the way agendas for women’s activism were framed. This was the case both in territorially secure states like Britain and France, and in those parts of Europe with insecure or contentious state boundaries, such as the areas covered by today’s Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova and Hungary.14 However, our contributors are equally influenced by Glenda Sluga’s contention that internationalism as a political and organizational principle also reached its ‘apogee’ in the era of the two world wars, as seen by the formation of the League of Nations in 1919–20 and of the United Nations in 1945.15 Internationalism may be defined here in its twentieth-century guise as the ‘exponential proliferation of international institutions and [the emergence of] a new international society’.16 There was no necessary contradiction between the rise of this new internationalism and the simultaneous growth of nationalism and nation states; rather, the two were frequently closely intertwined, not least where women’s rights were concerned. Indeed, as Sluga contends, women activists often sought to campaign at the international level for the ‘right to determine their own nationality’ irrespective of their marital status, a right denied by most states at this time (and a right that the male framers of the new international society were reluctant to impose, lest this impinge upon the sovereignty of individual states). Women who married foreign or stateless men typically found that they lost their citizenship of the country of their birth, whereas this did not apply to men who married foreign or stateless women.17 International networks of women were also important in campaigning against what were perceived as particular injustices suffered by defeated nations, for example the protests launched by women’s groups against the French use of colonial troops in the Rhineland occupation after 1920. For some on the left this was a matter of demonstrating resistance to French ‘imperialism’ or ‘militarism’, while for many on the right it was about protecting German women from the supposed dangers of contact with non-white men.18 Equally, international networks might devote themselves to issues of transnational concern, such as disease prevention, disarmament, the dissemination of medical and scientific knowledge, the abolition of prostitution, or educational rights for women.19

Introduction

5

In terms of its chronological time frame, the book focuses mainly on the years from 1918 to 1923. This period spans key Europe-wide and international events, including revolutions in Germany and in several of the successor states to the Habsburg Empire; the Treaty of Versailles (imposed upon Germany and opposed by many radical feminist voices across the continent); civil wars in Russia (1917–20) and Finland (1918), and conflicts in other parts of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor; the rise of fascism in Italy and Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922; the Greek–Turkish war of 1919–22 leading to revised borders in the Aegean region and accompanying compulsory population transfers; and the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 which brought to a head the post-war crisis over reparations. There are some exceptions to this chronology, however. In the case of women and socialism, it makes sense to begin in 1917, the year of revolution in Russia and of the first mass strike waves in Austria and Germany. In the case of suffrage, in order to compare like with like in regard to different national experiences, it is important to go back as far as 1906, the year in which Finland became the first country in Europe to grant women the right to vote and stand for elected office at national level. And in relation to women and the body, as Susan Grayzel reminds us, ‘the first aerial attack on Paris took place on 30 August 1914’, pointing to a future in which the private, civilian home and other spaces occupied by women and children could be turned ‘literally into a battle zone’ by men and machines operating ‘from the seeming safety of the skies’.20 In June 1917, this was made all too clear to the women of London when a primary school was hit during a daylight German air attack on the East End borough of Poplar, causing the deaths of eighteen infants, most of them aged just four to six.21 Needless to say, the knock-on effects of these developments actually reinforce the assertion made by the editors in their earlier book that the years 1918–23 ‘constitute a distinctive period full of radical potential during which the renegotiation of gender relations took place under unstable and highly volatile conditions of unprecedented social, economic and political strain’.22 Although this volatility was most obviously visible in defeated nations, with border conflicts and continued violence, political polarization and regime changes and profound economic and social instability, victorious nations such as Britain and France were also forced to adjust to new social conditions and expectations. Specifically, the many ‘states of exception’ that existed in Europe in the immediate post-war period allowed old taboos to be broken, old certainties to be cast aside and new ‘dreamworlds’ or ‘civic communit[ies] of citizens’,

6

Women Activists between War and Peace

whether of the socialist, nationalist, liberal-internationalist or pacifist kind, to be imagined.23 After 1923, on the other hand, Europe entered a new phase of ‘objectivity’ and ‘sobriety’ in which much of the radical experimentation of the immediate post-war years was itself abandoned, rejected or simply forgotten in favour of a ‘cold rationalism’.24 The subject matter of the individual chapters by and large determines the manner and ‘ease’ with which the different national historiographies of this period are brought together. Some interesting new empirical observations are made. In relation to suffrage and nationalism, for instance, juxtaposing the ‘classic’ British example against the lesser known Hungarian and Finnish cases helps to uncover how far Britain itself had gone in terms of ‘mainstreaming’ feminist ideas by the early 1920s, as Julie V. Gottlieb, Judith Szapor, Tiina Lintunen and Dagmar Wernitznig argue in Chapter 1. At the same time, however, our contributors are acutely aware of the many ‘irreconcilable asymmetries’ that have to be faced in this, as in many other, works of Europeanwide comparison – not least in view of our emphasis on the historicity and historical distinctiveness of the 1918–23 period as far as women’s activism is concerned.25 Across the book as a whole this would include, for instance, a marked unevenness between feminist movements in defeated and victorious nations; between women activists in newly emerging states with contested borders and their counterparts in long-established states with secure frontiers (and/or higher standards of living); between countries where women had been granted the vote in whole or in part by 1918–20, and those where they remained largely or wholly excluded from the franchise; and between the regions of Europe which experienced relatively little armed conflict after 1918 and those where ‘peace’ was hardly achieved at all in the years up to 1923.26 In terms of geography, we have attempted to represent a broad sweep of Europe from east to west and north to south, without making any claim to be inclusive of all nations or all states. The following countries are thus used as case studies in at least one of the chapters: Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and Russia. In drawing up this list we have played to the expertise of our particular group of scholars, while also being conscious of Karen Offen’s assertion, some ten years ago, that ‘the societies of central and eastern Europe … [and] the states of the Balkans, have too long been for many of us [historians of Western women’s movements], strictly peripheral concerns: terra incognita’.27 For reasons that will be explained in more detail in subsequent sections of this introduction, Hungary, which had its own, very vibrant and

Introduction

7

outward-facing women’s movement before 1914, and its own distinctive political trajectory after 1918, plays a prominent role in several of the chapters. We also refer on more than one occasion to America and in particular to the manner in which the imagined Europe or Europes of the post-war era were communicated by American women journalists to US domestic audiences. Needless to say, the activism under consideration here either originated in Europe and European political or cultural traditions, or involved interactions between Europe and other parts of the world. Our definition of activism is also broad. Without claiming to represent all types of women’s organizations after 1918, we have included feminist and nonfeminist, overtly political and ostensibly non-political, as well as national and international, nationalist and internationalist, liberal and conservative, rightwing and left-wing, and middle-class and proletarian activists or movements. More particularly, we believe that women’s activism in the post-First World War period was shaped along four principal axes: organizational, ideological, scientific-technological and geographical. We shall now discuss each of these in turn.

New organizational dilemmas Between 1914 and 1918 a wide range of women’s movements across Europe found themselves involved in mobilization for war. Although important national and regional variations occurred, for the purposes of historical comparison they can be divided into three main types. First, some groups of activists associated war work with women’s supposedly nurturing and motherly instincts, which obliged them to support men fighting in the field, and equally to assist families fending for themselves on the home front in the absence of husbands and fathers. As the state typically failed to mobilize women adequately for such purposes, private or religious welfare organizations – usually led by women – stepped in and seized the initiative, a phenomenon often seen, for instance, in the case of refugee relief work or work with war widows and orphaned children.28 Yet such activism, and the assumptions that lay behind it, did not go unchallenged. Pacifist and socialist women who campaigned for an immediate cessation of hostilities against the wishes of the states to which they belonged often argued that women had a special duty to resist war precisely because they were mothers. Motherhood, they claimed, was borderless, something that united

8

Women Activists between War and Peace

women of all nations and in all parts of the world.29 Some absolute pacifists even called on women to cease involvement in any kind of humanitarian war relief on the grounds that this might simply prolong the fighting.30 Conversely, the statesmen who met in Paris to draw up a peace settlement at the end of the war justified the exclusion of women from the negotiations on the grounds that their ‘motherly’ qualities might make them too sympathetic to the interests of the defeated enemy.31 Motherhood and motherliness thus became hotly contested topics during and after the war, with rival organizations competing to define these terms and their political, social and cultural significance for nation building and/or for female activism. The second kind of women’s movement involved in wartime mobilization was composed of those liberal organizations that before 1914 had campaigned for women’s access to higher education and the professions, and, ultimately, for the vote and the right of free political association. The war presented something of a dilemma for those suffragist groups who belonged to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which was founded in 1904 and held its last pre-war gathering in Budapest in 1913.32 The IWSA’s commitment to peace had been reinforced at this last meeting and was demonstrated both by ‘The International Manifesto of Women’ signed by Millicent Fawcett for the IWSA and delivered to the Foreign Office and the foreign embassies in London on 31 July 1914, and by demonstrations against Britain’s entry into the war in August 1914.33 Despite this commitment, the majority of IWSA members were keen to suspend their international campaigning work and offer support to their own nations once war had been declared. The issue of opposition to the war and continued support for pacifist and internationalist ideals was highly controversial during the war itself, with many within the IWSA determined to keep the two issues, suffrage and national defence, separate. The IWSA’s monthly journal, Jus Suffragii, managed to continue its publication of reports from member states throughout the war, but the policy of its editor, Mary Sheepshanks, to allow discussion of the war as a legitimate topic, proved controversial among members who felt that only suffrage-related reports should be included and who objected to the increasingly pacifist editorial stance. There was division, too, over the 1915 International Congress of Women at The Hague, which had many high-profile members of the IWSA among its supporters but which was not represented by any official delegates from its affiliated member organizations in France, Germany or Britain.34

Introduction

9

Meanwhile, the aftermath of the war caused its own organizational difficulties for the IWSA and like-minded organizations, in the sense that suffrage was achieved in some nations but not in others, and that defeat or victory in the war was by no means mirrored by success in achieving suffrage. For example, Russian, German and Austrian women were enfranchised, while French and Italian women were not.35 Suffragists in countries where women could vote were often tempted to move on to campaigning on other issues that affected women’s rights, such as the abolition of prostitution or the demand for equal pay for women workers.36 On the other hand, suffragists in countries that continued to refuse women the vote often felt obliged to emphasize women’s contribution to the war effort, and their passionate support for the nation and national goals, making virulent nationalism surprisingly more evident in international suffragist circles than it had been during the war itself.37 Finally, radical pacifist feminists had, as a result of their wartime experiences, and particularly their failure to convince men to engage in the kind of diplomacy that would foster a stable and permanent peace, become strongly critical of those suffragist movements that simply demanded the vote for women without challenging ‘male politics’ or providing an alternative, female-centred vision of democracy and freedom.38 This was particularly the case with those 1,500 anti-war activists from twelve belligerent and neutral states, mainly from the pacifist wing of the international campaign for women’s suffrage, who came together at the International Congress of Women at The Hague in April–May 1915 to discuss plans for mediating between the warring nations, stopping the war and finding ways of resolving future conflict without recourse to violent means. They combined calls for women’s full political citizenship in all nations with demands for a permanent mediation of international disputes, sending delegates to various heads of state to discuss their proposals. In May 1919, after the armistice had been signed and the terms of the peace were being negotiated in Paris, many of the same women – two hundred delegates from seventeen different countries – met in Zurich to respond to these negotiations. It was at this meeting that the provisional International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), founded at The Hague, was made permanent and renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), still one of the most influential international women’s organizations campaigning for peace today. Their aim was to protest against women’s exclusion from the peace talks in Paris, to condemn the proposed

10

Women Activists between War and Peace

terms of the settlement with Germany, which they believed would soon lead to renewed war, and, more generally, to suggest that there could be no freedom in the world, for women or for men, without first establishing the foundations for a lasting peace.39 Socialist women’s organizations were the final grouping that encountered big challenges in the face of war and wartime mobilization. In most European countries, socialist parties before 1914 had supported the campaign for women’s enfranchisement, but had also insisted – along the lines suggested by German activist Clara Zetkin – that socialist women should organize separately from ‘bourgeois’ women and accept the political direction of general party organs, in order to not dilute the class struggle by engaging in non-revolutionary, ‘reformist’ or feminist concerns.40 Socialist parties in turn were affiliated, from 1889, to the Second International, which in theory was committed to opposing war between capitalist countries by means of a general strike. Alongside the pre-war general congresses of the Second International, two international conferences of socialist women took place, at Stuttgart in 1907 and Copenhagen in 1910, and a third was planned for Vienna in August 1914.41 With the outbreak of hostilities, however, the principles on which the International had been formed collapsed as many European socialists – including socialist women – opted to support their countries’ respective war efforts. War work allowed socialist women to work together with ‘bourgeois’ women’s groups for a common purpose, raising questions about the possibility of extending their new-found co-operation into the post-war period, particularly in the sphere of social work and welfare measures.42 On the other hand, socialist women who remained committed to international solidarity on the basis of shared class and ideological interests were uncertain of how to act in the new circumstances. After the Third International Conference of Socialist Women finally took place at Berne in neutral Switzerland in March 1915, a small but growing minority of socialist women supported anti-war protests in defiance of the wishes of their own national parties.43 In due course they were joined by new groups of workingclass women who had been radicalized by their experiences of wartime food shortages and poor working conditions in munitions factories and engineering plants. Many of the pre-war assumptions about how labour movements should operate at local, national and international levels were now open to question, and significant rifts began to appear, not least over the question of national defence versus internationalism, or how best to engage in or resist war while supporting socialist objectives.44

Introduction

11

New ideological departures Socialist women in Europe were not only confronted with new questions about whether to support or oppose the war after August 1914, and whether to live in hope that the Second International would be revived or in acceptance of its unexpected demise, but also, in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in October 1917, with new ideological challenges. As early as September 1914 Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, had issued a call condemning the antiwar ‘centrists’ in the Second International for their ‘short-term expediency’, in other words their desire to restore peace in Europe without first fighting for and achieving socialism. Instead, he sought to realign the forces of the international left by demanding the transformation of the ‘imperialist’ war into a revolutionary civil war of the dispossessed against the ruling class in each of the belligerent nations.45 As Matthew Stibbe, Olga Shnyrova and Veronika Helfert show in Chapter 3, socialist women who aligned themselves with the Bolshevik cause after 1917 were required to rethink their attitude to violence and its role in overthrowing ‘militarism’, counter-revolution and ‘petty bourgeois opportunism’. They also faced particular pressures to prove their revolutionary credentials in the face of male proletarian prejudices against women’s supposed lack of political maturity and tendency towards ‘domestic’ or ‘pacifist’ concerns. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia with a promise to free women by emancipating the industrial proletariat as a whole from capitalism, and by 1920 communist parties had formed across Europe, grouping themselves together under the Moscow-based Comintern or Third International. Women, as well as men, were encouraged to sign up for the cause, not least by Clara Zetkin who in a speech to the Third World Congress of the Comintern in June 1921 called upon communist women to become the ‘driving force’ of the ‘revolutionary struggle’ and begged communist men, ‘with their greater political experience and knowledge’, to do more to support the campaigning work of women’s committees inside their respective national parties.46 Paradoxically, given the Bolsheviks’ emphasis on violence and the formation of a disciplined ‘vanguard’ of revolutionary fighters, European socialist women who stuck with more established social democratic parties in the aftermath of the First World War found it even harder than their communist counterparts to establish spaces for autonomous activism. Male leaders of social democratic parties were of course anxious to gain women’s votes in national elections, but their primary concern after 1918 was the reconstruction of the state in

12

Women Activists between War and Peace

the interests of labour through ensuring a smooth transition from wartime to a peacetime economy. This usually meant supporting the perceived material needs of male wage earners and their families while avoiding policies that might impinge too radically on the prevailing gender order. In Germany, for instance, both of the main left-wing parties, the SPD and the USPD, backed the demobilization decrees which allowed employers to dismiss women at the end of the war to make way for returning veterans.47 In general, European social democratic parties more or less abandoned any talk of promoting socialism (and gender equality) by immediate revolutionary means after 1919. Instead, they remained beholden to male-dominated trade unions which were keen to uphold the interests of their (usually older) members, while occasionally paying lip service to the idea of equality and to the role played by women in earlier labour struggles.48 Opposing communism was another key aim and another good reason for established social democratic parties not to associate themselves too readily with radical feminist, as well as ‘Bolshevik’ demands. Of course, social democratic women had a voice of their own, and often used it to promote policies of direct importance to women’s lives. Again, this might include campaigns for better access to health care, educational opportunities and birth control. However, party loyalties usually prevented them from collaborating with women from other, non-socialist political parties or movements over particular issues, while their support for the League of Nations and the creation of a new liberaldemocratic world order, and their rejection of Lenin’s use of terror against political opponents in Russia, typically ruled out any kind of joint work with communists.49 In the aftermath of the war, the moderate, democratic left was also confronted by a new ideological enemy in the shape of extreme (and populist) right-wing nationalism. Prior to 1914, women had only limited opportunities for engaging in organized, political forms of nationalist hatred or ethnic intolerance. However, after 1918, European parties of the conservative and nationalist right often proved extremely adept at attracting female voters and activists to their ranks, especially where they were able to exploit middle-class women’s fears of Bolshevism. This applied to some extent in democratic but politically conservative countries like Britain, and even more so in countries which had seen military victories for ‘White’ or anti-communist forces against the Red Army or supporters of the ‘Reds’ in the years 1918–21, such as Finland and Hungary (as discussed in the Chapter 1), or, to take a further example, Poland after 1918.50

Introduction

13

Nationalist women were often able to play on their record of patriotic service on the home front during the war in order to bolster their claim to citizenship, especially in defeated countries where their previously ‘exceptional’ involvement in politics might be seen as ‘vital to the restoration of the nation in the aftermath of war’.51 In Hungary after 1919, for instance, as explained in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2, the right-wing National Association of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége, MANSZ) succeeded in displacing the more pacifist-inclined, liberal Association of Feminists (Feministák Egyesülete, FE) as the country’s main women’s movement, partly by drawing hostile attention to the latter’s largely Jewish leadership and partly by emphasizing the National Alliance’s absolute commitment to revising Hungary’s truncated, and highly contested, post-war borders as established under the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. In the sphere of journalism, while mainstream conservative newspaper editors generally preferred their female correspondents to concentrate on purely ‘women’s issues’, it is also striking that some right-wing women were able to negotiate column space to write about political issues from a nationalist (or racist) perspective. Some asserted their ultra-patriotic credentials by ‘rapping’ nationalist men on the knuckles if they seemed to be flagging in their ideological commitment.52 Others did so by sidestepping the question of their own gender altogether, even as they wrote in favour of conservative family values and a ‘natural’ division of labour between male and female spheres which communists, liberals or feminists (or all three simultaneously) were supposedly aiming to destroy. This was the case, for instance, with Hungarian journalist and MANSZ leader Cécile Tormay, discussed in Chapter 1 of this book. Indeed, nationalist women, no less than communist women, were capable of utopian daydreaming, recourse to violence and hatred and the imagination of new paths to (national) freedom in the immediate post-war period. Two other ideological movements were radically transformed by the war, with implications for women’s activism. The first of these was pacifism. Unsurprisingly, many women who had experienced the war reacted with abhorrence and a determination to work together as women for peace.53 Even in the pre-nuclear age, the experience of industrialized warfare raised the prospect of future war strategies directed at unprotected civilian populations through aerial bombardment, gas attacks and mass starvation, turning peace into an urgent issue for women’s organizations. However, the fact that most women activists within the international organizations had supported the war and opposed

14

Women Activists between War and Peace

pacifist efforts, such as the Hague Congress, had shaken the pre-war belief in women’s ‘natural’ affinity with peace, while at the same time continued bitterness hampered reconciliation between the women of former enemy nations. Despite these challenges, the leaders of the women’s organizations adopted a strategy that stressed the factors uniting women, using a discourse of shared victimhood and loss in order to break the destructive cycle of revenge. Although peace was important for all three major international women’s organizations, WILPF was the most committed to an overtly feminist pacifist programme that saw equality, transparency and democracy as well as women’s inclusion in political decision-making as central to creating sustainable peace. Despite their criticisms of the League of Nations, WILPF members saw it as a platform for influencing international politics and quickly established their headquarters in Geneva. The war had forced women who opposed the war to define and articulate a gendered pacifist position in the face of overwhelming support for the war from feminist organizations, and the aftermath of war brought new dilemmas, especially given the rise of nationalist women’s organizations seemingly bent on keeping the mindsets of war alive after 1918. WILPF faced a dilemma, too, over the fundamental question of violence, and whether the use of force in defence of national self-determination against external aggressors could ever be justified. With some difficulty and much internal discussion, WILPF adopted an absolutist position that condemned any use of force, preferring instead to champion international arbitration combined with education for peace at its Vienna Congress in July 1921.54 This position was challenged by the rise of highly aggressive, right-wing regimes and women’s movements that rejected international influence and threatened the peace of Europe, and also by communist women who believed that violence could be justified if it was used in pursuit of ‘progress’ and social justice. The second movement – whose impact was felt not only in the 1920s, but also, even more prominently, in Western Europe in the years following the Second World War55 – was political Catholicism. In countries where women were enfranchised in 1918, for instance Germany and Austria, Catholic parties benefitted disproportionately from the support of female (as opposed to male) voters at elections.56 Catholic social action programmes were also a means of mobilizing women for activism in the civic sphere. While such programmes usually operated within parameters set by the male leaders of the Church, and were generally supportive of the existing political and gender order, in some instances, progressively minded Catholic women were able to take advantage of

Introduction

15

transnational and international links in order to garner support for goals closer to home, such as the right to vote or greater access to educational and professional opportunities. This was the case, for instance, with the French Catholic women’s organizations, the Action Sociale de la Femme and the Union Nationale pour le Vote des Femmes, both of which campaigned actively against the French Senate’s decision to deny women the vote in the aftermath of the war – even though this had been approved by a majority in the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, in May 1919 and again in 1927 and 1936.57

The body and advances in the science and technologies of war The war changed women’s relationship with the body and medical science. First, because new strategies of warfare such as aerial attacks on cities and longdistance naval attacks on coastal towns, as well as ‘hunger blockades’ and the development of chemical weapons, extended the reach of the war into a civilian population made more aware of injury and death through press reports and allied atrocity propaganda.58 Women were more vulnerable themselves because of these attacks, but also to industrial accidents in the dangerous armaments industry and to the diseases and consequences of physical deprivation. Medical women were brought into direct contact with the range and extent of injuries inflicted on the male bodies in their care. In Chapter 5, Alison Fell and Susan Grayzel argue that despite their own increased vulnerability to injury and death, women could only enter officially sanctioned war narratives through their relationship with the central figure of the dead soldier. ‘All these female figures “count” in the stories that shaped postwar accounts because they circulated close to that central figure – the dead or injured solider – in what is understood as the “real” war story.’ Beginning in 1917 and extending into the post-war period, this claim was both incorporated into and challenged by women’s activism. It was used by bereaved wives and mothers in their campaigns to gain control over the bodies of the dead, underpinning their argument that they had a right to the bodies of their men and that the fallen had a right to return to a civilian identity. It was challenged by the pacifist campaigns, in particular those against chemical warfare that stressed not just women’s relationship to the men who suffered and died, but their own physical vulnerability to attack. In a similar move, the women activists of WILPF, in a

16

Women Activists between War and Peace

resolution adopted at their Zurich Congress in May 1919, condemned the ‘mass deportations’ of ‘suspect’ civilians from war zones and vulnerable frontier districts which had ‘become a worldwide phenomenon since 1914’ and had ‘inflict[ed] suffering and death in many forms on innocent people’. Irrespective of the ‘security’ justifications cited by military or political leaders, they continued, ‘the expulsion of thousands of innocent people cannot be treated as an internal affair of any of the nations concerned’.59 In other words, women claimed a direct relationship to war and this was what motivated their intervention in areas of politics previously reserved for men, such as defence and international affairs. Changing military and civilian technologies impacted on women’s activism in other ways too. As Fell and Grayzel suggest, aviation offered opportunities to women to prove themselves as pilots. Air travel made the world a smaller space, cutting the time it took to travel between nations and continents, but so too did other advances in communications. Print media, for instance, were affected in the post-war period by what Maria DiCenzo, Judit Acsády, David Hudson and Balázs Sipos, in Chapter 4, refer to as the ‘greater availability and movement of journalists, media and popular culture’ across borders. This in turn played a vital part in creating – and maintaining – the bonds which held women activists together in an ‘imagined community’ made up of internationally and transnationally focused campaigners and communicators.60 Even women who explicitly distanced themselves from feminist ideals – such as the US journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan, who reported on her travels through post-war Central and Eastern Europe for the middlebrow, conservative US national weekly magazine the Saturday Evening Post – wrote and communicated political ideas as female observers of war and its aftermath. In the new media landscape of the post1918 world, mainstream ideas about femininity and new international cultural icons such as the ‘New Woman’ cut across and transformed older dividing lines between (liberal) supporters of and (conservative) opponents of female suffrage and gender equality. Once again the post-war order seemed to offer a number of new and open-ended possibilities for those wishing to challenge the gendered assumptions of the past.

The role of geography One final factor, geography, also played a major – and in many ways more constraining – role in how women’s activism was shaped in the aftermath of the

Introduction

17

First World War. The statesmen from the Allied and Associated powers who met at Paris in 1919–20 busied themselves redrawing Europe’s borders, supposedly on the basis of national self-determination although the reality differed a great deal from the theory. In Western Europe, borders remained largely unchanged after the German military surrender and withdrawal from France and Belgium in November 1918, but in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, fighting between different groups – whether Reds and Whites in the Finnish and Russian civil wars, Poles and Ukrainians in 1919, or Germans and Poles over Upper Silesia in 1921 – continued for some years to come. Short-lived Soviet regimes in Bavaria and Hungary were crushed with a great deal of brutality by right-wing paramilitary groups, and Budapest was temporarily occupied by Romanian troops in August 1919. In Bulgaria, a communist uprising in September 1923 took place against the background of widespread poverty and a harsh authoritarian regime bent on supressing the agrarian and urban poor. ‘Peace’ subsequently looked very different, depending on where one was in post-war Europe. So too did the considerable challenges of economic recovery, the reintegration of returning soldiers and refugees and the ‘cultural demobilization’ of wartime mentalities and enmities.61 Meanwhile, the post-war redrawing of frontiers also created what Kathleen Canning calls new ‘boundaries of belonging’ which often superseded pre-war loyalties and identities, whether of the party political, national or imperial variety.62 In Bolshevik Russia – and also for a brief period in Hungary in 1919 – belonging was defined by the controlling powers in terms of social class. As Olga Shnyrova has shown, feminists were deliberately excluded from the new Bolshevik state as they represented a ‘bourgeois’ element at odds with the interests of the ‘victorious’ proletariat.63 On the other hand, the success of the revolution required the mass mobilization and participation of socialist women – even if it in no way guaranteed them equal representation. Roughly 79,000 women were recruited into the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, for instance, while from 1918 the Bolshevik Party’s women’s section (the Zhenotdel) took charge of ideological training. In Central and Eastern Europe – and in particular in defeated nations like Austria, Hungary and Germany, as well as in countries lying in the precarious western border regions of the former Tsarist empire (present-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Belarus) – ethnicity increasingly came to define belonging. This was especially the case in those regions of Europe and Asia Minor (Anatolia) where internal population displacement and mass forced migration,

18

Women Activists between War and Peace

coupled with border changes and political upheavals after the war, had radically altered cultural identities and relations between different national and religious groupings. In Austria, for instance, the new republic of Deutsch-Österreich only recognized an obligation to war refugees and migrants of ‘German nationality’ and ‘Christian’ background. Numerous Jewish war refugees, many of them formerly loyal subjects of the Habsburg emperor, were deported to Poland and other countries in the immediate post-war years.64 In Germany, the rise of Nazism was still over a decade away, but anti-Semitic assassins killed Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922, and in October 1923 the Bavarian government ordered the expulsion of over 100 foreign-born Jews, including wives and children.65 In the newly resurrected state of Poland, nationalist women asserted their Polishness by joining a new female militia, the OLK or Women’s Voluntary Legion, which took part in clashes with ethnic Ukrainians and other non-Polish groups in the eastern borders of the country.66 As far as women’s activism is concerned, however, it was above all in Hungary that the question of ethnic belonging and national borders led to a sharp change of direction immediately after the First World War. Before 1914, as Chapter 1 shows, the Hungarian women’s movement had been Western-oriented, liberal and open to Jews and other minorities. Its position was symbolized by the fact that Budapest hosted the last pre-war Congress of the IWSA in 1913. Between 1918 and 1920, following military defeat and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, Hungary went through three different kinds of regimes in rapid succession – radical democratic, Bolshevik and conservative nationalist. The Treaty of Trianon in June 1920 further encouraged a shift towards ethnic nationalism, particularly because one-third of all Hungarians – or three and a half million Magyar people in total – were condemned to live in countries beyond Hungary’s new borders, namely in Romania, (Czecho-)Slovakia and Yugoslavia.67 The post-war trajectory of Hungarian-born internationalist Rózsa BédiSchwimmer (or Rosika Schwimmer, as she will be known in this book) is indicative of some of the problems faced by Hungarian feminists. Prior to 1914 Schwimmer had been a pioneering figure in Hungarian feminism and a leading light in the IWSA, and during the war her qualities as an inspiring speaker and her energy and passion in pursuing her causes had made her central to the International Women’s Congress at The Hague and to the founding of WILPF. As outlined in the first chapter, on suffrage, Schwimmer saw Hungarian women achieve suffrage under the short-lived progressive Károlyi regime of

Introduction

19

1918–19, was appointed to his opposition national council in October 1918 and became the first woman in Europe to be given a senior diplomatic post when she was appointed as ambassador to Switzerland. This position of influence was reversed first in Berne, where the Hungarian embassy staff and the Swiss government refused to acknowledge her credentials, and then under Béla Kun’s Tanácsköztársaság (Hungarian Soviet Republic), when she was condemned to complete political passivity and excluded from the elections in April 1919. Schwimmer was not an acceptable figure in post-war Hungary and was eventually forced to flee after the emergence of Admiral Miklós Horthy’s rightwing dictatorship brought with it a wave of extreme nationalism and antiSemitism.68 Nor was she able to find an outlet in the international women’s organizations for her energetic commitment to pacifism and internationalism. It seems that the assets that had recommended her to the IWSA, WILPF and other organizations before and during the war were no longer viewed as positive in the post-war environment – instead, her exotic Jewish-Hungarian background and her perceived association with communism made her an object of suspicion in the conservative climate of post-war America, while her fanatical brand of radical feminist pacifism and commitment to transcending the nation state through a new style of world government was out of favour in a Europe characterized by the rise of nationalism and the creation of new or newly independent nation states through the collapse of empire and the redrawing of national boundaries. In Western Europe, where post-war borders were more stable, and ethnic conflict and class hatreds less prevalent, it was possible for some women activists to hope for a restoration of the older feminist sense of international belonging which had partly disappeared during the war. As outlined by Ingrid Sharp, Judit Acsády and Nikolai Vukov in Chapter 2, however, with the exception of WILPF, it took a long time before women from defeated nations, especially German women, were accepted back into international women’s organizations. Women in the defeated nations were thus isolated from the international community in a number of ways. First, they were held responsible for the wrongs perpetrated by the armies of invasion and occupation and for their public support for their nation’s war aims. Secondly, they were kept apart by restrictions and sanctions that continued well beyond the armistice, by the redrawing of national borders throughout Europe and by highly volatile national contexts that could hardly be described as states of peace. The terms of the peace treaties were perceived by the defeated populations as devastatingly

20

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harsh, prompting a rise in nationalism and a continuation of the mindsets of war that also significantly hampered the restoration of relationships within international women’s organizations. Maintaining international contacts was highly problematic due to severe financial constraints as well as to continued post-war restrictions on civilian travel.

Conclusion The research presented in this book shows that the First World War had a profound effect on women’s activism. It challenged prevailing views of women’s role and duty in warfare, as well as understandings of bodily integrity and of where, in the light of an increased awareness of women’s vulnerabilities, the boundaries of gender roles lay in times of war. Most of the groups and individuals under consideration emerged from the war convinced that women had a special mission, but there was profound disagreement over what form that mission would take. Responses to the war and its aftermath were, as we have seen, anything but uniform, with some female activists increasing their commitment to internationalism and others passionately supporting the burgeoning nationalist camps. Internationalists saw women’s organization across national boundaries as a way to preserve peace and prevent future wars; to tackle issues that went beyond the scope of the nation state, such as humanitarian relief, and as a way of achieving feminist aims, such as female suffrage or providing a supportive framework for women’s careers and education. Nationalists tended to preserve the mindsets of war well into the post-war period and to see national regeneration as women’s primary mission. In place of the unifying discourse of shared victimhood and/or the ‘motherly’ or feminist concern to prevent future wars adopted by the international women’s organizations, nationalist women remained committed to a discourse of national victimhood, the preservation of the memory of the fallen and a profound mistrust of internationalism that hampered reconciliation between former enemies. Women’s entry into politics at both the national and international levels as well as advances in access to education and professional development meant that these tensions were played out in a range of public arenas, including the League of Nations, print media, medical and scientific debate and campaigns that mobilized public opinion either in the cause of peace or in protest against the perceived injustice of the peace treaties.

Introduction

21

Notes 1 See, for instance, Siân Reynolds (ed.), Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986); Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, second edition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, 2 Vols. (London: Penguin Books, 1988); Bonnie G. Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History since 1700 (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1989); Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (eds), Women and Socialism – Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998); Gisela Bock, Women in European History, translated by Allison Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) [2000]; Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History, 1780-1920 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950. A Political History (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2000); Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Woman: Europe, 1789-1918 (Harlow: Pearson, 2002); Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Ann Taylor Allen, Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 2 Among the many publications on offer, see especially the two excellent comparative essays by Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Men and Women at Home’, and Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘At the Front’, both in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol 3: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 96–120 and 121–52 respectively. 3 For a recent and insightful contribution to this debate see Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Women’s Citizenship and the First World War: General Remarks and a Case Study of Women’s Enfranchisement in Austria and Germany’, Women’s History Review, 25/2 (2016), pp. 274–95. 4 See also Bock, Women in European History, pp. 177–9. 5 Ibid., p. 242; Carol Miller, ‘Geneva – the Key to Equality: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, 3/2 (1994), pp. 219–45. 6 See, for instance, Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840-1920 (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1977); Richard J. Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism and Pacifism in Europe, 1870-1945 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Annika Wilmers, Pazifismus in der

22

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14

Women Activists between War and Peace internationalen Frauenbewegung 1914-1920: Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext, 2008). On gender see Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in Joan Wallach Scott (ed.), Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 152–80. For some pioneering essay collections that examine gender in relation to the First World War and other modern conflicts see Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987); Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006); Ana Carden-Coyne (ed.), Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (eds), Gender and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See, for instance, Anne Cova, ‘Introduction: The Promises of Comparative Women’s History’, in Anne Cova (ed.), Comparative Women’s History: New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Social Sciences Monographs, 2006), pp. 1–37 (here esp. pp. 2–5). Among recent volumes of essays that devote themselves to the ‘transnational turn’ in women’s history, three stand out in particular: Pernilla Jonsson, Silke Neunsinger and Joan Sangster (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s (Stockholm: Elanders Gotab, 2007); Kimberly Jensen and Erika Kuhlman (eds), Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2010); and Clare Midgley, Alison Twells and Julie Carlier (eds), Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) [1990], pp. 131–62. Ibid., p. 133. See also Klaus Schwabe, ‘Woodrow Wilson und das europäische Mächtesystem in Versailles: Friedensorganisation und nationale Selbstbestimmung’, in Gabriele Clemens (ed.), Nation und Europa: Studien zum internationalen Staatensystem im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001), pp. 89–108. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 486. Glenda Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Re-Reading of the “Apogee of Nationalism”’, Nations and Nationalism, 6/4 (2000), pp. 495–521.

Introduction

23

15 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 16 Ibid., p. 6. 17 Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, p. 476. See also Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 146–50. 18 Erika Kuhlman, ‘The Rhineland Horror Campaign and the Aftermath of War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 89–109. 19 Bock, Women in European History, pp. 176–7. On women in science and medicine in particular, see also Christine von Oertzen, Science, Gender and Internationalism: Women’s Academic Networks, 1917-1955 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Kimberly Jensen, ‘War, Transnationalism and Medical Women’s Activism: The Medical Women’s International Association and the Women’s Foundation for Health in the Aftermath of the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). 20 Grayzel, ‘Men and Women at Home’, pp. 97 and 105. 21 See also Lucy Noakes and Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Defending the Home(land): Gendering Civil Defence from the First World War to the “War on Terror”’, in Carden-Coyne (ed.), Gender and Conflict since 1914, pp. 29–40 (here p. 32); and Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 67–8. 22 See ‘Introduction’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 1–25 (here pp. 4–5). 23 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Kathleen Canning, ‘“Sexual Crisis,” the Writing of Citizenship, and the States of Exception in Germany, 1917-1920’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), pp. 169–213 (here esp. p. 176); Michael Pugh, Liberal Internationalism: The Interwar Movement for Peace in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Wilmers, Pazifismus. 24 This applied particularly to Germany – see Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn, ‘Introduction: In Search of the German Revolution’, in Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn (eds), Germany, 1916-23: A Revolution in Context (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 7–35 (here p. 15). 25 For both the notion of ‘ease of comparison’ and for the importance of acknowledging ‘irreconcilable asymmetries’ between different nations and

24

26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37

38 39

Women Activists between War and Peace regions we have drawn on the insightful introduction in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1–37 (here esp. pp. 21 and 27). For a very useful overview of military clashes in various parts of Europe and the Middle East after 1918, which also includes a discussion of those more fortunate states that remained ‘fundamentally undisturbed’ by post-war violence, see Peter Gatrell, ‘War After War: Conflicts, 1919-23’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010) pp. 558–75. Karen Offen, ‘“Eruptions and Flows”: Thoughts on Writing a Comparative History of European Feminisms, 1700-1950’, in Cova (ed.), Comparative Women’s History, pp. 39–65 (here p. 41). On refugee relief see Grayzel, ‘Men and Women’, pp. 100–1 and Peter Gatrell and Philippe Nivet, ‘Refugees and Exiles’, in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. III, pp. 186–215 (here esp. pp. 192–5); and on relief for war widows and orphans see Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 109–22. Bader-Zaar, ‘Women’s Citizenship and the First World War’, pp. 276–7. Amira Gelblum, ‘Ideological Crossroads: Feminism, Pacifism, and Socialism’, in Melman (ed.), Borderlines, pp. 307–27 (here pp. 310–11). Erika Kuhlman, ‘The “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom” and Reconciliation After the Great War’, in Fell and Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime, pp. 227–43 (here esp. pp. 228–32). Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 22. Sybil Oldfield, ‘Introduction to International Woman Suffrage News (Jus Suffragii) 1906-1914’, in Sybil Oldfield (ed.), ‘Thinking Against the Current’: Literature and Political Resistance (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), pp. 80–100. Ibid., p. 92. Jad Adams, Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 281. Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 23. Ibid., p. 111. For the Italian example, see also Emma Schiavon, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Campaign in Italy in 1919 and Voce Nuova (“New Voice”): Corporatism, Nationalism and the Struggle for Political Rights’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 49–67. Gelblum, ‘Ideological Crossroads’, p. 311. Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results, introduced by Harriet Hyman Alonso (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003) [1915]. See also Gertrud Bussey and Margaret Tims, Pioneers for Peace: Women’s International

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40

41

42 43 44

45 46

47

48

49 50

51 52

53 54

55

25

League for Peace and Freedom 1915-1965 (Oxford: Alden Press, 1980) [1965], p. 31; Gelblum, ‘Ideological Crossroads’, p. 314; Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 26–33; Kuhlman, ‘The “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom”’, pp. 232–5. Evans, The Feminists, pp. 160–1; Marilyn J. Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept “Bourgeois Feminism” ’, The American Historical Review, 112, no. 1 (February 2007), pp. 131–58. R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009) [1989], pp. 30 and 67–71. Grayzel, ‘Men and Women’, pp. 99 and 118. F. L. Carsten, War against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London: Batsford, 1982), pp. 35–6 and 172. See also John Horne, ‘Labor and Labor Movements in World War I’, in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker and Mary R. Habeck (eds), The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 187–227; and Wilmers, Pazifismus, pp. 245–6. Craig Nation, War on War, pp. 35–6. Clara Zetkin, ‘Report on the Communist Women’s Movement’, in John Riddell (ed.), To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 779–90 (here p. 785). Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 100. See also Bessel, ‘Eine nicht allzu große Beunruhigung des Arbeitsmarktes: Frauenarbeit und Demobilierung in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 9 (1983), pp. 211–29. See for example Pamela Graves, ‘An Experiment in Women-Centred Socialism: Labour Women in Britain’, in Gruber and Graves (eds), Women and Socialism, pp. 180–214 (here esp. pp. 183–7). See Horne, ‘Labor and Labor Movements’, esp. pp. 212–16. On Poland see Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, ‘Soldiers, Members of Parliament, Social Activists: The Polish Women’s Movement after World War I’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 265–85. Canning, ‘Sexual Crisis’, pp. 178–9 and 189–90. See, for instance, Christiane Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles: The Extension of War Culture by Radical Nationalist Women Journalists in post-1918 Germany’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 69–88. Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 115–17. See Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). See Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann (eds), When the War was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940-1956 (Leicester: Leicester University

26

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57

58

59

60

61

62

Women Activists between War and Peace Press, 2000), esp. the essays by Anna Rossi-Doria, ‘Italian Women enter Politics’, pp. 89–102, and Sylvie Chaperon, ‘“Feminism is Dead. Long Live Feminism!”: The Women’s Movement in France at the Liberation, 1944-1946’, pp. 146–60. See for example Adams, Women and the Vote, pp. 283–308. Also, for the Austrian case, Gabriella Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades: Women’s Movements and the “Austrian Revolution”. Gender in Insurrection, the Räte Movement, Parties and Parliament’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 221–43 (here pp. 233–4). Emily Machen, ‘Catholic Women, International Engagement and the Battle for Suffrage in Inter-War France: The Case of the Action Sociale de la Femme and the Union Nationale pour le Vote des Femmes’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). Cf. Adams, Women and the Vote, pp. 297–8 and Offen, European Feminisms, pp. 272–3. On wartime violence against civilians more generally, and associated discourses and propaganda, see Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). This was adopted as point 34 of the ‘Resolutions presented to the peace conference of the powers in Paris’ – see http://wilpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ WILPF_triennial_congress_1919.pdf. On the literally millions of civilians, the majority of them women and children, who were forcibly removed from their homes by invading armies or by their own governments in various parts of Europe between 1914 and 1918, see Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees and Forced Migrants during the First World War’, in Matthew Stibbe (ed.), Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration in Europe during the First World War (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 82–110. In Russia alone, up to seven million civilians had been involuntarily displaced by 1917 – see ibid., p. 86, and Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). The idea of an ‘imagined community’ of committed internationalists comes from Glenda Sluga, who in turn adapted Benedict Anderson’s notion of nations as ‘imagined communities’. See Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, esp. pp. 153–5. Also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991) [1983]. On ‘cultural demobilization’ see John Horne, ‘Kulturelle Demobilmachung 19191939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919-1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), pp. 129–50. Canning, ‘Sexual Crisis’, p. 176.

Introduction

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63 Olga Shnyrova, ‘After the Vote was Won: The Fate of Women’s Suffrage Movements in Russia after the October Revolution’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 159–77. 64 See Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914 bis 1923 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), esp. pp. 143–59. 65 David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (London: Norton, 1997), p. 172. 66 Kuźma-Markowska, ‘Soldiers, Members of Parliament, Social Activists’, pp. 269–75. 67 Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 269. 68 For the latest research on Schwimmer see Dagmar Wernitznig, ‘Out of her Time? Rosika Schwimmer’s Transnational Activism after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). Also Chapter 1 in this book.

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Suffrage and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective: Britain, Hungary, Finland and the Transnational Experience of Rosika Schwimmer Julie V. Gottlieb and Judith Szapor, with Tiina Lintunen (on Finland) and Dagmar Wernitznig (on Rosika Schwimmer)*

There can be no doubt that the First World War and its immediate aftermath represented a watershed in the history of women’s rights in most of Europe. Historical scholarship has traditionally celebrated the end of the war and the granting of female suffrage in some European countries as a triumph for both national and international women’s rights movements. By contrast, the interwar period has traditionally been described as a time of backlash, generational shift, reorganization and a quest for new goals. This narrative has privileged the British and German cases as representative of the European paradigm and, in turn, has downplayed very significant exceptions – most importantly France but others as well – and has been successfully challenged in the last decade.1 This chapter, a study of the relationship between women’s suffrage and nationalism in the aftermath of the First World War in Britain, Hungary and Finland, including a case study of the fate of transnational feminist peace activist Rosika Schwimmer, offers an opportunity to reflect on recent scholarly developments in the field of European comparative women’s history. Since the 1990s, the contours of European women’s history have indeed been broadened. For one thing, Europe itself is no longer understood as consisting of only the big powers or, worse still, the Western powers.2 Instead, explorations of

* Julie V. Gottlieb, Department of History, University of Sheffield, UK; Judith Szapor, Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Tiina Lintunen, Department of History, University of Turku, Finland; Dagmar Wernitznig, independent scholar.

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previously neglected national cases have resulted in challenging the dominant Anglo-centric or Western model of the history of women’s rights.3 Women’s historians have also begun to question the merits of treating suffrage as the single most important measure of women’s rights.4 This two-pronged correction of the established narrative of European women’s history has opened up the field and contributed to the exploration of previously neglected national cases that are no longer considered as exceptions or as lying outside of the European ‘norm’.5 The result is a much larger Europe, one that brings the writing of a comparative European history, at once inclusive of Eastern and other Europes and the consideration of gender as well as women, closer to fruition.6 One striking characteristic of the more inclusive European perspective is that it has both challenged the accepted narrative of women’s rights that ties the granting of female suffrage to women’s patriotic service in the war – yet in some ways has also confirmed it by highlighting the overwhelming significance of defining women’s citizenship in relation to their roles in national projects.7 Indeed, in all three cases under review in this chapter, feminists and suffrage activists may have won the vote and the right to stand in elections, but they largely lost the battle to define women’s citizenship in broader terms, leaving space for more essentialist or conservative definitions that were less challenging to the pre-existing gender order. In Britain, ‘ordinary’ women voters between 1918 and 1922 were normalized and homogenized to fit in with prevailing patriotic, anti-German and imperial agendas. In Finland, women’s citizenship was mainly defined by the political and cultural programme of national independence, which in the post-1917 period would be articulated in two diametrically opposed political movements and discourses, represented by the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Whites’. In Hungary the dissolution of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy and Hungary’s transformation from an imperial power into a small, defeated and more ethnically homogenous country brought about a redefinition of citizenship between 1918 and 1922. During this process, the previous liberal, inclusive definition of the Hungarian nation turned into an ethnic and increasingly racial and exclusive one. The recent scholarly attention paid to right-wing women8 is another key development in European women’s and gender history that provides important reorientation for our study of the relationship between suffrage and nationalism. While women’s rights activists’ controversial record and concessions to jingoism during the First World War have been acknowledged for some time, the study of proto-fascist, fascist and right-wing nationalist women activists in the aftermath

Suffrage and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective

31

of the First World War and during the interwar period has only been opened very recently. The Hungarian and Finnish cases in our study prominently feature right-wing nationalist women activists and demonstrate that their contributions cannot be neglected if we are to understand the success of counter-revolutionary ideologies and governments in the interwar period – in Finland and Hungary as well as across Europe.

The British case: The classic example of the achievement of women’s suffrage? What was the impact of women’s suffrage in the first years after the First World War in Britain? What had women achieved with the suffrage? Did women voters react to their political emancipation in the ways their leaders on the one hand, and the opponents of women’s suffrage on the other, had prophesized, each side in equally messianic terms? Women’s historians have tended to be more focused on the dramatic moments in the history of British feminism, namely the Edwardian suffrage movement and the post-Second World War Women’s Liberation movement. However, far more attention is now being paid not only to interwar feminism but to the status and representation of women in the aftermath of suffrage and to the gendering of interwar political culture.9 Although we can trace this redirection and a definite surge in the scholarship over recent decades, the examination of the immediate aftermath of suffrage has not been extensive. This is partly because what happened after 1918 was a dénouement from suffrage militancy, as neither feminists nor the mass of women were much inclined to carry through a feminist revolution after four long years of total war. Susan Kingsley Kent’s argument that for the most part feminists sought to broker ‘gender peace’ after the war remains compelling.10 Nicolletta Gullace’s important observation that the basis for citizenship shifted as a consequence of war from gender to patriotism and national service has helped us to make better sense of the unexpected lurches to the right among some leaders of militant suffragism in Britain. Gullace has argued that the Reform Bill of 1918 was ‘about defining manhood as much as about recognizing women, about having a system of punishment and rewards that grew out of the passion, hatred, and images of the Great War’, and less about the democratization of the British electorate, and less still about fulfilling feminist aspirations.11 The apparent sudden death of feminist

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militancy also explains why feminist historians, inevitably in search of attractive foremothers, have not always found the post-1918 period to be fertile ground for their recuperative efforts. Mary Hilson conducted a gender-based local study of the 1918 coupon election in Plymouth, the same constituency which elected Britain’s first woman, Lady Nancy Astor, to take her seat in the House of Commons in a by-election the following year. Hilson’s findings underline the problem. The December 1918 general election, the first election in which women aged thirty and over could vote, was hardly at all about feminist issues per se, and, in Plymouth at least, much more about making conservative messages appeal to women voters; as she argues, ‘Women’s citizenship … remained conditional on [women’s] role as defenders of the race, whereas it was up to men to act as defenders of the nation and state.’12 Taking a broader geographical approach, it becomes clear that the rhetoric and representations of women in the immediate post-suffrage years established resilient gender-bifurcated constructions of British democratic citizenship. Arguably, these constructions have been subtly modified but never entirely recast, even now, as we approach the centenary of the Representations of the People Act which enshrined universal male suffrage and the limited suffrage for women (from February 1918 to February 2018).13 By focusing on the press representation of women electors, on the mobilization of women as parliamentary candidates in 1918 and on the case of Christabel Pankhurst and the Women’s Party, we will be able to identify the early constraints imposed (and even self-imposed) on women’s political expression, and the origins of these powerful conceptions of women not as individual citizens but as grains of sand in a gender-identified voting bloc. It was precisely because of the notion that women would vote as women – rather than as individuals exercising free will, according to conscience, or reflecting class, regional, professional or other identities – that the Representation of the People’s Act was designed as it was. The main concerns were that women should not outnumber men at the polls, and that women’s influence and their concerns should not feminize national and, in particular, foreign policy. The pre-war anti-suffragist Mrs Humphrey Ward believed that it would be appropriate for women to be granted a special franchise that gave them rights only in relation to their private sphere, with no authority over imperial and foreign affairs because in these spheres their ‘ignorance is imposed by nature and irreparable’.14 The mistrust of women’s ability to decide matters of diplomatic complexity and of war infused the parliamentary debates on women’s suffrage in the latter part of the war. In the debate, Mr Burdett-Coutts MP argued that female suffrage ‘would

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not be in the interests of the State from the point of view of its international position. … What would be the attitude of women if we had to face another great war? The awful experience which they had gone through would probably be more lasting in their memory than in that of men, and if they had the power they might imperil the Empire. So far as war was possible and might be necessary for the safety of the nation woman could never be a complete unit of responsibility in the national life.’15 These were persistent concerns, and in the House of Lords debate on the Representation of the People Bill a few months later, Lord Loreburn opined that ‘if the Bill only sought to give women a direct vote in social matters affecting the common life of our own country he should feel more difficulty in moving the amendment, but the House of Commons had far greater power than that. Its power affected foreign policy, controlled the Crown colonies and India, and whenever it chose the House of Commons could control both the declaration of war and the terms on which the peace should be made. It was not right that in such matters of Imperial policy, and was against the public interest, that feminine influence should be so powerful.’16 These unreconstructed views of women’s domestic short-sightedness lost some of their potency in the course of the 1920s as internationalism was fast becoming the zeitgeist, and as ‘leaders of powerful Western states, middle-class women and feminists, anti-colonialists, social scientists, and moral reformers, now organized around the “international question” as well as the “nation question”’.17 However, in the short term, the fear that women would forever represent an electoral ‘peace bloc’ was fuelled by the activities of an influential and sensationalized minority of feminists who turned to pacifism during the war, dubbed the ‘Peacettes’ in 1915.18 Indeed, feminist politics had taken a decisive international turn at the fin de siècle. The internationalist mindset permeated high politics as well as social, popular, cultural, economic and gender discourses, taking on religious proportions.19 Catherine Marshall hopefully predicted that ‘women’s experience as mothers and heads of households has given them just the outlook on human affairs which is needed in this process of reconstruction’.20 Feminist internationalists stressed that ‘politics does not end at home’, and while ‘most people still think of the women’s vote as being concerned only with their home interests and their industrial interests’, the truth of the matter is that ‘women are humanly as much concerned with keeping the world at peace as men are’ and ‘home politics and foreign politics overlap, and what affects the one must to some extent affect the other’.21

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Up to the present day, pundits, pollsters and politicians alike talk about and work hard to mobilize the ‘women’s vote’ – it is an obvious and important point that men are not collectivized on the basis of sex. Coinciding with women’s enfranchisement, the press and politicians soon got into the lazy habit of essentializing and referring to women as a homogenous group, imagining a ‘women’s vote’, espying a ‘women’s peace bloc’, segregating ‘women’s issues’, addressing themselves to women in their roles as wives and mothers, providing woman’s pages in newspapers and often going as far as diagnosing a ‘Woman Problem’.22 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst prescribed that the woman voter would be different from the male, in that she would make her selection according to character and not party, and ‘vote together more as a sex than men have done’.23 From 1918 when women over the age of thirty were first allowed to vote in parliamentary elections, it was assumed that they would vote as women, in response to their sex-based and to a lesser extent their class interests. Perhaps this framing of the women’s vote as a gender bloc was logical enough and, of course, it was the case that women had agitated for the suffrage and for citizenship as gender-defined subjects. Nonetheless, both within the suffrage movement itself, and certainly in the general population, there were class, ethnic, educational, generational and regional identities and competing political commitments that demonstrated the fallacy of a cohesive and coherent women’s vote. It was in this regard that the women’s vote was a source of disquiet, and in the lead-up to the first post-war election, it was understood that this was to be ‘the most dramatic general election Britain has known since the passing of the Reform Bill nearly ninety years ago’, its drama enhanced by ‘the vast uncertainty which is the accompaniment of votes for women’.24 Women voters were an enigma. In time for the so-called coupon election on Saturday, 14 December 1918, eight and a half million women over the age of thirty who were either married to local government electors or qualified as local government electors in their own right were qualified to vote. It was also the first general election to be held in one day. The Representation of the People’s Act more than doubled the electorate from its pre-war size of eight million to twenty-one million, and had the franchise legislation been equal, another five million women would have had the vote and they would have outnumbered men. It followed that there was a real fascination with women as a newly discovered and unpredictable political species, with hundreds of articles carrying interrogative headlines like ‘How Will Women Vote?’ and ‘How Will Women Use their Vote?’

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Let us now move on to consider the ways in which candidates appealed to women as voters in the run-up to the 1918 election. Candidates addressed women voters qua women because of the realization that they would have ‘a profound and possibly a decisive influence on the election’. Convinced by their own prognosis that women would decide the election, most candidates started to hold women’s meetings as soon as suffrage had been attained; for example, the liberal leader Herbert Asquith addressed a number of women’s meetings, while Lloyd George ‘was obviously surprised at the crowds which flocked to the meetings at the Queen’s Hall’.25 Indeed, pro-Coalition newspaper advertisements sold Lloyd George as ‘the man who won the war, and the man who gave women the vote’.26 In Torquay the three candidates ‘wooed the women’ at a mass meeting where they directed their speeches to women’s concerns.27 In Glasgow, afternoon meetings were being held for the convenience of women electors, although they appeared to have failed to excite much interest. Of the questions put to the candidates in Glasgow, these were chiefly to do with ‘housing, temperance, and matters affecting the domestic circle; and outside of these subjects there has frequently been a desire to know what is to be done with the Kaiser’, demonstrating the packaging of nationalist themes for women voters. The Bridgeton division had the novelty of a ‘lady as a candidate’, but there the audiences were invariably small, and usually comprised a ‘sprinkling of men’. These efforts aside, less than a fortnight before the election the impression was that ‘so far there has been no evidence that women are taking more than their former onlooker’s interest in the election. There have been singularly few women at the election meetings held so far, except at some of the Labour candidates’ meetings.’28 Women were portrayed as apathetic and certainly unsure of themselves when it came to voting behaviour and the rituals of political life – they were being set up to fail, to let down those who had worked so hard to campaign for their political rights. There are a few prevalent themes in campaigning addresses by men and by the smattering of sixteen women candidates directed to women voters. Women had finally been granted the vote – or as many papers said ‘gifted’ the vote – as compensation for their war service and patriotism. Coalition candidates stressed women’s sacrifice and their justifiable urge to be avenged: ‘We are assured of a righteous peace from the hand that wages a victorious war, and the women to whom the nation owes so much, and upon whom now rests such a tremendous responsibility, will find the Coalition Government an instrument which will prove worthy of the power and trust they are able for the first time to personally repose in the Legislature. Mothers and wives have wept in silence.

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To-day they demand justice for what they have lost, and this Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law are determined they shall have.’29 The appeal to women to take their rightful part in post-war reconstruction and peacemaking was almost ubiquitous. Addressing a crowded meeting in London, Prime Minister Lloyd George, who foregrounded his credentials as a supporter of women’s suffrage for twenty or thirty years previously, stressed that ‘woman’s station in life would be decided by the election: it would decide whether the peace would be made for all time or only for a time. The women of the land had the greatest interest in peace. The men faced the horrors, but the women were listening in silence and dread for the messengers of fate knocking at their doors. If they suspected that any man was going to the Peace Conference with war in his heart they should vote against him. The peace must make war difficult, if not impossible.’30 Women were represented as the ones with the greatest investment in making peace, as this would be the only ‘recompense for these four years of sacrifice’ and ‘a guarantee of immunity from such grievous trials through all the years to come’.31 Women were also being taunted to vote, and if they failed to vote they would be making a mockery of the hard suffrage struggle on the one hand, or of the sacrifices made by their menfolk in the war. The appeals to new women voters were as patriots and weeping mothers who would support the coalition in its ambitions at the peace conference to avenge their fallen sons and deliver a peace that met Britain’s national interests. Women were addressed not just as another tranche of the electorate but as a homogenous group. It was hoped that they would have the vision to change the game of politics by voting above party. Women had an essentialist and feminine role to play in peacemaking and postwar reconstruction, with special interests in housing and education. However, it is noticeable in the mainstream regional press that they were not addressed as pacifists but as peace lovers – pacifism was equated with defeatism. Conservative women voters were addressed as Christians, and women’s suffrage had brought the opportunity to represent the voice of God in politics. While some of these appeals were conflicting and contradictory, what all of them had in common was that women were being addressed as women before they were being addressed as citizens. The powerful but ultimately unprovable ‘women’s vote’ was born at the same time as women exercised their vote for the first time. In the last weeks of 1918 the great areas of speculation were women’s voting pattern, their behaviour, their numbers, the class composition and generational profile of the female electorate, and women’s commitment to exercising a right which they had worked strenuously to secure. Before the election, reporters

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diagnosed apathy among women voters, even when the political culture was being reformed in such a way as to attract their attention and allow them to become active citizens – such as afternoon meetings, the growing prominence in the campaigns of candidates’ wives and women’s meetings dedicated to presenting each party’s position from the point of view of women. However, the tone changed significantly when polling day came on a Saturday (which was seen to place women who could not pull themselves away from domestic duties on the weekend at a disadvantage),32 and women were observed to be very much taking advantage of the franchise, their collective number and behaviour at the polls serving as a curiosity and a sideshow. Some newspapers, both national and provincial, regarded women voters as figures of fun, one carrying a piece with one-liners describing women’s ignorance of voting practices, the disproportion of women in some constituencies and several stories of women who went to vote and then dropped dead that very same day.33 But other news outlets were more charitable, and many papers reported on the high ratio of women to men at the polls. Not even the wet weather could keep them away, and even in poorer districts where women ‘go thinly shod’, ‘one would find women at the polling booths declaring that the proportion of women to men voters was six or eight to one’. The momentousness of this first opportunity to exercise their franchise was palpable, and ‘they often looked triumphant and pleased when they came out, like the little old dame who, as she came down the steps of Chelsea Town Hall, said to the party questioners with a smile, “I voted for the lady”’. Nor was there much evidence that women were voting as women and not along party lines, as this anecdote illustrates: ‘Sir Samuel Hoare had his old friends, and Miss Phipps had a host of women teachers to help either at the booths, in fetching voters from their homes, or in looking after children while their mothers went in to vote. At one of the polling booths in a wealthy quarter a lady prominent as an anti-suffragist in earlier days was extremely active in offering them the Hoare ticket and expressing disapproval of a woman’s candidature.’34 The conservative press breathed a sigh of relief that women’s behaviour in the polling stations was so civilized when the fear was that they would bring an unruly element into the conduct of elections. The Times’ interpretation was that ‘the election was largely a women’s election, and it is even estimated that in some districts in London the women voters outnumbered the men by 20 to 1. … The women voters, too, did well; they voted in large numbers and gave much less trouble at the polling stations than was feared by pessimists.’35 There was a sense of relief that women had not pulled any

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stunts along the lines of the suffragettes, and ‘the woman-voter exercised her new right with quiet satisfaction, evidently glad, and a little proud, that at long last her sex has been credited with sense enough to take part in the governing of the land they live in’.36 What was soon self-evident was that there was no way of proving the theories about women’s sex-based voting behaviour. At the same time, however, women candidates had not benefitted much from the excitement of this first ‘women’s election’. The Representation of the People’s Act of February 1918 was followed by legislation allowing women to sit in the House of Commons in October 1918, and while there was heated debate about the motion, the attitude of Mr Asquith summed up the reigning attitude: ‘Having extended the franchise to women, Parliament could not logically debar them from membership of the House of Commons. They had swallowed the camel, and ought not to strain at the gnat.’37 While only sixteen women availed themselves of this first opportunity of putting themselves forward, they did so in a spirit very different from that which accompanied the achievement of this emancipatory milestone.38 Women’s organizations such as the Women’s Party, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the newly formed Women’s Citizens Association and the Women’s International League (WIL) started to plan for the eventuality of the election many months before it was called, but they were still unsure if the election would be called during wartime or after an armistice. It was not until three weeks before the election that they knew whether women would be able to stand as candidates. The women were thus all ‘eleventh-hour candidates’. Further, they had ‘no organization, and little time in which to win the confidence of the electorate. As a rule too, they were credited with pacifist tendencies, and this helped to contribute to the general failure.’39 The timing was thus important in understanding the failure of each one of these hopefuls, and with only weeks to present themselves to their constituents and organize and finance their campaigns, the chance of election victory was remote. In keeping with the novelty and uncertainty of the female of the species exercising the rights of citizenship, many of these women candidates played up their gender identity – in later elections between the wars we can observe the opposite tendency. Violet Markham, a pro-League of Nations free trader who had been anti-suffrage before the war, was standing for the Liberals in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, because her brother, a war casualty, was unable to do so – she was a substitute. Nonetheless, she stressed that women had an important part to play in reconstruction, and that they ‘represent a new moral force in

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the electorate which I believe will prove of the utmost value to the nation’.40 Progressive Independent candidate for Hendon, Mrs How Martyn, also embraced the League as part of the women’s sphere, and she had the endorsement of Lord Robert Cecil, founder of the League of Nations Union.41 Emily Phipps, standing in Chelsea, devoted a significant portion of her platform to women’s issues and framed her election address around the significance of this being the first election in which women could cast their votes, advocating other feminist issues like equal pay for equal work, the establishment of a Ministry of Health with adequate female representation, the opening of trades and professions to women and so forth. She challenged her constituency to be the first to return a woman and thereby ‘go down in history as those which had the courage to do a new thing’.42 Suffragette leader Mrs Pethick Lawrence stood for Rusholme and she provided ‘A Letter to Women from the Woman Candidate’.43 While Miss Eunice G. Murray, the candidate for Bridgton, wanted to state that she was standing to ‘assert to the fullest extent the right of every citizen, regardless of sex’, she was motivated too by her conviction that ‘the country will benefit inestimably by the representation of the women’s point of view in Parliament’.44 These women candidates tried to share their excitement of scoring these women’s firsts, and projected themselves first and foremost as women who would bring the women’s point of view and the feminine touch to national and international policy. Not all women candidates projected themselves in this way, however, and the 1918 women candidates were drawn from across the political spectrum, most with suffrage pedigrees but others having identified themselves as antisuffragists, and contesting seats across the map. While many supported the nascent League of Nations and pro-peace position, in line with the WIL, others spoke from the opposite extreme. Richmond candidate Mrs Dacre Fox wanted to prolong the enmities of the war in peace time, and stood on the nationalist platform of ‘Britain for the British’,45 and Christabel Pankhurst, standing for her own Woman’s Party, demanded that harsh terms be imposed upon Germany. Dacre Fox would become a leading member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and in spite of her recent suffragette past, had little to say about women.46 Aside from this polarization between leftist and liberal views and chauvinistic nationalism as expressed by Dacre Fox and by Christabel Pankhurst’s Woman’s Party, there was also a significant difference of opinion about how to inaugurate women’s practices of citizenship. The non-party Women’s Citizens Association (WCA) was formed earlier in 1918 to educate women in citizenship, and it

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believed that once politically educated, women would vote on questions upon their merits and not along party lines. After all, women ‘had seen what party life and party politics had brought us to’.47 The WCA was vehemently opposed to the approach and the agenda of Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Party. Together with her mother Emmeline, Christabel had taken a sharp turn to the right during the War and would continue along this political trajectory thereafter.48 The Women’s Party was competing against pacifists for the women’s vote, as Pankhurst saw it, and while it had some radical ideas about social reform – like communal kitchens – it was otherwise a militant expression of a female-identified conservatism.49 Despite these paradoxes, at Smethwick, Miss Pankhurst polled 6,614 votes and there were 12,726 women on the register. ‘No other woman candidate in Britain obtained half as many votes as there are women entitled to vote. This suggests a disinclination on the part of women to be represented by members of their own sex, but given the right type of candidate and time to cultivate the electorate, there is no fear that women would be rejected on that score.’50 The failure of former suffragists and suffragettes to be elected to Parliament not only in 1918 but in any of the interwar elections (with the exception of Eleanor Rathbone who was elected as an Independent MP for the Combined Universities in 1929) and to deliver women to the promised land of equal citizenship was one bold indicator that suffrage alone would not spark a feminist revolution. The

Figure 1 Flora Drummond (‘The General’) and Phyllis Ayrton campaigning in Smethwick for Christabel Pankhurst, the Women’s Party candidate, in the British general election, December 1918. Reproduced courtesy of Alamy Images, G3BAFD. Contributor: Chronicle.

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advent of women’s suffrage was very soon regarded as a disappointment, a false dawn of sexual emancipation, and not just because the franchise was not granted on equal terms with men. We also need to consider how suffragists responded to the achievement of women’s suffrage, and how a sense of anticlimax soon set in among them. As suffragist Cicely Hamilton put it: ‘Truth to tell, at that moment I didn’t care a button for my vote; and rightly or wrongly, I have always imagined that the Government gave it me in much the same mood as I received it.’51 Why was suffrage such an anticlimax in the British case? It is remarkable how quickly the radical connotations of women’s suffrage faded away, and how smoothly competing constructions of women’s citizenship were accommodated within political discourse. This was facilitated by a process whereby women electors were integrated into the existing party system without much resistance or controversy, leaving little political space for an autonomous feminist movement.52 As we have been seeing, this was not at all the fulfilment of the hopes invested in the new woman voter in the transition from war to a fragile peace. Ultimately, what did happen was very different from what both men and women thought had been unleashed by the advent of women’s suffrage in 1918. And yet it is also true that the constructions of women’s citizenship as minority rights, as a voting or a peace bloc, as special interests in social policy, as outsiders and ‘others’ have persisted to the present day. What has been very mutable is not the separatist conceptions of women’s citizenship, but the way women have embraced or rejected being woman citizens depending on the nature of their most pressing concerns. Arguably, in Britain, as in many other countries in Europe where suffrage was granted in 1918–20, the right was more successful than the left at mobilizing women. The Conservative Party struck on a successful formula by bringing some of women’s demands for representation and equality in line with a nationalist, imperialist and ‘patriotic’ agenda.53 However, from a comparative perspective, was the British case in fact the ‘classical’ model, a case study of ‘success’ where the achievement of women’s suffrage was very much in keeping with the gradual and evolutionary process of British political, constitutional and cultural history? Does comparative study confirm or contest this paradigm? Indeed, on their own and in international networks, British feminist pacifists had placed their hopes in women to construct a better world in the aftermath of war, an anti-militarist, sex-equalitarian world in which social justice would prevail. While many of these hopes were soon dashed, the comparative perspective places in context the gains made by British women and demonstrates, in relative terms, the mainstreaming of feminist demands and discourses in British political culture. The backlash against

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feminism that British gender historians have tended to diagnose in these years appears to be much less of a harsh reaction when compared to other European case studies, where suffrage was granted in a revolutionary context (for example, Finland in 1906 or Hungary in 1918). And there is another important perspective that emerges by placing the British case in a comparative context. British women with suffrage pedigrees continued to minister on behalf of women in Europe who had still not attained their goals – and here I am referring to what I have called the European encounter, and the important conceptual and institutional network that mobilized feminist striving for suffrage legislation.54 This places the British case study not only beside but within the European framework. We are here reminded of the international and transnational dimension of suffrage work in the aftermath of war, and from their vantage point as enfranchised citizens, British women naturally emerged as leaders of the international suffrage movement, many exhibiting missionary zeal in this role. As we turn to the Hungarian experience of women’s suffrage in the immediate aftermath of the war, we can compare a case study of relative success with one of relative failure; and by pulling out this transnational strand we demonstrate the dialogue and encounter between women from nations in which they were enfranchised and nations where they were still agitating for the vote.

A hollow victory: The rise of nationalism and the decline of the liberal women’s movement in Hungary in the post-war era of women’s suffrage Despite the important differences between the British and Hungarian cases, 1918 serves as a turning point for both. In Hungary, by the early 1920s the ideological fault lines of the interwar period had solidified, condemning the liberal feminist movement to the margins and elevating the new, extreme nationalist, conservative women’s movement into a central position of power, all in the name of a programme of national regeneration. The introduction of women’s suffrage in Hungary demonstrates the ambiguities characteristic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hungarian history: the close alignment with Western European intellectual trends on the one hand and the volatility of the liberal political framework on the other. The Hungarian case is also illustrative of the pitfalls of narrating the history

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of women’s rights exclusively on the basis of political and legal developments. With its comparative perspective and attention to the respective nationalisms that informed gender politics in the post-war era, this comparison attempts to step beyond such narrowly defined political history narratives. Hungarian women gained the vote in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and first voted in the January 1920 parliamentary elections – on the face of it, a development very much in keeping with the general European trend. Unlike in other European and Western countries, however, female suffrage was achieved in parallel with two further developments, bringing into question the extent of similarities with Western European trends. First, female suffrage was introduced concurrently with universal manhood suffrage. With this the percentage of eligible voters increased from the pre-war level of approximately 9 per cent (of men) to close to 75 per cent of the population over the age of twentyfour.55 Secondly, while the introduction of universal suffrage would appear to signal a turn to a more democratic political system, in Hungary it coincided with a shift from the pre-war, narrowly defined liberal political framework to an authoritarian, illiberal one. Even more important is to consider the series of seismic geopolitical events that had preceded and in part prompted this political shift and shaped the broader political and ideological framework of Hungary: the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end of the First World War, and the liberal revolution from October 1918 to March 1919, followed by a Bolshevik-inspired revolution lasting until August 1919. The defeat of the left-wing revolutions by a coalition of right-wing, conservative and extreme nationalist forces led to the establishment of a counter-revolutionary regime from September 1919 that remained in power for the rest of the interwar period and beyond. Finally, the Treaty of Trianon, the punitive settlement imposed by the Western Allies in June 1920, deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its pre-war territory and close to 60 per cent of its population. Up to 30 per cent of the ethnic Hungarian population of the former Habsburg Empire now found themselves living in Romania and Czechoslovakia. While these developments affected all left-wing political parties adversely, they marginalized liberal feminists in a way that is particularly significant to our topic here: overtaken by a new, right-wing, nationalistic women’s movement which was able to build on resentment over the territorial losses imposed on Hungary, liberal feminists, who had championed the suffrage all along, were unable to take due credit for it when it was finally introduced. Moreover, as a liberal, left-leaning

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organization pushed to the margins in the interwar era of anti-liberal, nationalistic politics, Hungary’s mortally weakened feminist movement was not in a position either to develop a post-suffrage agenda or to influence female voters outside of its small, educated, urban and overwhelmingly Jewish constituency. The post-war settlement had other significant implications for women. The counter-revolutionary regime staked its existence after 1920 on the revision of the Trianon borders and succeeded in controlling the revanchist, nationalist discourse through education and propaganda during the interwar period. The regime also relied on a new, right-wing women’s organization, the National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ). The anti-liberal, nationalist gospel of MANSZ tied the regeneration of the nation to that of traditional family values, supposedly under attack from liberal forces. It called on Hungarian women to ensure the nation’s survival by performing their traditional roles as wives and mothers. This rhetoric found a captive audience in a female population traumatized by the preceding years of war, revolutions, counter-revolutions and foreign occupation and may explain why much of the female vote went to the parties of the right. Therefore, without at least a brief discussion of this complicated and in many ways paradoxical political context, any interpretation of the Hungarian case of female suffrage will remain superficial. The following overview of the history of the suffrage in Hungary in the immediate post-1918 period will flag up the parallels, at once genuine and illusory, of the Hungarian case with Western European trends, while also underlining the crucial impact of the anti-liberal turn on the role of gender in Hungarian political life. If we take up Gottlieb’s call to locate the British case within, rather than beside, the European history of women’s rights, we can establish several striking similarities with the Hungarian case. We acknowledge – but for argument’s sake will overlook – the glaring differences between the two countries this study brings together, in their geopolitical weight and international position, not to mention in their respective political traditions and systems: on one hand there is the world’s largest imperial power, coming out of the war as a battered but uncontested winner, on the other the former junior member of Europe’s oldest multi-ethnic empire, defeated and dismembered. The first and most obvious parallel is the granting of female suffrage to both British and Hungarian women in 1918. This development was regarded – and echoed in the claims of feminist leaders – in both countries as a reward for women’s wartime service on the home front. And while a direct causal

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connection has been called into question by recent scholarship, the efforts of highly visible, influential women’s rights movements, whose activism reached a peak in both countries in the run-up to the war, cannot be discounted.56 Gottlieb also calls attention to the leadership role in the international women’s rights movement taken up by British feminists whose ‘suffrage pedigrees’ following the war allowed them ‘to minister on behalf of women in Europe who had still not attained their goals’.57 It should be added that this dynamic aptly describes the relationship between British and continental feminists, including Hungarians, in the pre-war period as well. Established with a substantial delay, when compared with British and other Western European feminist organizations, the Hungarian Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete, FE) was founded in 1904; but it quickly caught up with and developed strong ties to international women’s rights organizations. The connection to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), the more radical and recently founded of the transnational feminist organizations, was especially important, with Hungary now joining the second wave of member countries. Moreover, the two leaders of the FE, Vilma Glücklich and Rosika Schwimmer, cultivated strong ties with their British colleagues, with Schwimmer eventually moving to London to take up her position as the corresponding secretary of the IWSA just prior to the First World War.58 A comparative approach can also lead to new and unexpected insights well beyond mapping out the personal and organizational ties between British and Hungarian feminists or establishing the chronological overlaps in the history of female suffrage in the two countries. A closer look at the parallels and differences between the two cases – and comparing them alongside other European examples – can challenge the narrow political historical perspective characteristic of early women’s history. Following the same agenda as the women’s rights movements it sought to describe, this scholarship was fixated on the vote. Our comparative study, by contrast, calls attention to the respective national and imperial projects in each country and the roles they assigned to women as voters in the immediate aftermath of suffrage. The recent scholarly attention paid to right-wing women is another development in European women’s and gender history that offers important pointers for our comparative study of the relationship between the suffrage and nationalism. While women’s rights activists’ controversial wartime record had been acknowledged for some time, the study of European proto-fascist and right-wing nationalist women activists in the aftermath of the First World

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War has only recently been critically explored.59 The contribution of right-wing women activists to the emerging anti-liberal – and in Eastern and East-Central Europe invariably nationalistic – rhetoric that became the hallmark of the interwar period is crucial to a better understanding of the relationship between nationalism and the politics of gender. Another significant difference – and a measure of the relative success or failure of the two cases – is the degree to which female MPs became a regular, accepted feature of political life. While in the British case the low but steady number of female candidates and MPs allows historians to establish some meaningful conclusions about the emerging, competing constructions of women’s citizenship, in the Hungarian case the number of female deputies remained so low as to make it difficult to establish any such patterns, at least in regard to political parties. In the entire interwar period there were only five female MPs in total, and between 1920 and 1931 only a single one at any given time.60 To close this admittedly incomplete survey of similarities and differences between the British and Hungarian cases of female suffrage in the aftermath of the war, it should be mentioned that there is a significant difference in the state of historical scholarship. Although the dynamic of feminist movements in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the impact of the suffrage on political life are relatively new areas of interest in British scholarship, they are almost completely absent from writing on Hungarian history. The study of the interwar period has been one of the most exciting areas of recent Hungarian historical scholarship but exclusively from a political historical perspective, with gender almost non-existent as a subject, concept or tool of analytical inquiry. To cite just one example, in a recent volume covering the history of parliamentary elections in Hungary between 1920 and 2010, there are just three sentences dedicated to women voters in the 1920 and 1922 elections.61 Also lacking in Hungarian historical scholarship is any study of the role of female activists under liberal and then Bolshevik rule in 1918–19; on the positions taken up by the liberal women’s rights movement towards both regimes; and on the emergence and early history of the right-wing, antiliberal women’s movement in the same period.62 We lack studies on women’s political participation within or outside of political parties, studies that would explore and interpret women’s participation in national elections as voters and candidates, the issues raised in parliament by less than a handful of female MPs and, lastly, scholarly biographies of the few women politicians of the period. The best study on the topic thus far is the chapter titled ‘Women in Parliament

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(1920–1990)’, written by the eminent political historian Mária Palasik in a recent volume which she also edited on Hungarian women in political life during the short twentieth century. But with less than three pages dedicated to the interwar period, her study hardly represents the last word.63 Hungarian women, as we have seen, voted for the first time in the January 1920 general elections, which took place on the basis of a universal, secret and mandatory ballot, including all men and women over the age of twenty-four. The electoral decree set a literacy requirement for women only and distinguished between active and passive electoral rights: only men and women over the age of thirty could stand for office. But the legislation tells us very little of the circuitous story of universal male and female suffrage, the object of a decade and a half of intense political struggle between the pre-war, semi-feudal Hungarian establishment and the mostly extra-parliamentary opposition, including the liberal feminists. In the years leading up to 1914, the Hungarian political establishment, dominated by old regime interests and clinging to national supremacy over the country’s growing ethnic minorities, resisted all attempts at political and social reform. Whether liberal or conservative, the Hungarian political establishment successfully blocked any kind of electoral reform. Indeed, the proportion of the enfranchised remained under 10 per cent of the male population, even though universal manhood suffrage was introduced in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy in 1906. The democratic opposition, consisting mainly of extra-parliamentary Social Democrats and Liberals, dreamed of a programme of political and social modernization that included universal manhood and female suffrage, land reform and the breaking of the Catholic and Protestant churches’ monopoly over education. The liberal feminists of the FE had been part of this pre-war democratic alliance, and suffrage was the cornerstone of their programme. From 1904 on they spearheaded efforts to put women’s suffrage on the political agenda, and while they succeeded in making their demands mainstream, they had come up against opposition from both the political left and right. Establishment politicians seemed to warm to the idea of female suffrage only as long as it promised to help maintain Magyar national supremacy over the minority nationalities in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. Furthermore, moderate and Christian women’s groups only agreed to co-operate with the feminists in exchange for guaranteed limitations on the right to vote based on income and education, in order not to threaten the interests of the traditional

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elite. By contrast, Social Democrats, including organized working-class women, condemned any limitation on the vote and campaigned against ‘the ladies’ suffrage’. Instead they advanced the ‘universal manhood suffrage first’ argument familiar from other Central European contexts.64 In the last two years of the First World War the feminists’ campaigns intensified, and while they pushed the well-known case about their wartime service to the fore, at the same time the gulf between liberal and socialist feminists as well as right-wing, Christian women activists and liberals widened, foreshadowing the political fissures of the post-war period. However, all the animosity between the various streams of women activists seemed to evaporate in the first days of the liberal revolution that followed the armistice in October 1918 and was led by Count Mihály Károlyi. The latter had been among the early champions of the suffrage – his wife, Countess Andrássy, was a recent convert to feminism and they both had worked with Rosika Schwimmer to advance separate peace negotiations with the West. After coming to power he kept his word and introduced universal suffrage, including for women (albeit over the age of thirty as opposed to twenty-four for men) in the first People’s Decree of the governing national council, in November 1918.65 Women activists from all sides welcomed and flocked to the new, revolutionary government, placing their hopes in Károlyi’s well-known Allied connections and anti-war credentials as guarantees of a just peace. After multiple delays, national elections were set for 13 April 1919 – but they were cancelled after Károlyi resigned on 21 March 1919 and a coalition of Social Democrats and Communists took over, introducing the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik experiment, the Republic of Councils. In April 1919 an election of local workers’ councils (modelled on the Soviets in Russia) took place and while in principle women were eligible to vote, in practice only members of either of the two parties or a trade union, and those deemed to be working-class wage earners, were allowed to do so. This limitation effectively excluded middle-class women from the vote and deeply offended the liberal feminists who condemned the political charade that made a mockery of the suffrage that they had fought so long for. In a report sent to Jus Suffragii, the bulletin of the IWSA, in early 1920, the FE provided a scathing account of the four months of Bolshevik dictatorship. The report singled out the election under the Republic of Councils as a ‘parody’ and a ‘tragicomical event of the women being “allowed” to vote in Hungary’.66 In August 1919 the Bolshevik regime fell and counter-revolutionary forces took over. Rejecting the Soviet path, they renewed negotiations with the Allies

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over a peace settlement. In November 1919 the occupying Romanian army left the capital and Miklós Horthy, the commander of the ragtag Hungarian National Army and soon-to-be head of state, rode into Budapest, leading the notorious paramilitary detachments that had unleashed the White Terror on the countryside on their way to the capital. In one of the paradoxical developments of the post-war period, universal suffrage, including women’s suffrage was the only part of the pre-war democratic reform agenda that would survive the defeat of the liberal and Bolshevik revolutions. This was due, in equal measure, to the Allied insistence on the widest possible electorate, to give legitimacy to the new government and the by then commonly accepted need to redefine the rights and duties of citizenship in a post-war ‘successor state’ which, as a result of the new, truncated borders, had become almost exclusively ethnic Hungarian in composition.67 After the false starts in 1918 and 1919, women finally exercised their right to vote in the January 1920 parliamentary elections. The two days of the elections were extremely well organized and devoid of any violence. This contrasted with the general tenor of the campaign in the run-up to the elections, when paramilitary violence and the open harassment of liberal and left-wing candidates was rife. A moderate MP, elected as a representative of the centrist Smallholders Party, expressed this paradox in the following way: I have never seen a clearer, more democratic, more straightforward electoral decree. But I have never seen an election of such lawlessness, organised under the banner of a faultless electoral decree. … Everything good brought to us by this democratic electoral law that was forced on us by the West was annihilated, demolished by a terror that we had never experienced before and which created entirely abnormal conditions across the whole country.68

In another glaring difference with the British case, the political campaigning preceding the January 1920 general elections in Hungary took place in the absence of a genuine opposition to the government. Following the defeat of the revolutions, most left-wing politicians went into exile. The counterrevolutionary regime had banned the Communist Party and severely curtailed the activities of the Social Democratic Party. Freedom of the press, before and during the campaign, existed only in the letter of the law. The White Terror, directed against anyone suspected of participating in either of the revolutions, as well as Jews, went on completely unchecked in the countryside and was barely restrained by the presence of Allied observers in the capital.69 The counter-

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revolutionary ideology had already taken shape well before the Horthy regime came to power, and with the conditions of the peace treaty made public in the days before the elections it was broadcast with the full force of governmentsubsidized propaganda. The new ideological mantra remained in force for the rest of the interwar period: it blamed the draconian measures of the Treaty on the democratic and communist revolutions of 1918–19 and their liberal, Jewish and Bolshevik leaders. The accusations mirrored the better-known German Dolchstoßlegende and, combined with the large-scale emigration of left-wing and liberal politicians, succeeded in limiting the scope and influence of liberal and democratic political parties for the entire interwar period. Among the exiles were many liberal feminists who, despite their legitimate claims to the opposite, were stigmatized for their supposed support of the Republic of Councils and condemned for attacking the Christian foundations of the Hungarian state, family and society. Although hardly qualifying as a free and democratic process, the short electoral campaign preceding the 1920 elections still offers an eloquent testimony to the impact of this newly emerging, anti-liberal, nationalistic political discourse on gender politics. With most of the campaign conducted at public meetings, and in light of the severe restrictions placed on the liberal press, three kinds of primary sources provide us with evidence of the ways in which women voters were considered and courted as voters and citizens: electoral posters and flyers, the documents of the FE, and, lastly, the press of the new, right-wing women’s organization MANSZ, which enjoyed the full support of the government. Echoing the general tenor of political life, the electoral posters of rightwing parties addressed female voters as ‘Christian Hungarian Women’,70 both adjectives being understood in contemporary parlance as code for ‘non-Jewish’. Urging women to ‘take their fate into their own hands, possibly for the last time’ the Christian Party’s poster encapsulated the essence of right-wing propaganda by referring to the recent memory of Bolshevik rule: ‘The Communist movement turns woman into pariahs of society, as its laws do not protect them and do not recognize the sanctity of marriage, and it allows a man to leave his wife whenever he wants to.’71 A decree issued in May 1919 by the government of the Republic Councils had simplified divorce proceedings. In addition (rumoured and real) attacks on the sanctity of marriage in Soviet Russia had been widely covered by the popular press from 1917 on, so voters could find these claims convincing.

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The Christian Socialist Party’s flyer shared the references to Christian morality, supposedly under threat from liberal parties, but was much more muted in its tone. Instead of using crass anti-communist propaganda, it appealed to female voters by highlighting the electoral issues assumed to be of interest to them. It offered a veritable smorgasbord of ‘women’s issues’, promising to secure lasting peace, solve the housing and food shortage, reduce infant mortality, introduce universal old-age insurance and improve public health.72 The archives of the FE also hold evidence that despite the onslaught of right-wing propaganda, or because of it, mainstream parties and politicians still counted on the support of the politically most educated and astute female voters. The letter of the National Democratic Civic Party, whose leader, Vilmos Vázsonyi, had been a long-time supporter of the suffrage in parliament, thanked the feminists for their support.73 More surprising is a letter to the interim president of the FE from the moderate but solidly anti-revolutionary candidate, József Szterényi. A former minister in several pre-war governments, he asked for the support of the feminists, claiming his credentials as a long-time advocate of female suffrage.74 Then again, it may have been Szterényi’s Jewish background that made him consider this step, at a time of open, vicious anti-Semitism in political and public life. (He was elected as an independent in the capital.) The minutes of the executive of the FE on the day preceding the elections testify to the feminist organization’s effort to maintain a degree of influence over the outcome of the elections. They report that the executive sent a letter to its members, naming ‘candidates somewhat close to us’ and urging members of the FE to vote for them.75 The FE archives also preserved the flyers of the Social Democratic Party. Having decided to boycott the elections, the Social Democrats urged their supporters to defy the electoral law that made voting mandatory by finding legal ways to make their ballot invalid.76 The loose co-operation of the Social Democrats and the FE was revived two years later, in 1922, when the feminists called on their members to support the Social Democratic candidate Anna Kéthly in the elections. She would go on to become one of the most prominent socialist politicians, and certainly the most respected one, of the interwar period. Sitting as an MP from 1922 to 1948 and between 1922 and 1931 as the only female deputy in the national parliament, she represented working-class and so-called women’s interests and issues with great passion and integrity.77 As for the 1920 elections, a sole female MP, Margit Schlachta, was elected. A prominent member of the Christian Socialist Party and its affiliate, the Christian

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Mission Society and the leader of the party’s women section, Schlachta had been nominated by the governing right-wing party, the Christian National Unity Party, and beat three other, male candidates. In the period between 1920 and 1922 she was the only woman MP among 219 MPs, frequently rising to speak, mainly on issues related to social welfare; however, she also supported the controversial reintroduction of corporal punishment brought in specifically to punish black marketers, understood in contemporary code to mean Jewish merchants.78 Yet no other source speaks more eloquently of the new concept of female citizenship that the counter-revolutionary regime assigned to women than the writings of the leader of MANSZ, Cécile Tormay. A successful writer of historical novels before the war, Tormay rose to the highest echelons of the counter-revolutionary regime. As a reward for her support for the right-wing conspiracy against the Károlyi government, Tormay was given a high-profile role in the ceremony welcoming Horthy and his national army to Budapest in November 1919. But it is her role in shaping the regime’s violently anti-Semitic, anti-liberal rhetoric, with her semi-fictional account of the revolutionary period, An Outlaw’s Diary79 and her leadership of MANSZ that secured her political reputation. Without a doubt the single most high-profile right-wing woman politician of her times, Tormay became a revered figure of the counterrevolutionary period, whose family background and public persona embodied the combination of old-fashioned authoritarian conservatism and radical antiSemitism that was the hallmark of the Horthy regime. Tormay’s editorial in the yearbook of MANSZ, published in December 1919, on the eve of the elections, reveals the fundamental paradox implicit in the role of right-wing, anti-liberal female politicians across Europe after 1918: the problem of emancipated, highly educated, professional women (and in Tormay’s case an unmarried, closeted lesbian) preaching to their fellow women on the merits of traditional female roles and the dangers of too much education. The editorial defined the duty of Hungarian women as the cultivation of a truly Christian family life and the inculcation of patriotism in their roles as wives and mothers. Her advice on what to do with the suffrage, in her eyes an unwanted and unexpected, somewhat dubious gift, is worth quoting in full: The sober women of the Hungarian race realize that they now have the same right to vote in elections as their husbands had until now. But because women had not in general concerned themselves with politics, the question was raised: Whom should they ask for an honest and unbiased opinion on how to use this

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Figure 2  Cécile Tormay (second from left), Countess Ambrózy Migazzi and Countess Ráday, leaders of MANSZ with Ambassador András Hóry on a visit to Rome, 1932. Reproduced courtesy of the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, Department of Historical Photographs. new right in the most useful manner. … Thank God for the organisation that is best equipped to provide women with advice, an organisation formed by and of the best Hungarian women. This organisation is MANSZ.80

And there can be no question that the rhetoric of Tormay and MANSZ, appealing to traditional and Christian family values, found fertile ground in Hungarian society, especially among women in the rural areas least affected by the economic and social modernization of the cities. The year 1922 serves as an apt cut-off point in the history of female suffrage in Hungary. By the early 1920s the ideological fault lines of the interwar period had solidified, condemning the liberal feminist movement to the margins and

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propelling the new, extreme nationalist, anti-liberal women’s movement to the centre of power, all in the name of a programme of national regeneration. As if to underscore the anti-liberal nature of the political system that remained in place until 1944, a new electoral law introduced in March 1922 lowered the proportion of voters from about 40 per cent to just below 30 per cent.81 The decree also introduced the open vote – an unprecedented measure in post-war Europe – with the exception of the capital and the seven largest cities, further reducing even the semblance of a democratic parliamentary system. Crucially, the new electoral law set higher age- and education-related requirements for women: thirty years as opposed to the twenty-four required for men, and six years of schooling as opposed to the four years required of men. A number of exceptions made the law more complicated – women with four years of school but with three or more children, with independent income or with a university education could also vote – but this did little to alleviate the decree’s gender bias. As a result, in the 1922 elections the percentage of eligible voters was reduced by approximately 25 per cent or 750,000, affecting twice as many women as men.82 Tellingly, during the parliamentary debate on the new law (with the debate unresolved, the electoral law was finally introduced by government decree) both the small liberal opposition and the right-wing Christian parties objected vehemently to the planned limitations on women’s voting rights. This seems to either confirm the accepted wisdom that women overwhelmingly voted for the parties of the right, or were regarded as solidly voting for them, but also raises the possibility that they did not. Another possible interpretation is that while Christian, conservative MPs opposed the limitations placed on female voters out of political expediency, the few liberal MPs did the same out of principle – because no one had any statistical evidence for women’s voting patterns. The anti-liberal turn in Hungary’s political life created an insurmountable challenge for liberal feminists and an opening for a new, nationalistic women’s movement. Women’s suffrage had been granted in 1918 and practised first in 1920. By then, however, liberal feminism had been successfully quarantined by a right-wing regime that staked its existence on the territorial revision of post-war borders and the rejection of liberal democracy. The fate of liberal feminism in Hungary illuminates the challenges faced by liberal women’s rights movements in the East-Central European region, where they proved to be defenceless in the face of a new, aggressive nationalism. In Hungary, the principles of internationalism, pacifism and women’s emancipation along Western, liberal lines could not compete with an anti-liberal, nationalistic project that tied the regeneration of the nation to the regeneration of the family and interpreted

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them both as women’s duties. By involving Hungarian women in this project on a massive scale, the Horthy regime cemented the appeal of its right-wing, nationalistic ideology for the rest of the interwar period.

The Finnish case: Pioneer of women’s suffrage and the politics of nationalism The Finnish women’s position differed from that of British and Hungarian women but there are certain observable parallels as well. Since the Finns were pioneers in women’s suffrage the topic is relatively well researched.83 Finland was the first country in Europe to enfranchise women in 1906, making the Finnish case exceptional. In 1906, Finland changed over from a diet to a unicameral parliament. Traditionally only the men of the four estates, the nobility, clergy, burghers and landowning peasants, had the vote. Under the new legislation the electorate increased from 8 per cent to 85 per cent of the adult population, with many men as well as women gaining the vote for the first time, which was a momentous change.84 Women received both active and passive voting rights, meaning that they could vote and stand for election. Sixty-two women candidates ran in the inaugural election. Compared to Britain and Hungary, the most striking discrepancy was that in Finland approximately 10 per cent of the members of the first Parliament in 1907 were women. These nineteen women came from a wide range of backgrounds, ranging from maids to noblewomen.85 How was such progress possible and how far did the suffrage change the social standing of women? First, following the international trend, the suffrage reform in Finland coincided with a dramatic turning point in the construction of the nation. The sociopolitical situation was ripe for reform: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland was still a part of the Russian Empire. Tsar Nicholas II, who came to power in 1894, tried to unite his empire by standardizing the currency, language, religion and army. The Finns were appalled by this Russification which weakened their autonomy, but they were incapable of preventing it. In 1905 they had their chance, as Russia had both foreign and domestic problems: it had lost the war against Japan and political demonstrations spread throughout the empire. Revolutionary ideas reached Finland too. The Finns protested by a general strike and thereby forced the tsar to make concessions including reversing the standardization of the currency and approving the establishment of a parliament on the basis of universal and equal

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suffrage. The promise of universal and equal suffrage was interpreted to apply to both sexes. Besides, in the labour movement, in which women were represented in substantial numbers, civil rights were defined and demanded on the basis not of gender but of class; thus they included women as well. The Finnish Labour Party had already demanded the active and passive vote for everyone over twenty-one years old, including women, in its 1899 programme and remained unequivocal on this matter.86 Another factor explaining Finland’s unique situation is that unmarried tax-paying women had already been able to vote in local elections since 1875. Furthermore, as women had campaigned for female suffrage in state elections since the 1880s, the idea was not a novelty. The Women’s Society of Finland was founded in 1884 to improve women’s standing, and the League of Finnish Feminists (Unioni Naisasialiitto) was officially founded in 1892 in order to fight for the vote but also for other rights.87 Unlike in the United States or Britain, in Finland there was no movement that concentrated solely on women’s suffrage. The first chair of the League, Lucina Hagman was elected to the first unicameral system of representation in 1906. Four other members of these two women’s associations were elected to this first parliament as well. One should pay attention to the fact that the women’s rights activists who represented the upper middle and middle class had tried to achieve the suffrage only for women of their own class. The battle for women’s suffrage was thus an initiative of a small elitist group. They were motivated especially to get the vote for educated women and wanted to leave the lower class outside the reform. The middle-class women’s movement did not change its opinion until 1905 when the labour movement strongly backed universal suffrage. Then the suffragists turned to socialist women and tried to transcend class boundaries by appealing to them with the rhetoric of sisterhood. Their approaches did not receive the response the suffragists had hoped for, however, because socialist women remained convinced that class oppression was a bigger issue than the question of gender equality. Furthermore, the universal suffrage demanded by socialists included women: they therefore saw no need for a separate women’s movement. All in all, the socialist women had closer bonds to the men of their party than to the women of the upper classes. The feminist associations themselves have exaggerated their role as pressure groups for suffrage. Academic research on women’s organizations or on suffrage has questioned their importance in the move towards suffrage in 1906. Nevertheless, they managed to get five members elected to the first parliament.88 Women activists did not have a list of their own

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in the elections; instead, they represented the bourgeois Finnish and Young Finnish parties. One final explanation for the early extension of the franchise in Finland is the fact that women there had always enjoyed a special status in society, due to the country’s strong agrarian economic base. At the beginning of the twentieth century nearly 90 per cent of the population still lived in rural areas where men and women worked side by side. In the old Finnish agrarian social order women were not subordinate to men. There may have been a distribution of work between the sexes in the agrarian culture but it did not produce antagonism within the gender order. Moreover, the sexes were seen as complementary and in partnership.89 Besides, in the countryside, schoolmistresses and the ladies of large houses enjoyed a certain prestige in the local community. Despite the legal equality and the suffrage, there were other, more traditional assumptions concerning women’s roles in society. The nationalists emphasized women’s role as makers of the Finnish nation and wanted to improve their rights and social standing. However, these improvements were advocated only if women’s political activities supported their role as mothers. The home was the basic unit of the society and the future of the nation depended on the morals of the homes. Finnish upper-middle- and middle-class conservatives argued that women should confine themselves to fulfilling their nurturing and caring roles. This could be encouraged on two levels. First, women should stay at home and raise their children. Secondly, if they did not have children of their own, they could act as ‘social mothers’ and utilize their ‘natural facilities’ as teachers and nurses. The most prominent fields in which this social motherhood could be practised were education and welfare.90 In contrast, intellectual fields, such as economics, were reserved for men. Working outside the home was regarded mostly as a temporary phase between childhood and motherhood. In other words, after getting married, women were expected to renounce their careers and become perfect housewives. Middle-class women’s conservative organizations, such as Martha, also propagated a model of ideal motherhood to the working classes.91 Due to this attitude, women’s politicization progressed slowly after 1906 and the League of Finnish Feminists was frustrated. Social scientists have called this social system ‘incomplete democracy’.92 According to these middle-class views, men were supposed to be the sole supporters of their family to allow women to stay at home. Nonetheless, in lowincome, working-class families women were expected to contribute to household expenses. This model was shared in the working population, whether in the

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countryside or in towns and cities after industrialization. Special arrangements were thus needed when the children were small: for example, the mother often worked as a laundress, cleaner or seamstress, which enabled the combining of work and childcare.93 The possibilities for married women to work outside the home gradually improved. In the 1910s, the situation changed, especially in towns: married women began increasingly to work in factories, shops and offices as the social structure was slowly developing and the idea of children’s day care took root in society.94 Women’s participation in parliamentary work led to important legislative improvements to women’s rights in the workplace, such as occupational safety. Nevertheless, the old attitudes and old gender roles changed slowly. The major turning point in Finnish society came in the form of the civil war of January–May 1918, which shook the social standing of women as well as the gender order overall. After the Russian revolution in 1917 the Finns seized the moment to secede from Russia. On 6 December 1917 Finland declared its independence. The political situation in the new country was unstable due to the lack of an army and police force. There was a power vacuum, which both socialist (or Red) and conservative (or White) forces strove to fill with their own paramilitaries. The Reds organized a coup d’état in January 1918 and managed to conquer Southern Finland. The subsequent civil war lasted three and a half months and ended with the defeat of the Reds. More than 36,000 Finns died in the battles and in prisoner of war camps after the civil war. During the war, socialist women took enormous leaps forward in terms of breaking the old gender barriers by taking on various ‘masculine’ tasks. The majority of these women were members of the local social democratic associations or trade unions. The most conspicuous group of socialist women was composed of the women soldiers who participated in front-line battles. Even the socialists themselves were not sure whether to approve the female battalions or not. After a long period of hesitation, the Red administration decided to allow women to participate in armed combat as well. The Women’s Social Democratic Association nonetheless objected to the militarization of women. The Whites, for their part, were appalled by women warriors. For them, a woman bearing arms went totally against the inherent caring and nurturing role of a woman. They considered it unfeminine to challenge the prevailing social system or revolt against the government with a rifle in hand. What is more, the women soldiers’ masculine appearance – with their men’s trousers and short hair – was denounced by conservatives as a threat

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to the established gender order. Red women were portrayed in White newspapers as sexually loose barbarians who were abnormal, unfeminine and unpalatable. Owing to this perception, many of these women fell victim to sexual violence and/or were executed without proper trials after the capitulation of the Reds in the spring of 1918.95 As well as entering the army, women were also accepted into responsible administrative and political positions in Southern Finland, where the Reds established an autonomous socialist government. Especially striking was the case of the two women who were appointed to the Red government. Hanna Karhinen was named deputy minister of the interior, and Hilja Pärssinen was appointed as the minister of social affairs.96 Never before had women gained such powerful positions in Finnish politics. Both of them had been members of parliament working in several select committees before the civil war, which means that they were by no means political newcomers.97 The Red administration engaged

Figure 3  A female Red Guardist during the Finnish Civil War in 1918. Reproduced courtesy of the People’s Archives, Helsinki, Finland, KansA130-1978.

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women with experience in politics on a local level as well. Hilma Laine, for example, was a clerical assistant at the local Social Democratic Party office before the war. During the war, she was appointed to the local political department, to the Red town council and, most sensationally of all, to the local Red court. It was this last posting that turned out to be the most aggravating factor in her own trial after the war. Numerous other women activists worked for the socialists at a local level during the civil war,98 but after the Reds were defeated, the offence of having worked for the Red government was considered to be much more serious than rank-and-file membership in the Red Guard. For this reason, Red officials tried to flee the country. Hanna Karhinen and Hilja Pärssinen succeeded in escaping to Russia, but Hilma Laine was captured before she could cross the border and sentenced to four years of penal labour. In addition, she had to forfeit her civil rights, including suffrage, for six years, which was the normal penalty for such crimes.99 After the war, traditional gender roles were reasserted in line with the pre-war situation while post-war nationalism curtailed and negated the emancipatory changes that had been made during the course of the war. The next time a woman was appointed to the cabinet was in 1926 and after that, 1948. Interestingly, even certain socialist women expressed their satisfaction with the reconstructed roles for women after the war. For example, in the Social Democratic Party the importance of motherhood over work outside the home was emphasized. In the post-war years after 1918, women’s role as mothers was underlined in the right-wing conservative nationalist discourse: it was women’s duty to raise lawabiding citizens who would not challenge the authorities or the pre-existing gender order, as the Reds had done. In this sense there were many parallels with the Hungarian example. Even though Finnish women were no longer active in the top echelons of government, as they had been under the Reds, they still retained the vote and the right to stand in parliamentary elections. The importance of women voters was acknowledged, and both the political right and left made every effort to attract women voters in the parliamentary elections of 1919. Conservative women contributed to this discourse by arguing in their own political magazine that if the socialists won the elections they would turn society upside down and declare all women aged eighteen to forty to be the common property of men. They referred to Soviet Russia, right next door, as an example. According to the magazine, this menace could only be avoided by voting against the socialists.100 This kind of propaganda was far from unique; indeed, similar messages were

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used in anti-communist campaigns across Europe, for example in Germany and Hungary in 1919.101 In the Finnish parliamentary elections of 1919, women were unquestionably in a powerful position since their absolute number of votes was higher than that of men.102 This was because the political left had lost tens of thousands of its regular male voters due to the civil war; approximately 27,000 Red men had died and around 60,000 had lost their right to vote as a consequence of their political actions. Thus, women’s electoral support was crucial to the survival of the political left. Social Democrats acquired eighty seats out of a total of 200, which was a good result under the circumstances. Conservative women were also conscious of the improved chances for getting women elected to parliament and encouraged women voters in magazines and newspapers to vote for female candidates.103 In the end, women managed to obtain seventeen seats, which was close to the number in the previous elections of 1917.104 In many ways, even after 1918, Finnish women enjoyed greater equality with men than women in most other European states because they acted effectively in parliament. Moreover, after the war, women’s legal standing was gradually improved by legislative reforms. Several restrictions on women’s activities were introduced after the civil war but were then gradually lifted in the interwar period. For example, from 1919 women were entitled to engage in independent industrial and commercial activities, and after 1922 married women were allowed to enter into a contract of employment without their husband’s permission.105 Feminist organizations were able to encourage a public dialogue over women’s rights and cultivated their connections to the parliament. They were, nevertheless, disappointed by the slow progress. The League of Finnish Feminists argued in the 1920s that women did not have enough influence in society, because they did not vote often enough for female candidates in elections. There was a lack of solidarity between women. Women were also reluctant to stand for positions of trust. That is why women did not have power in local or national organs.106 Equality between the sexes was progressing but after the civil war there was a new type of inequality in Finnish society. The nation was divided into winners and losers, and the latter, namely the Reds, were considered to be unworthy citizens. They forfeited their civil rights as a punishment for their treacherous actions. The former Reds were treated as second-class citizens, which could be observed, for example, in the labour market and the distribution of social benefits. Although suffrage and other civil rights were restored fairly quickly by means of pardons, the fractures in society prevailed until the late 1930s.

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Nonetheless, social reforms gradually healed the political divisions, and, finally, the Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939–40 reunited the nation.

Rosika Schwimmer in the aftermath of suffrage and war The case of the Hungarian-Jewish activist Rosika Schwimmer demonstrates how the post-war move to homogenize and normalize women voters can be understood in the context of the turn to a nationalist form of feminist politics across Europe after 1918. This stood in diametrical opposition to her own internationalist and pacifist-humanist brand of feminism and made her an outcast among women’s groups, both in Hungary itself and in wider networks of activists working for peace and gender equality in many parts of the post-war world. Rosika Schwimmer’s life and work in the aftermath of the war represents a prism through which to observe many developments and tendencies in gender and peace politics within and outside of Hungary’s borders. Before the First World War, Schwimmer was considered one of the most progressive and pioneering feminists-suffragists in her native country, Hungary, and the wider Habsburg lands. For instance, she almost single-handedly acquainted Hungarian society with the key arguments in favour of granting women the vote. For that purpose, she established the FE with Vilma Glücklich (1872–1927) in Budapest in 1904 and joined the IWSA in the same year. Schwimmer’s good relations with the IWSA culminated in 1913, when the FE hosted the Seventh IWSA Congress in Budapest; she was subsequently employed as the corresponding and international secretary for the IWSA journal Jus Suffragii in London. Throughout this time she supported the moderate suffragist wing of the international women’s movement and was highly critical of the militant tactics deployed by the suffragette movement in Britain. Yet her positive image in suffragist circles changed with the outbreak of the First World War, when she adopted an uncompromising pacifist and fervent stop-the-war-at-any-cost stance. For example, she toured the United States in 1914, where she lectured extensively on peace and mediation rather than on women’s suffrage, thus alienating Carrie Chapman Catt, president of both the IWSA and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Moreover, Schwimmer inspired the foundation of the Woman’s Peace Party in Washington DC in 1915, and at the International Congress of Women at The Hague in the spring of 1915 she lobbied successfully for her idea of women envoys to be sent to neutral and belligerent nations. In response to her mediation plans, automobile

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tycoon Henry Ford sponsored the flamboyant Ford Peace Ship Expedition in 1915, viewed sceptically not only by patriots and militarists but also by most feminists, suffragists and pacifists. This peace voyage lacked credibility from the start, because it was widely considered to be a mere publicity stunt, orchestrated by the Ford Motor Company. A maritime pilgrimage of pacifists, traversing from New York City across the Atlantic to convene peace conferences in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, also appeared unrealistic and sensationalist to average observers in both continents. After the war, Schwimmer was appointed by the new government of Count Mihály Károlyi as Hungarian minister to Switzerland in 1918, although this diplomatic post was neither endorsed by the Hungarian Embassy in Berne nor recognized by the Swiss authorities. In 1920, she escaped from the new counterrevolutionary Horthy regime in Hungary, and came to the United States via Austria. In America she launched two unsuccessful projects, the so-called World Center for Women’s Archives with feminist historian Mary Ritter Beard in 1935

Figure 4  Rosika Schwimmer, Hungarian-born pacifist and feminist, c.1927. Reproduced courtesy of Alamy Images, DD782F. Contributor: Everett Collection.

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and the so-called Campaign for World Government and World Citizenship with Lola Maverick Lloyd (1875–1944), a social activist and Texas heiress, in 1937. Schwimmer died in New York City in 1948 as a stateless alien after her naturalization application was refused in the late 1920s, due to her outspoken pacifism.107 Schwimmer’s expressly political campaigns for peace trespassed on masculine domains, and appeared eccentric, bizarre, unorthodox, futuristic, idealistic or utopian to both her adversaries and former supporters.108 Just as she had denounced government-sanctioned, gender-defined, domestic and private forms of charity, philanthropy or welfare work in Hungary before the war (as remedies against the social ills caused by industrialization and urbanization), she deliberately boycotted women’s patriotic self-mobilization during and after the war on the grounds that it glorified violence and death and at the same time perpetuated older gender and social prescriptions.109 For instance, she was highly critical of women’s participation in organized wartime relief work, denouncing it as a social sedative ‘which unfortunately narcotises so many good people into believing that everything is done if we care for the victims, while we don’t care to prevent as much as possible the making of new victims’.110 Similarly, after the war, Schwimmer interpreted the sociopolitical situation for most women in Western nations as stagnant. In her radical feminist worldview, the total war effort had not dissolved the Victorian bifurcation of the separate spheres, but consolidated it, while the aftermath of the war perpetuated gender inequalities in all nations. According to her, female suffrage did not result in a paradigm shift of autonomous political participation or agitation by women in Hungary or in any other country. Female citizens were bestowed with political rights, such as the franchise, in order that they would become dutiful supporters and passive agents of political parties and movements led by men – and not so that they could become political actors in their own rights or on their own terms.111 The franchise hence overwhelmingly failed to trickle down into direct, active political participation by women. Nor did it allow the equal representation of women. Furthermore, the presence of women in clerical rather than executive functions, or occupying positions as electors and assistants to male politicians, was the direct equivalent to relief work during the war and charity work before the war. Schwimmer’s refusal to subscribe to the party system (or charity and relief work for that matter) again signified a certain element of uncontrollability and unpredictability on her part: ‘Although we in Hungary have always enjoyed freedom of assembly and political association, we [the FE] have never joined

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political parties, because we are well aware of the lessons history teaches us: before one obtains political power oneself, one is exploited as an acolyte who has to downplay one’s own interests.’112 With her atypical peace effort, which involved challenging masculine prerogatives over politics and diplomacy, and women’s voluntary wartime and post-war roles in relief work, Schwimmer pursued political ambitions outside of those intended for women by the authorities, both before and after the granting of suffrage. Her previously mentioned ambassadorial appointment by Count Mihály Károlyi – a rather isolated incident in international politics due to Károlyi’s progressive attitude – and the intolerant and discriminatory treatment she experienced as the ‘unofficial’ first woman diplomat of modern times, epitomizes her outsider position extremely well. Furthermore, Schwimmer’s outspoken refusal to endorse nationalism not only cost her the right to US citizenship but also substantiated her argument that after the vote had been won, women were only acceptable in the public sphere as nationalist (or patriotic) exponents. Devoid of class or gender distinctions, nationalism could be invoked by women hoping to engage in political life or to lay claim to new citizens’ roles, albeit again supportive or secondary roles only.113 In societies destabilized by war, nationalism generally enabled many ‘underprivileged’ groups to feel empowered over others, now labelled ‘inferior’. The Hungarian case – with right-wing, reactionary and revisionist parties winning the support of ultra-nationalist, even anti-Semitic, women’s groups for their cause and promoting them at the expense of formerly prominent feminists like Schwimmer – illustrates this scenario par excellence. Yet Schwimmer was also singled out and harassed by reactionary and anti-Semitic opponents precisely because of the loss of her once strong position in international feminist and pacifist circles.114 Thus it seems that Schwimmer’s feminist-pacifist activism did not simply come ‘under fire’ – to use Karen Offen’s phrase – but that Schwimmer’s pre-war and wartime record of feminism and pacifism even backfired.115 In the context of the post-war reaction against feminism and the revival of nationalism, many of the qualities and quirks that had enabled her to enhance her career before 1914 became counterproductive and disadvantageous. In this way, a leading figure in Hungarian and international feminism, who had always worked for women’s suffrage and rights through transnational networks, became depoliticized and sidelined by her immediate and wider environment, ironically at exactly the same time as the franchise was being officially implemented for women in certain nations.

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Conclusion This chapter has provided a comparative study of the relationship between women’s suffrage and nationalism in three nations in the immediate post-war years. Beginning with the granting of women’s suffrage in Britain in 1918, the ‘classic’ example and a case study in success, we then moved on to Hungary where the achievement of women’s suffrage was ambiguous – a case study in the triumph of the forces of nationalism over liberal feminism. The British and Hungarian cases were then compared to that of Finland, where women’s suffrage was achieved early, in 1906, but where after the First World War feminists could not withstand the challenges of nationalism and allowed their movement to be co-opted by the right. These dilemmas were experienced on a very personal basis in all these countries and in the international and transnational networks that feminists had established before the war and courageously sustained during the war itself. Hungarian internationalist pacifist Rosika Schwimmer personified these tensions, and the challenges she faced in the aftermath of war illustrate the decline of feminism and the palpable feeling of anticlimax in the face of resurgent nationalisms. At first glance, these four cases seem to have little in common and display stark differences in terms of national histories, political agents, economic and social development and intellectual and cultural/religious traditions. Yet a comparative approach offers insight into the interplay of political rights and nationalism in the aftermath of war in Europe. The British, Finnish and Hungarian cases, along with the individual case of Schwimmer, represent drastically different examples of nation states emerging from within empires – some as winners, others as losers – and their comparison illuminates the dilemmas of female activists in the new, post-war political landscape.

Notes 1 Anne Cova, ‘International Feminisms in Historical Comparative Perspective: France, Italy and Portugal, 1880s-1930s’, Women’s History Review, 19/4 (2010), pp. 595–612. 2 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (eds), Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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3 Anne Cova (ed.), Comparative Women’s History: New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2006); Ann Taylor Allen, Anne Cova and June Purvis, ‘International Feminisms’, Women’s History Review, 19/4 (2010), pp. 493–501. 4 Pat Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 253–88. 5 Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (eds), Gender and War in TwentiethCentury Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006); Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 6 Jitka Maleckova, ‘Gender, History, and “Small Europe”’, European History Quarterly, 40/4 (2010), pp. 685–700. 7 See, for example, Nicoletta Gullace, ‘The Blood of our Sons’: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 8 Kevin Passmore (ed.), Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power (eds), Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists Around the World (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), especially the chapters by Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Female “Fanatics”: Women’s Sphere in the British Union of Fascists’, pp. 29–42 and Victoria L. Enders, ‘“And We Ate Up the World”: Memories of the Seccion Femenina’, pp. 85–100; Julie V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Julie Gottlieb (ed.), ‘Special Issue: Women, Fascism and the Far-Right, 1918-2010’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13/2 (June 2012); Christiane Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles: The Extension of War Culture by Radical Nationalist Women Journalists in post-1918 Germany’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 69–88; and Raffael Scheck, Mothers of the Nation; Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), among others. 9 See C. Daley and M. Nolan (eds), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Julie V. Gottlieb (ed.), ‘Special Issue: Feminism and Feminists after Suffrage’, Women’s History Review, 23/3 (June 2014). 10 Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 11 Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’, p. 169. 12 Mary Hilson, ‘Women Voters and the Rhetoric of Patriotism in the British General Election of 1918’, Women’s History Review, 10/2 (2001), pp. 325–47.

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13 For an excellent overview see Krista Cowman, Women in British Politics, c.16891979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 14 Quoted in Jo Vellacott, ‘Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919-1929’, Contemporary European History, 10/3 (2001), pp. 375–94. 15 ‘House of Commons’, The Times, 20 June 1917. 16 Earl Loreburn (L.) in the debate on the Representation of the People Bill. ‘The Franchise Bill: Women and the Vote’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 10 January 1918. 17 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 5–6. 18 ‘Women peace fanatics are becoming a nuisance and a menace.’ ‘Democratic control of our foreign policy and the abolition of secret diplomacy’ was one of the things demanded by the ‘National Conference of Women’ held yesterday at the Central Hall, Westminster. … Dress rehearsal for the International Women’s Congress to be held at The Hague … Peace Fanatics: Women’s Wild Scheme to End the War Standard, 15 April 1915. 19 See Daniel Laqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and Susan Pedersen, ‘Review Essay: Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, 112/4 (2007), pp. 1091–1117. Also Chapter 2 in this book. 20 Catherine E. Marshall, ‘The Future of Women in Politics’, in M. Kamester and J. Vellacott (eds), Militarism Versus Feminism: Writing on Women and War (London: Virago, 1987), p. 47. 21 ‘Women Voters and the Red Flag’, by Evelyn Sharpe [c. December 1918] [WIL pamphlet], D/MAR/4/80. 22 See Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 23 ‘Woman’s Task: Mrs Pankhurst on Win the War Aims’, Liverpool Echo, 12 January 1918. 24 ‘British Election Hinges on Premier’, New York Times, 25 August 1918. 25 ‘Women and Their Votes’, Western Gazette, 13 December 1918. 26 ‘Why Women Should Support Mr Lloyd George’, Western Daily Press, 9 December 1918. 27 ‘Wooing the Women’, Western Times, 13 December 1918. 28 Morning Post, 3 December 1918. 29 ‘Voice of the Women’, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 4 December 1918. 30 ‘Women and the Vote’, The Devon and Exeter Gazette, 10 December 1918. 31 ‘Women and the Election’, Dundee Courier, 29 November 1918. 32 The fact that the election was on a Saturday was seen to disadvantage women: ‘It is still feared that probably only a small minority of women will vote on

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48

49 50 51 52

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Saturday next. The day is inconvenient for the average housewife, and in rural constituencies, where the polling-stations are remote, women, it is expected, will not attempt to participate in the election. The prevailing indifference and the large number of absent voters threaten, indeed, a considerable proportion of abstentions among the electorate as a whole’ – ‘Will the Women Vote?’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 December 1918. See ‘Women at the Poll’, Swindon Advertiser, 20 December 1918. ‘Women at the Polls: Some London Incidents’ (From a Woman Correspondent), Manchester Guardian 16 December 1918. ‘Eager Women Voters: Heavy Polling’, The Times, 16 December 1918. Illustrated London News, 21 December 1918. ‘Women and Parliament’, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 24 October 1918. In the new parliament there were 707 members, of whom 107 were returned unopposed, and sixteen women candidates. ‘Women Gossip’, Cheltenham Looker-On, 11 January 1919. Mansfield Division of Notts.: Parliamentary Election, 1918, Address of Violet Markham, Liberal Candidate, D/MAR/4/80, Catherine Marshall Papers. Hendon Division Parliamentary Election, Vote for Mrs How Martyn, Progressive Independent Candidate [1918] D/MAR/80, Catherine Marshall Papers. Chelsea Parliamentary Election, Miss Emily Phipps (ex-president of the National Federation of Teachers), [1918] D/MAR/4/80, Catherine Marshall Papers. Rusholme Parliamentary Division, Vote for Mrs Pethick Lawrence, The Labour Party’s Woman Candidate [1918] D/MAR/4/80, Catherine Marshall Papers. General election, 1918, Bridgeton Parliamentary Division, Miss Eunice G. Murray, Non-Party Candidate, D/MAR/4/80, Catherine Marshall Papers. General election, 1918, Parliamentary Borough of Richmond (Surrey) Mrs Dacre Fox’s Address to the Electors, D/MAR/4/80, Catherine Marshall Papers. See Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism; and Angela MacPherson and Susan MacPherson, Mosley’s Old Suffragette: A Biography of Norah Dacre Fox (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Enterprises Inc., 2011). Miss Picton-Tuberville addressing the Coventry Women’s Suffrage Society – see ‘Coventry Suffrage Society Meeting’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 22 March 1918. See Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: Right-wing Feminism, the Great War and the Ideology of Consumption’, Women’s History Review, 23/3 (2014), pp. 330–46. ‘How Will the Women Vote?’, Hull Daily Mail, 2 October 1918. ‘Women Gossip’, Cheltenham Looker-On, 11 January 1919. Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935), p. 67. Arguably, the right was more successful than the left at mobilizing women. The Conservative Party struck on a successful formula by bringing some of women’s

70

53

54 55

56

57 58

59 60

61

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Women Activists between War and Peace demands for representation and equality in line with a nationalist, imperialist and ‘patriotic’ agenda. See Beatrix Campbell, The Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory (London: Virago, 1987); David Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 5/2 (1994), pp. 129–52; and Neal R. McCrillis, The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage: Popular Conservatism, 1918–1929 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998). See Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 13–37. Mária M. Kovács, ‘Hungary’, in Passmore (ed.) Women, Gender and Fascism, p. 85, citing Ignác Romsics, Ellenforradalom és konszolidáció (Budapest: Gondolat, 1982), p. 10. Thane, ‘What difference did the vote make?’, describes the complex dynamic of change in Britain. Françoise Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division’, in F. Thébaud (ed.), A History of Women in the West, vol. 5: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 21–74 and Karen Hunt, ‘Women as Citizens: Changing the Polity’, in Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 216–58, provide summaries of the debates. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism, p. x in this chapter. Mineke Bosch, with Annemarie Kloosterman (ed.), Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902-1942 (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 8 and 280. Passmore (ed.), Women, Gender and Fascism; Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism. See also the titles cited in note 8 above. Mária Palasik, ‘A nők a parlamentben (1920-1990)’, in Mária Palasik (ed.), A nő és a politikum; A nők politikai szerepvállalása Magyarországon (Budapest: Napvilág, 2007), pp. 231–3. Jenő Gergely, ‘Titkos választás és ellenforradalom – 1920’ and Zoltán Paksy, ‘Választások Bethlen módra – 1922’, both in György Földes and László Hubai (eds), Parlamenti választások Magyarországon 1920-2010, 3rd updated edition (Budapest: Napvilág, 2010). The relevant passages are on pages 71–2 and 91. For the immediate aftermath of the First World War, see the chapters by Judit Acsády, ‘Diverse constructions: Feminist and conservative movements and their contribution to the (re-)construction of gender relations in Hungary after the First World War’, and Judith Szapor, ‘Who represents Hungarian women? The demise of the liberal bourgeois women’s movement and the rise of the right-wing women’s movement in the aftermath of World War I’, both in Sharp and Stibbe

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63 64 65

66 67 68 69

70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80

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(eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 309–31 and 245–64. Judith Szapor, ‘Feministák és ‘radikális asszonyok – Női politikusok az 1918-as demokratikus forradalomban’, in Beáta Nagy and Gyáni Gábor (eds), Nők a modernizálódó magyar tárasadalomban (Debrecen: Csokonai, 2000), pp. 248–77, is a rare example of a study that explores female campaigning in the revolutionary period. Palasik, ‘A nők a parlamentben’, pp. 231–3. Richard J. Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism and Pacifism in Europe, 1870-1945 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987). J. Szapor, ‘The Women’s Debating Club of Countess Károlyi: Hungarian Women’s Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Activism in 1918/19’, L’Homme: European Journal of Feminist History, 25/2 (2014), pp. 63–71. Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives, OL), Feministák Egyesülete (Association of Feminists), P 999, box no. 9, item no. 13, dated 1 March 1920. Gergely, ‘Titkos választás és ellenforradalom’, p. 53. Győző Drozdy, Memoárok, cited in ibid., p. 82. The Social Democratic Party participated in the electoral campaign before deciding, in the face of unbridled intimidation, to boycott the elections. The degree of lawlessness was well illustrated by the murders of the Social Democrats’ campaign manager the week before, and of the editor-in-chief of the Social Democratic daily, Népszava [The People’s Voice] three weeks after the elections, at the hand of paramilitaries close to Horthy. Electoral poster of Dr Pál Lipták, candidate for the Christian Party. Poster preserved in the documents of the FE, OL, P 999, box 24, folder 43. Flyer of the Christian Party, ibid. OL, P 999, documents of the FE, box 24, folder 43. The stamp of the Romanian military censor on the flyer helps in its dating: the Romanian troops left Budapest in the middle of November. Letter of the National Democratic Civic Party to the FE, dated 27 December 1919, OL P 999, box 4, folder 5. OL, P 999, box 4, folder 5. Letter of József Szterényi, dated 8 January 1920 to Mrs Oszkár Szirmay. Minutes of the FE executive, 26 January 1920. OL, P 999, box 2, folder 3. OL P 999, box 24, folder 43. Palasik, ‘A nők a parlamentben’, pp. 231–2. Margit Balogh, ‘Schlachta Margit, a “keresztény feminist”’ [Margit Schlachta, the ‘Christian feminist’], in Margit Balogh and Katalin S. Nagy (eds), Asszonysorsok a 20. században [Women’s lives in the twentieth century] (Budapest: BME Szociológia és Kommunikáció Tanszék, 2000), p. 232. Cécile Tormay, Bujdosó könyv [An Outlaw’s Diary] (Budapest, 1920). MANSz Almananchja az 1920-ik évre (Budapest, 1919).

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81 Paksy, ‘Választások Bethlen módra – 1922’, p. 93. 82 Ibid. 83 Several scholars have studied female suffrage and women’s social standing in Finland. For instance, in the 1960s Aune Innala explored women’s legal status in her study Suomen naisen alkutaival lainsäätäjänä 1907-1917 [The initial stages of women as legislators 1907-1917] (Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä, 1967) and stressed the Anglo-American influence in the early women’s movement in Finland. In the 1980s Riitta Jallinoja used in her book Suomalaisen naisasialiikkeen taistelukaudet [The struggles of the Finnish feminist movement] (Porvoo: WSOY, 1983) a feminist approach emphasizing the woman question in the suffrage movement. Since the 1990s the most thorough research has been conducted by Irma Sulkunen, several of whose books are cited in this article. 84 The required age was twenty-four for both sexes. 85 Of these nineteen women, nine were Social Democrats and ten were bourgeois, representing the Finnish (six) and the Young Finnish (two) parties, the Agrarian League (one) and the Swedish People’s Party (one). 86 Irma Sulkunen, ‘Suffrage, Nation and Citizenship − The Finnish Case in an International Context’, in Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi and Pirjo Markkola (eds), Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 84–5; Irma Sulkunen, ‘Suomi naisten äänioikeuden edelläkävijänä’ [Finland as a pioneer for women’s suffrage], in Irma Sulkunen, Maria Lähteenmäki and Aura Korppi-Tommola (eds), Naiset eduskunnassa [Women in Parliament] (Helsinki: Edita, 2006), p. 39. 87 Both of these associations collaborated with the International Council of Women and sent their representatives to the international conferences – see Minna Hagner, ‘Pioneeriaika 1890-luvulta 1920-luvulle’ [the Time of Pioneers from 1890’s to 1920’s], in Minna Hagner and Teija Försti (eds), Suffragettien sisaret [The Sisters of the Suffragettes] (Helsinki: Unioni Naisasialiitto, 2006), pp. 36–7. 88 Sulkunen, ‘Suomi naisten äänioikeuden edelläkävijänä’, pp. 35–8 and 56–62; Marja Kokko, Sisaret, toverit. Naisten järjestäytyminen, ryhmätietoisuus ja kansalaistuminen Jyväskylässä 1800-luvun lopulta 1930-luvulle [Sisters, Comrades. The organization of women, group consciousness and the culture of citizenship in Jyväskylä from the end of the nineteenth century to 1930s] (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto, 1998), p. 69. 89 Irma Sulkunen, ‘The Mobilisation of Women and the Birth of Civil Society’, in Merja Manninen and Päivi Setälä (eds), The Lady with the Bow: The Story of Finnish Women (Helsinki: Otava, 1990), p. 45; Sulkunen, ‘Suffrage, Nation and Citizenship’, pp. 100–1.

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90 Swedish women’s rights activist Ellen Key (1849−1926) used the concept of social motherhood (samhällsmoderlighet) in her booklets Missbrukad kvinnokraft och naturenliga arbetsområden för kvinnan [Misused woman-power and the natural fields of work for women] and Kvinnopsykologi och kvinnlig logik [Women’s psychology and female logic] in 1896. From Sweden the concept spread to Finland and was received ambiguously. The feminists disapproved of the whole concept of social motherhood whereas the conservative nationalists had similar thoughts on the matter. See Johanna Annola, Äiti, emäntä, virkanainen, vartija. Köyhäintalojen johtajattaret ja yhteiskunnallinen äitiys 1880−1918 [Mother, matron, civil servant, guardian: poorhouse directress and social motherhood in Finland 1880–1918] (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 2011), p. 16. 91 Tiina Lintunen, ‘Women at War’, in Aapo Roselius and Tuomas Tepora (eds), The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 203; Anne Ollila, Suomen kotien päivä valkenee..:Marttajärjestö suomalaisessa yhteiskunnassa vuoteen 1939 [In Finnish homes, a new day dawns …: the Martha Organisation in Finnish society until 1939] (Helsinki: SHS, 1993), pp. 30−1 and 141–3. 92 Kokko, Sisaret, toverit, pp. 72−3. 93 Marjatta Rahikainen, ‘Naiset näkyvät Suomessa tekevän vaikka mitä’ [Women seem to do almost everything in Finland], in Marjatta Rahikainen and Tarja Räisänen (eds), ‘Työllä ei oo kukkaan rikastunna’: Naisten töitä ja toimeentulokeinoja 1800- ja 1900-luvulla [‘No one gets rich by working’: Women’s work and means of livelihood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries] (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2001), p. 29; Sulkunen, ‘Suffrage, Nation and Citizenship’, pp. 100–1. 94 Maria Lähteenmäki, Mahdollisuuksien aika: Työläisnaiset ja yhteiskunnan muutos 1910–30-luvun Suomessa [The time of opportunities: working-class women and the change in Finnish society in the 1910s and 1930s] (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1995), p. 29. 95 Lintunen, ‘Women at War’, pp. 212−22. 96 Officially the title was commissioner, but in actual fact they were acting ministers. 97 Osmo Rinta-Tassi, Kansanvaltuuskunta punaisen Suomen hallituksena [The People’s Delegation as a government of Red Finland] (Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus, 1986), pp. 162 and 172. 98 National Archives (KA), Court for the crimes against the State (VRYO) doc. 8395; Prosecutor Files (VROSYA) Aå 447 Pori, The minutes of the revolutionary Court in Pori on 22 March 1918; Labour Archives (TA), The minutes of the municipal organization of Social Democrats in Pori 1917–26 329.5, Meeting of the Labour Council on 31 January 1918 and Meeting of the Labour Council’s Board on 21 March 1918.

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99 Hilja Pärssinen returned to Finland later and was elected again to parliament in 1929. Hanna Karhinen was executed in Stalin’s purges in 1938. See members of Finnish parliament: https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/kansanedustajat/Sivut/911305. aspx. 100 ‘Mitä luulette’ [What do you think], Suomen Nainen [The Finnish Woman], 1 March 1919. 101 According to Eliza Ablovatski, in Hungary ‘revolution threatened paternal authority over children as well as the authority of husbands over their wives. These perceived threats were terrifying to conservatives’ – see Ablovatski, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest’, in Bucur and Wingfield (eds), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, p. 78. 102 Official Statistics of Finland, SVT XXIX Parliamentary Elections 9. 103 See ‘Naisäänestäjille’ [For women voters], Suomen Nainen, 22 February 1919. 104 Social Democrats achieved ten and bourgeois parties seven of the women’s seats. Maria Lähteenmäki, ‘Naiset tasa-arvoisemman yhteiskunnan puolesta 1907−2003’ [Women for more equal society 1907−2003], in Irma Sulkunen, Maria Lähteenmäki and Aura Korppi-Tommola, Naiset eduskunnassa [Women in Parliament] (Helsinki: Edita, 2006), p. 111. 105 Apart from this, women were qualified for civil service office after the law reform in 1926 – see ibid., pp. 119−20. 106 Hagner, ‘Pioneeriaika 1890-luvulta 1920-luvulle’, p. 93. 107 Biographical entries about Schwimmer can be found by Martin D. Dubin, ‘Schwimmer, Rosika’, in Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James and Paul S. Boyer (eds), Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 5 Vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. iii, pp. 246–9; Edith Wynner, ‘Schwimmer, Rosika’, in John A. Garraty (ed.), Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement, 10 Vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), vol. iv, pp. 724–8; Gayle J. Hardy, American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825–1992 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1993), pp. 338–41; Susan Zimmermann and Borbála Major, ‘Schwimmer, Róza’, in Francisca De Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006), pp. 484–9. 108 The women delegations initiated by Schwimmer at the International Women’s Congress at The Hague in 1915, ironically, were received by statesmen and ministers in Europe during the war, precisely because they were perceived as apolitical, due to their sex (and it is safe to assume that male peace envoys could not have attained audiences that easily and prolifically, because of their assigned political status).

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109 This also relates to Tiina Litunen’s observations earlier in this chapter about preindustrial societies in Finland, with women’s ‘naturalised’, not politicized positions (as maternal keepers of the hearth and home) being approved by patriarchy. 110 Schwimmer to Mrs M. H. Illingworth, 18 August 1914, Rosika Schwimmer Papers (henceforth RSP). Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Box 41. 111 See, for example, Esther Breitenbach and Pat Thane (eds), Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (London and New York: Continuum, 2010) and Gottlieb and Toye (eds), The Aftermath of Suffrage. Generally, the enfranchisement of women has to be seen within contexts of geopolitical strategizing of (especially young or fragile) territories or nations. Women as helpers (sometimes ‘civilising agents’) against a wilderness that is meant to be conquered, as in the case of Wyoming, New Zealand or Australia, for instance, or for national empowerment against external aggressors, such as in Finland against Russia. 112 Schwimmer to Fräulein Reuter, 9 June 1912, RSP, Box 29. [Translated from the German by Dagmar Wernitznig.] 113 On nationalism transcending class and gender, see, for instance, Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (London: Granta, 1997), p. 229. Ehrenreich also specifically refers to the British suffragettes, whose immediate shift to patriotism during the war helped to rehabilitate their public reputation as patriots. Generally, studies on nationalism tend not to factor in the component ‘gender’ – see, for instance, E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Nonetheless, there are some exceptions, such as Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Religion, Class and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000). 114 See also Dagmar Wernitznig, ‘Out of her Time? Rosika Schwimmer’s Transnational Activism after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). 115 Offen, European Feminisms, p. 257.

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Internationalism, Pacifism, Transnationalism: Women’s Movements and the Building of a Sustainable Peace in the Post-War World Ingrid Sharp with Judit Acsády (on Hungary) and Nikolai Vukov (on Bulgaria)*

Before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, internationalism and pacifism had functioned as unifying ideals within the principal international women’s organizations: the International Council of Women (ICW, founded in 1888) and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA, founded in 1904). This was founded on a shared commitment to international sisterhood based on ideas about women’s nurturing qualities that made them naturally opposed to violence, and their common interests as women that transcended cultural, classbased or racial differences. The project of the two main international organizations involved working together across national boundaries to improve the situation of women, and in the case of the IWSA to achieve female suffrage within the national contexts of member states. The connection between suffrage, internationalism and pacifism was made explicit at the IWSA Budapest Congress in 1913, and women’s natural affinity with peace and the interconnectedness of the international community of women was accepted unchallenged. The community created by the members of these international women’s organizations was a virtual one, yet the personal interactions, such as the biennial IWSA Congress, the travel and lecture tours taken by individuals as well as other meetings abroad, played a significant role in developing strong feelings of friendship and solidarity among the individuals.1 Informal correspondence among members across borders and formal circulars

* Ingrid Sharp, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, UK; Judit Acsády, Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest; Nikolai Vukov, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.

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and newsletters distributed among the national affiliates and local groups also played a key role in formulating and strengthening the political values shared by this community. The shared values contributed to the construction of a common identity and coherence within these movements between the formal organizations.2 Internationalism within women’s organizations fits in with trends identified by Australian historian Glenda Sluga in her 2012 study, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. Sluga notes that internationalist thought was a key strand in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinking, fostered by developments in communication and trade and the exchange of ideas and cultures.3 This was reflected in a large number of associations and organizations founded to promote a greater international connection and co-operation. Sluga outlines the different and competing forms of internationalism that found expression during the pre-war period: for some, the aim was structural, with an international court implementing international laws; for others it was economic, seeking more effective trade through the removal of national barriers and the harmonizing of transport and tariffs. A major element in internationalism was a belief in the possibility of world peace, accompanied by visions of a world community or brotherhood. For some, this had psychological or religious underpinnings with visions of a divided humanity yearning for togetherness. Some groups and individuals viewed internationalism as compatible with nationalism and the civilizing mission of imperialism, while others saw internationalism as an evolutionary advance that would in time supersede the nation state. Those committed to internationalism were often part of an urban intellectual and cultural elite and were sometimes viewed with suspicion in their own nations, accused of cosmopolitanism (often a code for Jewishness) and a lack of rootedness in their own cultural soil. These ideas surrounding internationalism and its relationship with nationalism are also found within the women’s movement before the war, but in a rather vague and unexamined form that was open to criticism within the movement. In 1900, leading German feminist Helene Lange had expressed her discomfort with the ‘superficiality’ and the ‘empty phrases’ of international meetings, stating robustly that ‘trees need their own soil to take root in: only parasites can eke out their short-lived existence on alien organisms’.4 It was the pressures of the war that lent urgency to the women’s internationalist project, on the one hand these pressures forced the development of concrete proposals for international co-operation, but they also found expression in terms of an ‘imagined community’5 of internationally minded women.

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Internationalism took on a new urgency because it was seen as the only way of stopping the war and building a sustainable peace in the post-war world. The outbreak of the First World War forced women in belligerent nations to examine their ideas and commitment to internationalism in light of a pressure to display their allegiance to a nation under threat and engage in the nationalist project through patriotic war service. In fact, only a small minority of women within the suffrage movement remained committed to ideals of internationalism and pacifism, with the majority of suffragists identifying strongly with their own nation and keen to demonstrate patriotism and fitness for citizenship. International organizations generally sought to suspend contacts until after the war and to do their duty within their own national context, with the maintenance of sisterhood across enemy lines seen as problematic in the context of war. Those women who did retain their commitment to internationalism opposed the war and wanted to use the existing international networks to work for peace. Given the response of the majority of women within the organizations, it was no longer credible to simply state that women had a natural affinity for peace due to their nurturing roles or maternal natures and the linked ideas of internationalism, pacifism and suffrage had to be further examined and set within a framework that clarified women’s connection with war and peace. The different responses to the war caused a rift within national as well as international women’s organizations that was especially highlighted by the negative publicity associated with the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915. This congress was called by members of the IWSA but held without their support. It was organized by a committee of women including representatives from warring nations, and brought together over 1,000 women6 from belligerent and neutral nations to debate the causes of war, suggest ways of bringing it to an end and create conditions under which future wars would be less likely. This congress of women, which has been widely discussed in feminist and women’s histories,7 was represented in the majority of mainstream press coverage and some of the feminist press as both naive and irresponsible, as ridiculous and inappropriate behaviour by women with no understanding of international affairs and as a treasonous betrayal of the fighting men of the women’s own nations.8 Because the women at The Hague saw the war as the result of male politics that excluded women’s influence, they regarded gender equity and especially the enfranchisement of women as a cornerstone of the conditions necessary to create and preserve peace, and this opened them to accusations of pursuing their own selfish goals while men suffered and died for their sakes. Unsurprisingly,

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the women engaged in patriotic war work were keen to distance themselves from the event and to point out that the official women’s organizations were not represented at The Hague. Internationalism, pacifism and suffrage had become so toxic under the prevailing wartime conditions of heightened nationalism that the mainstream women’s organizations could not afford to be associated with them, and they offered no encouragement to the branches of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (later to be renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, WILPF) that sprang up in most belligerent nations in the wake of the Hague Congress.9 One exception to this was the progressive Hungarian women’s organization, the Association of Feminists (Feministák Egyesülete or FE), formed in Budapest in 1904. This body managed to remain true to pacifist ideas while also engaging in patriotic war work in support of the Hungarian war effort.10 This chapter will look at the restoration of the ‘imagined communities’ within the three major international women’s organizations in the aftermath of the war, considering how such organizations and their national members, especially those in defeated nations, overcame the very considerable barriers to co-operation; how the ideals of internationalism had been challenged and modified by the experience of war and revolution; and how the achievement in some nations of female suffrage, one of the major unifying goals of the pre-war women’s movement, impacted on approaches to international activism. Taking the cases of three defeated nations, Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria, it will examine postwar attitudes to reconciliation within the national women’s organizations, their motivations for seeking inclusion in the international organizations and the strong forces that had to be overcome in order for them to do so. While women’s war experience and the response of organized women to the war and its aftermath have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention since the rise of women’s and gender history in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this has focused on the experiences of women in the United States and/or in Britain, France and Germany (‘the big three’11), so that a gender perspective on the experiences of Eastern and Central European nations is only recently beginning to emerge.12 The extent to which the women’s organizations in these nations were able and willing to restore and maintain their international connections, and the ways in which international influence was negotiated and used, were clearly shaped by the post-war national context. Women’s organizations in Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria were operating in circumstances that were widely perceived as national catastrophes, and this had a major effect on their response and the scope for action they enjoyed.

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Barriers to internationalism in the aftermath of war After the armistices of autumn 1918 had apparently brought the war to an end, the major international women’s organizations, the IWSA, the ICW and WILPF,13 were highly committed to post-conflict reconciliation and a swift restoration of international relations between the organized women in combatant nations, seeing this as an essential step towards creating conditions for a sustainable peace. However, the problems that worked against post-war co-operation between former enemy nations affected the women activists just as much as they did the rest of the population, and despite public rhetoric that suggested that women were able to overcome the divisions of war more easily than men, the restoration of these international imagined communities was by no means straightforward. Women in the defeated nations were isolated from the international community in a number of ways by external and internal factors. First, bitterness over the wrongs perpetrated by the armies of invasion and occupation were directed against the women of the aggressor nations, for example for their failure to speak out against atrocities committed against French, Belgian and Serbian women. Even in the pacifist WILPF, formed in 1915, whose members had condemned the war from the outset and had resisted nationalistic rhetoric in favour of a discourse of shared suffering, divisions between Belgian and French members and their German counterparts were persistent and difficult to overcome.14 In the case of nationally minded organizations, such as the Federation of Women’s Organisations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF) in Germany, their publicly articulated wartime support for the national cause continued to be a source of bitterness and hostility for French feminists, even though these had also backed their own nation’s war effort. Even where this continued mistrust and hostility could be overcome within the women’s organizations themselves, the broader context in victorious nations remained hostile to all representatives of defeated nations, but especially Germans, without distinction of gender, making attendance at international conferences an uncomfortable affair as late as 1924. Secondly, women in the defeated nations were affected by restrictions and sanctions that continued well beyond the armistice; by the collapse of the Habsburg, Tsarist and Ottoman empires and the redrawing of national borders throughout Europe; and by highly volatile national contexts that could hardly be described as states of peace. In all three nations under consideration here, the armistices of 1918 did not bring an end to the war – Allied sanctions continued to prevent foodstuffs and raw materials from reaching former enemy nations until the signing of their respective peace treaties: at Versailles in June 1919

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(for Germany), at Saint Germain-en-Laye in September 1919 (for Austria), at Neuilly-sur-Seine in November 1919 (for Bulgaria) and at Trianon in June 1920 (for Hungary). In all cases, the terms of the treaties were perceived by the populations to be devastatingly harsh, involving the loss of territories, population, military standing and prestige as well as the payment of reparations and the acceptance of responsibility for a war of aggression. The response of large sections of the population to these punitive treaties was a rise in nationalism and a continuation of the mindsets of war that made a return to peacetime values impossible and significantly hampered the restoration of relationships within the international women’s organizations as well. In all three nations, the end of the war brought political polarization and revolutionary unrest, continued violence both internally and externally and an economic collapse that left states unable to cope with widespread social needs, including those of displaced populations and war victims, for example the ‘hundreds of thousands of refugees from the territories of old Hungary’.15 While in Bulgaria, it was the Agrarian Party that was to carry the burden of the dramatic post-war situation, in Hungary and Germany it was initially the left-leaning, would-be liberal democracies that had to cope with the enormous economic and political instability of the immediate post-war period. In particular, they had to resist the rise of nationalistic, revanchist groups on the one hand and the increased support for Soviet-style revolution on the other. This period, during which the majority of Central and East European women also gained the right to vote, was characterized by increased political activism by women of all political convictions, particularly on the extreme left and right of the political spectrum. The liberal, middle-class women’s movement often found itself squeezed between these two hostile factions and forced into a defensive position. In Hungary in particular, where the ‘Red’ regime of Béla Kun was superseded by the ‘White’ regime of Admiral Horthy, the pre-war feminist organizations all but vanished from the scene as the trope of the sexually and politically promiscuous ‘Red’ women was opposed to that of the  pure, ‘White’ women committed to conservative values and the causes of the nation, who respectively symbolized the greatest threat to and highest guardian of true Hungarian values.16 In all three nations, the dominance of the progressive middle-class groups was challenged in the post-war environment by the rise of left-wing, socialist women’s groups or by right-wing nationalists – or indeed both. In all three countries, particularly in Hungary and Germany, there was a rise to political prominence of powerful right-wing women’s groups that

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preached the return to traditional family and religious values and a pre-war gender role division that placed women’s interests in the domestic sphere and restricted women’s political influence to areas of specifically female concern: in fact, according to US historian Karen Offen, ‘all further feminist campaigns’ had to be conducted ‘in the shadow of renewed, loud, insistent, and repetitive rearticulations of women’s obligations and role’.17 These rightwing women were also strongly nationalistic and objected to engagement on friendly terms with international organizations – except when it suited their own nationalist agendas, for instance in campaigns for treaty revision. Suffrage was granted to Hungarian and German women, although Bulgarian women had to wait until 1938 for the partial enfranchisement of married or divorced women and of widows. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, enfranchisement did not always bring feminists into positions of influence. In Germany, for instance, the women elected to parliament were mainly not those who had campaigned most energetically for suffrage before the war, although the socialist women of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) or Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which had included women’s suffrage in its programme since 1891, were well represented. The internationalist pacifists who had campaigned for peace before and during the war were not represented at all in mainstream politics. This meant that at national level the strongest internationalist voices in the progressive, liberal women’s movement were marginalized, although socialist women did have a voice through their respective parties. In Hungary, too, women were granted suffrage under a democratic regime, but by the time of the first elections in April 1919 those who had campaigned for the vote had already been marginalized and were unable to exercise their rights. By 1922, the vote was subject to new restrictions limiting the scope of women’s franchise. In Bulgaria, an important step was made in 1921 when the women’s organizations started to speak openly about ‘equal rights’ in the sphere of suffrage, instead of the previous formulation of the ‘improvement’ of voting rights. Still, in practice, the introduction of voting rights for some of the women appeared in legislation only in 1938 and the granting of voting rights on an ‘equal’ basis, in other words regardless of women’s marital status, came into force only after the Second World War, in 1947. Maintaining international contacts was highly problematic for women’s organizations in all three nations. A notorious example was the refusal of the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior to send Ekaterina Karavelova (deputy leader of the Women’s Union) to the executive meeting of the ICW in The Hague in

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1922, on the grounds that the delegate could not be a prominent political figure. In Germany, the right-wing groups sometimes felt that they could make use of the international organizations to air their own national grievances, which caused great embarrassment to the internationalists. In some cases, German women successfully mobilized international public opinion along racial and nationalistic lines, as in the case of the occupation of the Rhine by French colonial troops, using racial assumptions to deploy the trope of unprotected white women becoming subject to the bestial lusts of primitive races.18 Even where permissions may have been possible, finances did not allow for the cost of travel. In nations suffering post-war hyperinflation such as Germany, Austria and Bulgaria, the cost of correspondence and subscriptions to journals was very difficult to raise. British and American women meeting their Central and East European counterparts for the first time after 1918 were often struck by the physical changes they had undergone as a result of years of deprivation and malnutrition.19 Despite the many broad commonalities between the three nations, there are also significant differences which affected the return to international women’s organizations in different ways, and these will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent sections.

Bulgaria Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers in October 1915 already severely weakened by the ‘first national catastrophe’ of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Involvement in the First World War was supposed to restore lost territory but in the end it led to further devastating losses and the almost complete collapse of the economic system. Prior to the war, Bulgarian women had begun to organize along the lines of Western-dominated international organizations such as the ICW and IWSA, which they joined in 1908. By 1914 they were campaigning for greater opportunities for women in education and the professions, and some groups had also begun to demand equal political rights for women. The Bulgarian Women’s Union (Bulgarski zhenski sayuz) – an umbrella organization representing all of the women’s associations across the country – had been founded in 1901. Although female suffrage was not promoted as a central point in the Union’s programme (due to political considerations and the strong emphasis which many of the traditional associations placed on

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charity and education),20 it increasingly cropped up in discussions and became the cause of a number of splits and divisions between ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’. In addition, the Socialist Women’s Association wanted to align the Union with the ‘class struggle’ and made a strong bid to impose this policy at the 1903 Congress.21 When their efforts failed, they left the Union to form the Socialist Women’s Union in 1914, which argued that working-class women would obtain political equality only by joining forces with men in the struggle for proletarian liberation against the exploiting capitalist class. After the departure of the socialists, the Women’s Union put itself forward as an organization which stood ‘above party’ and ‘above class’. Despite ongoing internal divisions, the Union followed a policy of demanding complete civil and political equality for women. In 1908 it became a member of both the ICW and the Alliance. The same year, a separate feminist association (Ravnopravie or ‘Equal Rights’), with educational and suffragist aims, came into being. With the approach of the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and the First World War (1915–18) the issue of women’s suffrage was pushed to one side by more pressing questions. The short period between the Balkan Wars and the First World War was also marked by a sharp rise in the activities of women Social Democrats,22 who organized mass anti-war demonstrations which at the same time were also an affirmation of women’s social and political rights.23 Women had taken on more public roles during the war and had stepped in to fill the gaps left by the absence of men. As Bulgaria had suffered huge losses and POWs were retained in captivity for a long time after the armistice women played a key role in national reconstruction, while the collapse of state structures meant that women’s organizations were required to address the pressing social needs of the population. By the time the government agreed to an armistice on 29 September 1918, some 101,000 soldiers had lost their lives, around 153,000 had been wounded and 27,000 were missing. A further 50,000 had fallen victim to epidemics, and 112,000 soldiers were about to become prisoners of war under the Salonica Agreement. The Bulgarian army was forced to surrender substantial territories along all the boundaries of the pre-1915 state and the goal of the national unification of all Bulgarians, which had been one of the major motives for participating in the war, now clearly had to be abandoned. Feminist goals were set aside in favour of relief and charity work aimed at supporting the most vulnerable, including the Bulgarian refugees displaced from the lost territories. Women’s organizations also played a vital role in commemorating the dead and creating cultures of memory and

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mourning that could accommodate the absence of bodies for burial and the fact that graves, where they existed, lay outside the redrawn boundaries of Bulgaria. This indeed was a European-wide issue, one that was not confined to defeated nations.24 Post-war Bulgaria was anything but a peaceful society – an uprising of soldiers and workers in 1918 had been brutally suppressed by government forces and the post-war government was repressive in character. The sharp polarization in the political spectrum and the bitter accusations between political parties later found expression in the authoritarian rule of the Agrarian Union (1920–23) and the coup against their leader Alexander Stambolijski in June 1923, the communist-led September 1923 uprising and its violent suppression, the ‘Sveta Nedelya’ terrorist act (organized again by the Bulgarian Communist Party, or BCP) and the White Terror that drowned the country in new waves of violence in the spring of 1925. The tense divisions between left- and right-wing parties were reflected in the women’s movement too. The pre-war alignment of Bulgarian women’s organizations with progressive international feminist goals was disrupted and the rise in importance of socialist women’s groups led to the claims to represent Bulgarian women made by liberal, progressive feminists being challenged. Socialist women attacked ‘bourgeois’ women’s organizations and were hostile to their priorities – relief and charity work.25 One of the most striking demonstrations of this was the series of actions that the Socialist Women’s Union held against the ‘Day of the Roses’, a national holiday that was scheduled for 29 June 1915 on which members of the associations which made up the Women’s Union would sell artificial roses with an appeal to citizens to support the battle against tuberculosis. Socialist women declared themselves against the holiday, and on the day before it was due to take place, they organized public protest meetings and carried out wide-reaching propaganda to prevent the event. The day was denounced as a ‘swindle’ and as an ‘annual carnival’ of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose was to conceal the link between tuberculosis and poverty among the working-class population. In the end, the activities carried out by socialist women prevented the holding of the holiday and it was postponed until a later date.26 This lack of co-operation between socialist women’s groups and the Women’s Union was to continue during the post-war period, when politics became increasingly polarized. Despite the hostile environment and the pressing need at home that took up much of their time and energy, the Bulgarian Women’s Union did work hard to overcome national isolation by maintaining and strengthening its international links, expressed particularly after the creation of the Bulgarian branch of WILPF

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(the International Women’s Committee for Permanent Peace ‘Traen mir’) in 1918.27 After the signing of the disastrous Treaty of Neuilly on 27 November 1919 – under which the country had to pay enormous reparations, limit its army to 20,000 men only and accept the forcible resettlement of hundreds of thousands of its co-nationals from territories now incorporated into neighbouring states – the Union played a vital role in the appeals made to the international community against the redrawing of national boundaries, the loss of territories with a majority Bulgarian population, the mass displacement of Bulgarian refugees and the delayed repatriation of thousands of prisoners of war. Particularly famous was the letter sent by the members of WILPF’s Bulgarian branch, who sent an ‘Appeal for Justice’ to US president Woodrow Wilson, seeking his support for taking Bulgaria out of its post-war international isolation and for a just solution to the burdens imposed on the country by the Treaty of Neuilly. A protest letter on behalf of the Bulgarian Women’s Union written by Ekaterina Karavelova to highlight the plight of Bulgarian women under the terms of the peace was also sent to women’s groups abroad, searching for international sympathy and support.28 Union activists such as Ekaterina Karavelova, Zheni Bozhilova-Pateva, Lidiya Shishmanova, Vassilka Kerteva and Dimitrana Ivanova also took an active part

Figure 5  Bulgarian women’s rights activist Ekaterina Karavelova, pictured in March 1934. Reproduced courtesy of the National Literary Museum, Sofia, Bulgaria, 449/80.

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in international congresses in the name of peace and reconciliation. One of the main activists of the Union, Pateva, had been a delegate at the International Women’s Congress in The Hague in 1915, where she expressed her ‘disgust at the human slaughter, the insane ruining of the lives of millions of human beings’.29 In August 1918 she addressed the Military Club in Sofia in similar terms, protesting against the war and appealing for peace. Following a series of papers and speeches about disarmament, Pateva initiated the creation of the Bulgarian branch of WILPF in 1919. In 1920 she was an official representative of the government of Alexander Stambolijski in Norway where she delivered a paper to the ICW, and two years later, in 1922, she was a Bulgarian government delegate at the executive committee meeting of the ICW at The Hague. Here, she spoke out against violence in all its forms, proclaiming that ‘there are no victors and vanquished; there are only shared sins – nation-sinners, which have to forgive each other’.30 Pateva believed that one of the major causes of war was to be found in the human soul and she wished to overcome the hatred and disharmony among peoples and nations through ‘shared co-operation along the path towards spiritual culture, the culture of love, brotherhood and freedom’.31 ‘We are for abolishing reparations, full disarmament, opening of the borders and free communication between people.’32 Pateva took part in several other events organized by the international women’s movement – in Dublin and Rome (1923), Geneva (1929), Belgrade and Lyon (1931), Paris (1937) and Rotterdam (1939 and 1940). In 1926 she founded the Women’s Peace Society in Bulgaria. In her activity she promoted new ideas of justice and solidarity among all people and nations, the establishment of new individual and social relations based on humanity and ethical principles and the introduction of social and political reforms in all countries. In the 1930s, she supported the idea of creating a United States of Europe and proposed also the creation of a Federation of the Balkan states. Due to her long-term journalistic activity and her significant international work, in 1931 Pateva was named an ‘honorary member of the International Trade Union of the Democratic Writers’ in France. Karavelova represented the Union at the Fourth Congress of WILPF in Washington DC in 1924 and at the Fifth Congress in Dublin in 1926. During her visit to the United States, she was involved in lectures and agitation for peace in the two Pax Special trains from Washington to Chicago and from Chicago to Montreal, as well as taking part in the two-week International Women’s School in Chicago. After the Congress in Dublin in 1928, she played an active part in WILPF’s summer school in Glan, Switzerland, as well as participating in the creation of the Bulgarian–Romanian association in Bucharest in 1932. In 1925

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she was elected as the head of the Bulgarian section of WILPF and participated as its representative in the Committee of the Associations for the League of Nations, being also a deputy leader of the Bulgarian branch of the ‘Panevropa’ Union. On each of these occasions, she presented the Bulgarian cause in the strongest terms and insisted on joint measures for the revision of the Paris peace treaties, the abolishment of the unbearable reparations and a milder treatment of the defeated nations.33 In Washington, at the opening of WILPF’s Congress on 1 May 1924, she stated, ‘I plead for justice, that is to say – worldwide peace. Because we still do not have it. It exists in the books of the peace treaties, but not in reality.’ And she finished her speech by saying: ‘Bulgaria always believed wholeheartedly in the nice words and promises of the Allies. Today it is crushed with bitter disappointment and doubts …, and I ask you to listen to its desperate voice: “Give us back the faith, oh, noble women of great and powerful America, and you – representatives of all countries, gather all your efforts and help annul this humiliating doubt of ours in civilization, justice and humanity!”’34 Here she also declared that ‘our ideal is not peace, which is signed by governments that do not know the actual interests of people, but peace of true democracy’.35 These statements go to the heart of Karavelova’s key aim – to overcome the rift between the rhetoric of peace and its practical implementation, and this was at the core of her criticisms of Bulgarian as well as international politics: ‘The peace treaties did not bring the desired peace, but disturbances on earth. The ideal of just peace underwent a crash, because the peace treaties created new chains of slavery for 40 millions of minorities.’36 They were in line with the overall disappointment of WILPF members with the conditions of the post-war peace, emphasizing also the humiliating conditions of the defeated nations and the disastrous situation for minorities and refugees – all of them painful themes for the Bulgarian people too. Karavelova’s reports on Bulgaria’s pitiful situation attracted the attention of the women’s international community and several delegates from WILPF Headquarters visited the country in the 1920s to check the situation of minorities and refugees. Following Karavelova’s speech in Washington, the delegates made a decision to gather the selected Eastern Committee (including delegates from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania) in Belgrade in October 1924, and to visit Bulgaria and Macedonia afterwards, with the purpose of learning more about the situations of minorities.37 On the basis of these visits, some of the delegates insisted on the inclusion of special clauses on Bulgarian refugees in the League of Nations’ resolutions on minorities.38 This shows that the international community of women did respond with sympathy

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and a willingness to intervene on their behalf. Although appeals for a revision of the Treaty of Neuilly had little effect, Bulgaria gained some sympathy as a defeated nation which had been treated too harshly by the peacemakers in 1919, and this helped to overcome the international isolation which the country had faced in the early post-war years. Cross-border contacts were vital to Bulgarian women as a way of overcoming international isolation and as a way of publicizing their desperate situation, and the activities of Pateva and Karavelova on behalf of the Bulgarian Women’s Union are representative of the trend of advocating the nation’s cause across the world and in the name of international peace. As with the other nations under consideration in this chapter, the union was squeezed between the activities of the socialist/communist women who emphasized the international class struggle and the right-wing women’s groups, which did not aim for peaceful reconciliation but rather for renewed militarization in defence of the ‘wronged’ nation. The union was able to continue with its internationalist position until the shift to the right in national politics in the late 1930s, followed by the left-wing takeover after 1944, made this impossible.

Germany In Germany, the war was brought to an end by a left-inspired revolution led by mutinous sailors and other members of the armed forces, who set off for home, spreading resistance on the way. As the chapter by Matthew Stibbe, Olga Shnyrova and Veronika Helfert in this volumes outlines, the German Revolution of 1918–19 has been gendered male by the majority of historians, despite the involvement of women both in the uprising itself and the political structures it brought about. Key revolutionary elements affecting women’s organizations were the repeal of censorship laws, which allowed news of peace activism, including feminist pacifism, to reach the German public, and the introduction of universal suffrage to all men and women over the age of twenty, which enabled women to stand for election and vote for their representatives in January 1919. As a result of the revolution, the Kaiser was forced to abdicate and imperial rule was replaced with participatory democracy, allowing the interim government to sue for peace and the armistice to begin on 11 November 1918.39 The new Republic was a compromise between the parliamentary democracy favoured by the MSPD (Majority Social Democrats), who had supported the war, and Sovietstyle Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Räte) favoured by the left-wing elements

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of the USPD (Independent Socialists), who had broken away from the SPD in 1917 due to their opposition to the war. Even with the achievement of suffrage, which had been one of the major goals of the movement, German women’s groups were operating within the context of political and economic crises and the continuation of wartime mentalities that dominated Germany in the aftermath of the lost war. A major trauma that cemented this continued mindset was the Versailles Peace Treaty, presented to the Germans on 7 May and signed on 28 June 1919. The public outrage over the harsh terms of the treaty, which demanded that Germany and its allies accept sole responsibility for starting the war and that they pay huge reparations was shared by women’s leaders such as Gertrud Bäumer and Helene Lange of the BDF. In June 1919, Lange echoed the mood of the public in exhorting the German government not to sign the shameful Versailles Peace Treaty and to take the consequences, preferring ‘rape to surrender’40 and setting Germany’s moral resistance against the hatred and vindictiveness of their enemies. Similar protests by women occurred in Bulgaria, who joined the public outrage by issuing declarations against the Treaty of Neuilly and initiating protest letters to European governments and international organizations to counter its humiliating clauses. The particular situation in Germany in 1918–23 – defeated, demoralized, bankrupt, desperately unstable and with galloping inflation making a mockery of traditional German values of thrift, caution and hard work – was experienced as a crisis even deeper and potentially more destructive than the wartime struggle itself.41 In this context, BDF women felt that their overriding priority was once again to offer support to their beleaguered nation, this time by deploying women’s gift for creating consensus against the inner division and ‘moral collapse’ that threatened its survival as a nation.42 During the war, the BDF had solidly supported the government’s mobilization policies, with only a small minority opposing the war and refusing to engage in patriotic war work. Because the values of feminism and pacifism were so unpopular in wartime Germany, the BDF had been forced to distance itself very publicly from the peace efforts of The Hague Congress, which led to a rift within the German women’s movement and proved afterwards to be a barrier to reconciliation.43 Post-war, Bäumer’s patriotic pronouncements were held against her both at home and abroad and she was obliged to defend her wartime record against charges of nationalism on the one hand and insufficient patriotism on the other.44 While the radical pacifists and founding WILPF members Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg presented their

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re-engagement with international work as relatively unproblematic, Bäumer’s return to internationalism was a slower and more painful affair.45 Beyond an appeal to women in victorious nations to use their influence to end the blockade that prevented food from reaching a starving German population, Bäumer did not set out to restore international links in the immediate aftermath of war.46 When former ICW president May Wright Sewall wrote in a personal letter to the BDF in April 1919 that ‘for our ICW there has been no war. … All of our councils are allied; each equally with all the others,’47 she was completely at odds with the German women’s perception of the hostilities that continued to a greater or lesser extent throughout the early 1920s, not least as a result of the Allies’ occupation of the Rhineland from 1920 and the Franco-Belgian invasion of the Ruhr in 1923. A precondition for taking up active membership of the ICW was peace, but as Helene Lange expressed it in 1920, ‘for us there is not yet peace’.48 In 1920 Bäumer described the ICW as ‘powerless and insubstantial’49 and wondered how the women’s movement would ever ‘find its way back to one another after all that had happened’.50 Bäumer’s writings in 1918–20 show that she shared the antipathy towards the victorious nations that dominated public discourse in Germany. In her article in Die Frau of December 1918, she described the armistice conditions as ‘an expression of a simple desire to destroy’ and as embodying ‘the principle of violence in the most naked brutality imaginable’.51 She showed her commitment to preserving a nationalist sense of the meaning of the war, describing it as having been conducted with honour and having awakened the ‘most noble moral powers’ in the German people.52 Her writings at this time reflect a sceptical, even hostile attitude to internationalism. She uses language that suggests a continuation of the war mentality and an explicit rejection of the humiliating terms of the ‘peace’. In November 1918, the BDF published a declaration in the German press opposing the armistice and those who signed it, stating that German women ‘can have no faith in a “just peace” whose first condition is to expect the German nation to place its internal affairs under the control of external forces’ and that rather than accept such dishonourable terms, ‘women, too, would be prepared to lend their strength to a struggle for survival to the bitter end’.53 Bäumer’s Home Diary entry for 10 November 1918 records her response to the armistice negotiations as being ‘like a blow with a cudgel’54 and its conditions as leaving her feeling crushed and fearful.55 On 7 May 1919, when the terms of the peace treaty were made known, her response was sorrow and anger mixed with a sense of profound shame.56 Bäumer’s first speech in the national assembly in February 1919 issued a challenge to the international women’s movement

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to speak out openly against the injustice of the armistice conditions and the continued blockade or German women would not co-operate in working to heal the wounds of war.57 This was echoed in Helene Lange’s statement of August 1920 that ‘the women of our enemies should know that it will not be so easy to build a bridge over the monstrous injustice of this peace’.58 The BDF was a member organization of the ICW and German suffrage organizations were members of the IWSA, yet both congresses in 1920 took place without official delegations of German women. In June 1920, the IWSA met in Geneva, bringing together women from both sides of the conflict for the first time since the war. Leading BDF member and suffragist Marie Stritt was present, not as the leader of the Reichsverband für Frauenstimmrecht (Reich Association for Female Suffrage), but as a government representative. Annika Wilmers has shown that the Congress was not welcomed by Belgian or French organizations, who insisted on an official statement from the BDF condemning the German occupation and especially the deportation of Belgian and French women as a condition of attendance.59 In the end, Belgian women stayed away, and condemned their French sisters for being ‘strangely forgetful of the terrible reality’.60 Despite the positive and conciliatory congress report claiming that ‘from the first day until the last, not a sign or mark of ill-feeling or enmity was to be found’, it is clear that relations between women from former enemy nations were still extremely raw and that German women more than those of the other Central Powers were held responsible for their nation’s military policies.61 Despite apparent urging by the German government,62 Bäumer refused to attend the ICW’s first meeting in Oslo (Kristiania) in September 1920 until the ICW agreed to condemn Germany’s exclusion from the League of Nations.63 Private correspondence shows that this principled public stand was reinforced by Bäumer’s sense that the women of victorious nations would not treat German women as equals.64 For Bäumer, the achievement of women’s suffrage had brought with it a greater obligation to national politics,65 a new context in which the terms of the Treaty of Versailles could not be swept under the carpet by the women’s organizations: Anyone who wants a renewal of relations between peoples in the spirit of real inner and outward solidarity of nations, cannot ignore the injustice, the senselessness of Versailles. While that stands it is an eternal obstacle to anything new that could emerge.66

In 1922, Bäumer did attend the executive meeting of the ICW at The Hague, and noted in her report for Die Frau that the German delegation had been met by a

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genuine desire to work with German women as equals.67 For Bäumer, the shared fate of women, particularly those who had experienced the war as belligerents, was ‘unifying in a very profound sense’ and she was able to recognize the ‘moral strength’ of the international community of women68 and envisage a future in which it would ‘become more and more a force that will influence and shape the world’.69 By July 1926 – with German entry into the League of Nations now on the horizon – Bäumer was ready to address the Alliance’s Congress in Paris in conciliatory terms, declaring that ‘the ideal of rebuilding nations in the spirit of trust is worth living and even dying for’.70 Internationalism was a highly contentious concept in post-war Germany and was liable to stir up and cement internal divisions within women’s organizations. In particular, the rise of a powerful and vocal right-wing nationalist women’s movement committed to maintaining the mindsets of war complicated the return to international relations. Christiane Streubel describes the founding of the Ring of Nationalist Women (Ring Nationaler Frauen) in January 1920 as a direct challenge to the BDF’s supremacy.71 As the most prominent leader of the BDF, Bäumer found herself under attack in the press and was forced to defend her wartime record against accusations of a commitment to internationalism characterized as ‘alien to German nature (volksfremd)’.72 That the Alliance’s Silver Jubilee Congress was held in Berlin in 1929 illustrates the extent to which German women had been reintegrated into the international organizations by the end of the 1920s. The Congress took place with the support of both the German government and the co-operation of the German WILPF members, and was generally well received by the German press. It ended with a public demonstration reflecting women’s continued commitment to peace at which Bäumer’s speech summed up her conviction that harmony in international relations depended on a ‘mutual respect for other nations’ right to existence’.73 Only the extreme right-wing women of the Ring disrupted proceedings with counter-demonstrations drawing attention to the bitterness of Versailles, an ominous prefiguring of the problems to come as the German political landscape turned to the right in the 1930s, culminating in the fascist dictatorship of the NSDAP after 1933. For the German women of WILPF, a return to internationalism should have been far more straightforward. After all, these women had embraced internationalism during the war, had prioritized international solidarity over loyalty to their nation at war and had suffered isolation and persecution as a result.74 Although pacifists remained a minority within the German women’s movement and their activities were highly circumscribed, several branches of

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the League had been formed, often using existing suffrage groups as a basis.75 Yet even within WILPF, restoring relations between the German women and their French and Belgian counterparts once hostilities were over was fraught with difficulty. In Belgium in particular, anti-German feeling remained strong throughout the 1920s and it was for this reason that it took until 1923 for a Belgian branch of WILPF to be set up. Belgian women did attend the WILPF conferences at Zurich in 1919 and Geneva in 1921 as visitors, but they shied away from publicity for fear of hostile reactions at home. Léonie Lafontaine, the only Belgian woman in attendance at Zurich, does not appear in the conference report but her presence can be inferred from accounts written by individual delegates.76 There is evidence of tensions within the German branches of WILPF as well as between German delegates and women of other nationalities at Zurich, but the accounts of these events and the development of WILPF in Germany were deliberately presented in as positive and harmonious a light as possible, especially by the forceful WILPF leader Lida Gustava Heymann,77 so it is hard to judge the extent of these, and Annika Wilmers urges caution in taking WILPF accounts at face value.78 One striking event at Zurich set the tone for a sustained effort in restoring post-war friendship between French and German women and marked the importance of symbolic gestures as part of this process, and that was the widely reported embrace between Heymann and French delegate Jeanne Melin, at which Heymann announced: ‘We hope that we women will throw a

Figure 6  German delegation to the WILPF International Women’s Congress, Zurich 1919, from Bericht des 2. Internationalen Frauenkongresses Zürich 12–17.5.1919, von der Internationalen Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit (Geneva, 1919), p. 400. Photograph courtesy of the Stiftung Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Kassel, Germany.

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bridge from France to Germany and from Germany to France.’ Melin replied: ‘I take the hand of my German sisters; with them, we will work from now on, not against man, but for him.’79

Hungary The military defeat in the First World War and the revolutions in the two Austro-Hungarian capitals, Budapest and Vienna, brought about the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy. In Hungary, mass demonstrations, which came to be known as the Aster or Chrysanthemum Revolution, caused King Charles (Charles I of Austria or Charles IV of Hungary), the last emperor of Austria and last king of Hungary, to give up his throne (although not his claim) in favour of the democratic government of Count Mihály Károlyi. This government was short-lived, giving way to a communist regime – the Soviet Republic of Hungary – under Béla Kun, followed by a period of counter-revolution under the authoritarian conservative leader Admiral Horthy in 1920. In this way, Budapest had experienced ‘two revolutions, one democratic, the other soviet, a flu epidemic, Romanian occupation, a flood of refugees, and the armed gangs of the White Terror’ before the Treaty of Trianon was signed in June 1920.80 How did the women’s organizations fare in this rapidly changing political landscape? Under the short-lived liberal Károlyi government, the progressive middleclass women’s organizations fared very well indeed. Prior to the First World War there had been several progressive organizations, the FE, formed in Budapest in 1904, among them. It was both strongly aligned to Western feminist aims and strongly connected to the tradition of Hungarian progressive women’s movements since the mid-nineteenth century – this was expressed in the struggle for women’s education, access to the professions and suffrage. The FE was also affiliated with both the ICW and IWSA and its leading members, Rosika (Rózsa) Schwimmer and Vilma Glücklich, played key roles in strengthening and developing this relationship. The IWSA Congress of 1913 was hosted lavishly in Budapest, the most easterly congress to that point. Here the relationship between female suffrage and peace and the principles of international sisterhood were articulated and embraced by the organization. With the outbreak of the war, the FE was one of the few organizations to maintain its commitment to pacifism, internationalism and suffrage while also engaging in war work to provide paid employment for women left in hardship

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by the loss of their breadwinners and support for orphans and widows, care for wounded soldiers and, in the post-war period, help with the reintegration of returning POWs. At the Hague Congress in 1915, Hungary had been represented on the organizing committee by Glücklich and Schwimmer, while an eight-strong delegation are listed as having attended. Count Károlyi and his wife were very supportive of women’s causes and women were invited to serve on the national council while female suffrage was granted in 1918. Schwimmer was even appointed as ambassador to Switzerland at a time when diplomatic ranks were very firmly closed to women, although she was not recognized by the Swiss authorities.81 Under Béla Kun’s communist regime, the FE suffered a major setback. Although the FE was not forced to dissolve by Béla Kun, the prohibition of assemblies and group meetings involving more than three persons practically paralysed it in its political activities and FE members were deprived of their former influence. leftwing women’s organizations rose to prominence and feminist goals were seen as representing bourgeois class interests. The organization’s journal, A Nő, was reduced to a few editions and outspoken individuals such as Schwimmer were suppressed and prevented from travelling abroad. As outlined in Chapter 4 of this book, the Alliance’s monthly journal Jus Suffragii was an important outlet for communicating the plight of feminism in post-war Hungary. The activities of social movements and associations became highly politicized in the post-war period. Founded in November 1918, the right-wing National Association of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége or MANSZ) was dedicated to promoting the traditional Hungarian ideal of womanhood, based on Christianity, domesticity and nationalism. The aggressive promoting of traditional womanly values by this extreme right-wing group of women was anti-feminist, nationalistic and anti-Semitic. These attitudes were very much in line with those promulgated during the emergence and consolidation of an authoritarian right-wing dictatorship under Admiral Miklós Horthy after September 1919. The right-wing view of womanhood promulgated in MANSZ’s journal, later called A Magyar Asszony (Hungarian Matron, established in 1921), was far preferable to the regime than the progressive, critical position held by FE, and, as in Germany, the claim of this liberal feminist group to represent Hungarian women abroad was challenged.82 Under Horthy, the political gains made by women were reversed or restricted – voting rights were modified and the number of women among university students reduced, in order to ‘defend the interests of Hungarian men’.83 In 1920 MANSZ established a Committee for

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Foreign Affairs with the aim of spreading information about Hungary’s position abroad. MANSZ used international links with women’s organizations to gain sympathy for its own conservative vision of Hungary and to seek to influence foreign opinion, especially about the injustice done to their nation by the peace treaties. Thus in 1920 they published a petition to ‘all the women of the world’ 84 in which they passionately entreat women of all nations to raise their voices on behalf of Hungary and not let the country be torn apart: ‘Méres, femmes, nous Soeurs! Elévez vos voix protectrices en favour de nos enfants.’85 A similar petition in English, aimed at women in Britain and the United States, was published by the Hungarian National Council of Women to explain how, under the terms of the treaty, the Hungarian Kingdom stood to lose territories with a majority Hungarian population.86 In 1920 MANSZ also used its international links to distribute 100,000 copies of an illustrated postcard87 in English, French and German, showing the territories to be torn away from Hungary as a consequence of the treaties.88 In this political context the progressive women’s movement led by the FE had become marginalized in their native Hungary as well as isolated internationally. Their work during the war had been underpinned by pacifist ideas and afterwards

Figure 7  Postcard, Hungaria 896–1918, c.1920, published by MANSZ (the National Association of Hungarian Women), Budapest, 4 ⅜ × 6 ¼ inches (11 × 6 centimetres). Reproduced courtesy of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection, XC1997.121. Photo: Lynton Gardiner.

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was characterized by a desire to restore and maintain peace between nations in the new post-1918 international context. In this way, the activities of the FE can be seen as an attempt to contribute to the cultural demobilization of Hungary, to stop the cycle of resentment and revenge and to work against the possibility of future wars. Their efforts were strongly opposed by the largest women’s association of the interwar period, MANSZ, which saw international feminism as one of its basic enemies. MANSZ was formed with the political aim of fighting to regain the lost territories of the country, thus keeping the idea of the war and the injustices suffered by Hungary alive in public consciousness. Like the writings and activities of the nationalist German organizations described by Christiane Streubel,89 MANSZ propaganda was directed towards cultural remobilization, in other words towards increasing the nation’s readiness for another war. In the early 1920s, the authorities harassed members of all progressive movements, feminists among them. The FE was accused by conservatives (including MANSZ) of being anti-patriotic. Due to their earlier involvement in pacifism during the First World War they were easily targeted as scapegoats for the military defeat. Yet in spite of ongoing persecution, the feminists continued to campaign for and defend the values of women’s emancipation. The FE agreed that the peace settlement was harsh and unjust towards Hungary, but nonetheless argued that all women’s efforts should be directed towards preventing a revanchist war.90 They remained committed to ideals of internationalism, and a letter to Catherine Marshall makes clear that their protests against the treaty’s treatment of national minorities did not come from a position of nationalism: We are always on the standpoint of real internationality. … Our complaints concerning the sufferings of Hungarian minorities are not dictated by feelings of nationalism but by feelings of justice, as yourself, I am sure of it – feel the misery of Europe and all the unjustness of the so-called peace.91

In the pages of A Nő, the FE made attempts to defend the interests of women in employment and protested against the restriction of political rights, stressing the importance of a democratic society in preventing a new war and of formulating an anti-militarist platform which rejected violence and anti-democratic political measures. At the same time, the activism of the FE can be interpreted as an effort to boost modernist visions of gender relations and to promote the image and the cultural context of the emancipated woman in a radically anti-democratic social atmosphere that fostered conservative values and morals. It also strove to maintain its existing international networks and alliances, including links with

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pacifist bodies, but this proved to be very difficult in the immediate post-war era. Hungarian women were represented at the WILPF Congress in Zurich in 1919, but the first meeting of the IWSA, initially planned for Madrid, appeared to be beyond their means for both financial and logistical reasons, as their reply to the call for the Madrid convention in January 1920 reveals: We are sorry to state that there is little hope for the Hungarian Auxiliary to be represented at the 8th Congress of the I.S.A. [sic]. The obstacles are twofold: it is doubtful whether we could get visas for the countries we have to pass to reach Spain and secondly and chiefly we see no possibility to raise the expenses for this distant journey as considering the devaluation of our values [sic] this will amount to an enormous sum. … We regret intensely that the congress is not held in a country which we could reach without having to combat insurmountable difficulties as we believe it to be of extreme importance after the long interval of these tragic years which have past since the last convention …92

When the Congress was moved from Madrid to Geneva, a letter dated 24 February 1920 indicates the continuing importance the IWSA leaders assigned to the Hungarians’ participation: ‘You will no doubt be glad to know that the Congress has been withdrawn from Madrid, and that it is to be held in Geneva, probably in the week beginning June 6th. We do hope that this will make it possible for Hungarian women to be present.’93 The letter continues: ‘We are not quite clear as to what is at present the political situation in Hungary with respect to a Parliament. We have been proposing that one of the Propaganda Meetings at Geneva should be addressed by women members of Parliament of different countries. Have you any women members of Parliament now? If so, is there any you could recommend as a good suffrage speaker?’ As Judith Szapor suggests, ‘This was a sad reminder of the isolation of Hungary and the difficulties experienced by liberals in maintaining ties with the west.’94 However, the isolation was not complete and despite the difficulties, correspondence with the headquarters of international organizations and the FE’s Budapest office was kept alive, and the women of Hungary did manage to get messages through to the IWSA in which their situation was clearly outlined and sympathetically received. In Jus Suffragii of December 1919, for example, the FE committee sent an urgent appeal for help from the international community by telegram to the IWSA ‘with whom we cannot communicate direct [sic]’ via WILPF offices in Geneva. The telegram was published along with a message of support and the promise to approach the League of Nations on behalf of Hungarian women’s rights.95 In May–June 1920, a report by the FE to the IWSA Congress in Geneva

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was published in Jus Suffragii under the heading ‘Hungary, a story of suffering’.96 It begins with the poignant words: Since our last report was sent to Jus Suffragii, about a year ago, Hungary has had three governments, and now the third regime is in power, and we have seen as much of history as any three generations may have witnessed in the past centuries. Physical and mental sufferings have ruined our health and our nerves, and we have lost our illusions, our hope, and almost our faith in humanity.

However, the report also mentions the importance of a number of visits from women from international organizations to Hungary who were able to bring news of international developments, even offering lectures under anodyne titles, as well as gaining impressions of Hungary that could not be conveyed in writing. Particularly striking is the mention of a visit by ‘Miss Courtney, our dear friend and co-worker, who spoke in our members’ meeting hopeful and encouraging words of the hope of a revision of the peace treaty’.97 The importance attached to this continued connection is also shown by a letter to Margaret Corbett Ashby, in which the FE stated that ‘we are eager to secure the same ties of love and confidence between our auxiliary and our international president as have always existed since the foundation of our organization’.98 This suggests that in situations of despair and isolation, the connection with the international community offered the Hungarian women of the FE a vital lifeline.

Rosika Schwimmer in the aftermath of war One international activist who was caught up in the post-war problems to an extraordinary extent was the Hungarian-born internationalist Rosika Schwimmer. It seems ironic that Schwimmer’s energetic commitment to pacifism and internationalism, her rejection of the nation state as tending to encourage, rather than inhibit, war, should not have found an outlet after 1918 in any of the international organizations that apparently shared her values. Before the First World War, Schwimmer was considered one of the most progressive and pioneering feminists and/or suffragists in her native country, Hungary, and the wider Habsburg lands. After the war, as outlined in Chapter 1 of this book, she was squeezed out and denied influence in international circles and found herself without a place in the pacifist internationalist movement that her enthusiastic commitment to internationalism and pacifism had helped to found.99 In

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Hungary, although Schwimmer was rejected by mainstream politics under the Horthy regime, her ideas and her legacy remained influential and continued to set the tone in the feminist movement. She retained an active connection with her fellow feminist activists in Budapest even after her emigration to the United States: they maintained correspondence and Schwimmer regularly sent articles to the Hungarian feminist journal, A Nő, in the 1920s. In later years she commented on news of Hungarian political life.

Return to the international community How did the organizations overcome the divisions of war, defeat and the potentially divisive effects of uneven enfranchisement of member nations? As noted above, the outward-facing rhetoric of the major international women’s organizations was of uninterrupted sisterhood and an uncomplicated return to harmony in the aftermath of war. Yet it is clear that the leaders were well aware of the difficulty of the task ahead. As the appeal to ‘fellow women’ in the first postwar issue of Jus Suffragii, signed by British pacifists Helena Swanwick, Maude Royden, Margaret Ashton and Kathleen Courtney, notes: ‘The bitter memories of the last 51 months will be unendurable unless we pour over them the balm of reconciliation. Always in past history the brooding over wrongs and grief has led to further wrong.’ As the appeal continued, it was important not to allow past bitterness to poison a future in which ‘women of the International Alliance once more clasp hands all the world over’.100 Also in 1918, Isabella Ford articulated the belief that ‘it is only internationalism in its best and widest sense … that can build the new world for which we all long so ardently’. She called for ‘the women in the Alliance without one exception to draw together again in even closer comradeship than before’.101 On 11 October 1920, IWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt writes in a private letter to Aletta Jacobs: ‘I agree with you that it is the task of women to save the world from the results of this terrible man-made war, but I am sure I do not know how to go at it.’102 Members of international women’s organizations were only too aware of the problems caused by the war losses and the war crimes committed by soldiers of one nation against another, but they sought to overcome this by using a carefully maintained discourse of common victimhood. They were also very aware of the complicity of women in the war economy and of their support for militarism. The first post-war Congress of the IWSA in Geneva in June 1920 was a key moment in re-establishing relations and in adjusting to a political landscape in which female suffrage had

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been achieved in twenty-one nations since the Budapest Congress in 1913. It was, stated the report in July’s Jus Suffragii, important ‘not so much for what it did and said … but for the mere fact of its existence’.103 In the IWSA conference report of 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt stresses the harmony of the meeting, but shows too that it was a deliberate decision on behalf of delegates and a hard-won achievement: From the first day to the last, no sign of ill-feeling or enmity was to be found. Not that the delegates forgot or disregarded the recent existence of the war. No one who saw them would suppose for a moment that they were meeting in any blind or sentimental paradise of fools. But they met, nevertheless, differing perhaps profoundly in their national sentiment their memories and their judgements, but determined to agree where agreement was to be found, to understand where understanding could be arrived at, and to co-operate with the very best of their will and intelligence in assuring the future stability of the world.104

The carefully managed displays of outward unity in WILPF were designed not simply to mask the problems in relations between women of former enemy nations, but can be seen as a strategy in overcoming them. Despite the rawness of the war years and the undeniable continuation of enmity between Allied women and those of the Central Powers, the expression of internationalism and the outward denial of rupture in the face of a clear-eyed understanding of the problems to be overcome can thus be seen as both an acknowledgement of and a desire to break the cycle of bitterness that would lead to renewed conflict. There is plenty of evidence to show that the international women’s organizations did indeed offer support and sympathy to women from defeated nations and that Allied women were prepared to condemn the injustice of the continued blockade of Austria and Germany after 1918 and to speak out against the terms of the peace treaties. Women in the defeated nations used their membership of international organizations as a platform to get their voices heard and to appeal for help and sympathy from the international community of women. Love, personal friendship and sympathy born of a sense of shared humanity were used by those struggling in the post-war period to overcome the mindsets of war through international reconciliation just as they had been used by those working for peace during the war. Unlike the statesmen who saw war as a legitimate tool in international politics, the international women’s organizations saw war as catastrophic to the whole of humanity but especially to women. They used rituals of reconciliation and a discourse of shared victimhood and loss in order to bind together a community

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subject to fragmentation through powerful national and personal grievances. The women made a conscious decision to do what was necessary to remain true to their ideals of transcending national self-interests in the context of highly charged nationalism, using ‘the very best of their will and their intelligence’ to channel the post-war bitterness and grief away from the enemy nations and instead towards the enemy of the whole of humanity: war itself. Despite the difficulties outlined above, it seems that women from the defeated nations were indeed represented at most of the post-war international women’s congresses held in the early to mid-1920s. Hungarian and Bulgarian women were present at the ICW’s First Congress in Kristiania, Norway, in 1920, sending three delegates each, and at the IWSA’s first post-war Congress in Geneva in 1920, sending two and one delegates, respectively, while Germany was represented by three women. Although Schwimmer was not able to attend WILPF’s Zurich Congress in 1919, she did manage to attend the IWSA Congress in Geneva in 1920. There is some discrepancy over whether she was made welcome, as she is listed in the congress report as ‘a special guest’.105 A Bulgarian branch of WILPF was established in 1919 and representatives of the Bulgarian Women’s Union attended the international congresses and, as we have seen, used the opportunity to keep Bulgaria’s situation before the eyes of the international community of women. Women from all three nations were represented at WILPF’s Washington Congress in 1924, and in 1929 a study conference on Eastern European problems organized by WILPF in Vienna was attended by delegates from fifteen countries, including Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary.106 At this meeting, vexed questions related to frontiers and minorities were discussed, apparently with ‘good will and friendliness’. However, the report of the Ninth International Congress, held in Yugoslavia in 1937, mentions the continued problems between women of East European sections, including Hungary and Bulgaria, which ‘up to now, had not found their way to practical co-operation’,107 suggesting that the relationships between women’s groups continued to be strained. Leila J. Rupp writes of the problems of representation and the difficulty of establishing truly internationalist thinking within the newly established nations.108 Rupp’s table of women’s officers shows that while Germany was consistently represented in the executive groups of all three organizations between 1920 and 1934, when German women disappeared from the ICW leadership but not from WILPF or the Alliance, only WILPF consistently included Hungarian and Austrian women in leadership roles during this time.109 In 1922 Vilma Glücklich is recorded as being appointed international secretary of WILPF. She resigned

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Figure 8  International group at the WILPF International Women’s Congress, Vienna 1921, from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Report of the Third International Congress of Women, Vienna, July 10-17, 1921 (Vienna, 1921), following page 152. Photograph courtesy of the Stiftung Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Kassel, Germany.

in 1925, two years before her death. There are no records of Bulgarian women in leadership roles in any of the organizations.

League of Nations One arena that offered scope for women’s co-ordinated effort was the newly established League of Nations, which, despite its flaws, became the focus of women’s international activities in post-war period and marks a real departure in women’s international activity.110 Despite the problems outlined above, the international women’s organizations and their role in the League of Nations did provide a space for international engagement that could be used effectively by women from defeated nations as well as by women who had been denied the vote in their own nations. These opportunities came about less often via official channels – very few women were appointed to committees or included as official

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delegates to the League – than through lobbying, serving in an advisory capacity and exercising direct influence. Bulgaria was admitted to the League in 1920, Hungary in 1922 and Germany not until 1926, but Germany in particular was able to exercise influence via women’s organizations well before Gertrud Bäumer became part of the official German delegation in 1926. Article 7 of the League of Nations Covenant ruled that all positions within the League should be open equally to men and woman, a major achievement for which international feminists, according to Rupp, ‘rightfully claimed credit’.111 The three international organizations responded differently to the establishment of the League. The ICW was the most positive, seeing itself in the words of its president, Lady Aberdeen in the president’s address of 1920, as the ‘Pioneer of the League’ and as she put in the president’s memorandum, ‘a Women’s League of Nations with real power behind us’.112 The ICW placed on record its belief that the League should be open to all nations and that Germany had a right to admission on an equal footing with other nations.113 The IWSA likewise greeted the League of Nations as a positive development – at its first post-war Congress in Geneva in 1920 the report referred to it as a new world that had ‘risen out of bloodshed and ruin, a new world that promised democratic progress and a better understanding among nations’.114 President Margaret Corbett Ashby’s speech at the IWSA’s Rome Congress in 1923 recorded that ‘the creation of a League of Nations has opened to us a vast and hopeful sphere of work’ and referred to the fact that women ‘were placed on an equality with men in this first effort towards world peace’.115 However, Rupp notes that the IWSA’s public pronouncements were generally more positive than private qualms would suggest and that disillusionment soon set in as a result of frustration at women’s persistent underrepresentation in the League.116 WILPF in contrast was highly critical of the League from the moment it became aware of the terms under which it would operate, especially the terms that involved the exclusion of defeated nations from membership and onesided disarmament.117 The draft covenant of the League of Nations had been published in February 1919, while the terms of the Treaty of Versailles – for Heymann ‘a typical product of male logic’118 – were announced on the first day of the Zurich Congress of 12–17 May 1919. As British historian Jo Vellacott notes, ‘As for the covenant, they were bitterly disappointed in the form it laid out for the League of Nations, condemning it as “a league of conquerors against the conquered [which] would not save the world from future wars … useless as an instrument of peace”. So bad did they find it that it was only with difficulty that the decision was made to continue their support of the principle, while

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working to change the worst features, which they identified item by item.’119 Despite their profound scepticism, in the commentary they sent to Paris WILPF managed to greet at least the principle of the League, while condemning its structures and suggesting changes that would be more likely to achieve a peaceful world order.120 All three international women’s organizations established a presence in Geneva with the aim of influencing world developments. The ICW and IWSA set up temporary offices in Geneva while the League of Nations’ assembly was in session and WILPF, despite its strong criticisms of the League, was determined to set up its headquarters in that city at the Zurich Congress of 1919121 and remained one of the most active groups. Because of their commitment to creating conditions for sustainable peace, women of WILPF refused to restrict their interests to areas expected of women, such as the humanitarian response to post-war famine and relief work in general, as these were seen as simply cleaning up the mess left by men; instead they commented on all major League of Nations topics.122 In general, the women’s organizations set out to lobby at the League, influence its structure and ensure that women were represented in its legislation. They lobbied for feminist goals, put forward the names of suitable women for League positions and offered the ‘women’s perspective’ on subjects such as the return of prisoners of war to defeated nations and their treatment in line with the rules of war; violence against women – rape in wartime and under occupation, and domestic violence; the question of married women’s nationalities; the trafficking of women; and education for peace and against militarism. In particular they directed their campaign against the encouragement of militaristic masculinity in boys’ education, suggesting that they were interested in creating conditions for a sustainable peace as well as simply regulating disputes between nations. They also identified the treatment of women in mandated states as a key issue for international intervention. The number of women officials remained at a low level, never rising above 1 per cent in the twenty years of the League’s operation.123 Moreover, only one woman ever led a department of the secretariat: the British-born Rachel Crowdy, who was chief of the social section from 1919 to 1930. Nevertheless, the women’s organizations felt optimistic that the effects of their continuous lobbying and personal conversations were positive, and that their presence at the League did ensure that women’s voices were heard.124 Within the League, women co-operated in cross-organizational groups to promote the causes to which they were committed, and they lobbied to improve and reform the structures of the League and to improve the scope for

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women’s contributions to policy. Recognizing the importance of presenting a united front, the women of all three organizations co-operated with one another and in 1925 an advisory committee, the Joint Standing Committee of Women’s International Organisations, was formed, initially with only the three main groups plus the World’s Young Women’s Christian Association, but later expanded to include nine women’s organizations. The role of this committee was to increase the participation of women at the League, and it put forward the names of suitable women whenever a position became vacant. The committee encouraged compromise and communication and motivated women’s groups to make a common cause of key issues. However, this was a limiting factor too, in that that it assumed a collective identity and a single voice for all women based on assumptions about their essential natures. As Carol Miller points out, women were generally relegated to humanitarian and social arenas and women delegates were seen first and foremost as representing women’s interests and offering the women’s perspective.125 However, the difficulty of presenting anything that could sensibly be seen as ‘the women’s perspective’ on international affairs was obvious given the diversity of views held by women in the fifty plus organizations recognized by the League.126 Miller’s assessment of the women’s influence at the League of Nations also acknowledges the significance of their contribution while noting the limitations and frustrations of their position, holding that ‘the most significant and lasting contribution made by women at the League was to have won recognition for the idea that the status of women deserved attention from the international community’.127 In a context in which ‘the status of women was tied to sensitive cultural and religious traditions far beyond the authority of the League … it was a real achievement for the women’s network to have convinced League member states that the position of women in society could be construed as a problem for international attention’.128 Women co-operated in particular over the cause of peace, feeling that the development of strategies of warfare such as chemical warfare and aerial bombardments that targeted civilians had made the prevention of war an even more vital area of women’s concern.129 At the League, efforts were focused during the early 1930s on the World Disarmament Conference. With four women sitting as members and a petition signed by women from all over the world that attracted eight million signatures,130 the women’s organizations had high hopes that the conference would call a halt to arms proliferation. However, as Leila Rupp notes, these hopes were soon dashed.131 It appeared that although most of the delegates to the League were keen to appear to support disarmament, none of them were prepared to make any concessions that would

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compromise what they saw as their nation’s defensive capacity. The failure of the Disarmament Conference, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and eventually the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 were all major blows to the international organizations, all of whom were committed above all to promoting peaceful relations between nations. Women’s work in and with the League of Nations was important in that it established the precedent that women should be included in international affairs. They also overcame the division between the private and public spheres and established that ‘women’s issues’ could be an appropriate subject for international legislation – for example in the debates about married women’s nationalities and the trafficking of women.132 Even though women only represented a tiny proportion of League of Nations officials and delegates, their involvement in an advisory capacity established international relations, disarmament, war and peace as key women’s concerns and helped to normalize the political engagement of women at a time when this was still highly contested at a national level. In this way, women without voting rights at home could be involved in politics through their membership to international women’s organizations.

Limits to internationalist vision Despite the rise in international thinking in the post-war period there were limits to the internationalist vision. Just like the League of Nations itself, many new organizations restricted membership to women from neutral and victorious nations. In the International Federation of University Women, for example, which was founded in July 1919, the initial membership of fifteen nations was restricted to the victorious Allies, neutral nations or individuals with existing connections to the United States or United Kingdom as in case of Czechoslovakia’s Alice Masarykova (daughter of that country’s post-war president, Tomáš Masaryk). Austria joined in 1922, but Germany only joined in 1926. The Medical Women’s International Association had no German or Austrian founding members.133 Even where women from defeated nations were not specifically excluded, active membership could be difficult for them due to the circumstances within their own nation states as well as public hostility that made visiting the congresses very uncomfortable. In 1923, for example, a meeting of the IWSA had to be moved from Paris to Rome because the antiGerman feeling was so strong in the French capital and it was 1929 before the

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organization met again in Germany;134 at the 1924 Congress in Washington, WILPF president Jane Addams ‘felt compelled to apologize for the “currents of intolerance” delegates encountered, … suspecting that it might have been too soon to hold an international gathering on U.S. soil’.135 These barriers to internationalism were felt most acutely by women in defeated nations and it was not always easy for them to transcend national interests. Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia claims that international bodies in fact were organized in the interests of members within a national context (for example suffrage, academic progression and research networking) and this was arguably especially true of defeated nations.136 Membership in international women’s organizations gave the nation a voice it was denied elsewhere. It could overcome national isolation, allow defeated nations to plead their cause for justice and a less punitive peace and use women’s organizations as a starting point to mobilize public opinion in their favour. The insistence on shared victimhood could be used to mask national war guilt, and there are examples too of nationalist women using the international networks as a public forum to air their grievances.137 This is clear in the case of MANSZ, the Hungarian organization that stressed from the outset that their international contacts were cultivated on the basis of a national advantage, and that favoured high-level, influential diplomatic links to advance its revisionist cause internationally. For example, the wife of the Hungarian ambassador, in the United States, Gróf Széchenyi Lászlóné, was a MANSZ member and in 1921 Magyar Asszony published a letter expressing sympathy and personal support from the wife of the president of Finland to the organization.138 In all of the organizations, there were also limits to members’ abilities to think transnationally and overcome inbuilt prejudices. Especially in the contexts of newly created nations there were huge problems with claims and counterclaims for representation within nations divided along ethnic or ideological lines.139 Unlike the other two major international women’s organizations, WILPF had been founded at an international level before any national sections existed. Vellacott sees WILPF as qualitatively different from previous women’s organizations, characterizing it as transnational ‘to reflect WILPF’s attempt to lay aside national interests, to hear from all sides, to look at the good of the whole, and to consider long-term effects as well as present gain. In discussion, no one was expected to represent her nations.’140 Despite their stated desire for wider global membership and a belief that women’s problems were universal regardless of culture and race, the structures of the organizations themselves were biased in favour of Western members.

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There were language barriers for those who did not speak one or all of the main languages of discussion at international gatherings – English, French and German – which was a matter of educational opportunity as well as nationality. In addition, despite the rhetoric stressing the international sisterhood of all women, leadership in all three organizations was dominated by Britain and America, while the congresses were mainly held in Europe or America.141 Contemporary scholars such as Antoinette Burton and Leila Rupp have identified a ‘feminist orientalism’ that served to marginalize women from nations seen as less developed and reinforce colonialist and imperialist assumptions of racial superiority,142 with the ICW in particular often using Protestant Christian rhetoric in ways that could alienate and exclude Catholic women and women of other faiths. Moreover, despite The Hague women’s commitment to a global sisterhood based on equality and shared humanity, the terminology of the resolutions and debates used an unexamined discourse of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ nations.143 However, in her 2012 monograph, Intelligent Compassion, Confortini reminds us that the women of the WILPF, in a conscious effort to overcome Eurocentrism and imperialist attitudes, were constantly working for relations of solidarity beyond Western white women.144

Conclusion In this chapter we have argued that the war forced women active in international organizations to firm up their ideas about war and peace and develop a structured framework within which to pursue internationalist goals. Furthermore, they had to do this against the background of a peace settlement that was highly contested and which – at least in the period of 1918–23 – failed to bring peace and the restoration of pre-war living standards to significant parts of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. We have seen that the experience of war and the use of new strategies and weapons that targeted civilians brought home the urgency of peace as a women’s issue and made the leaders of the international women’s organizations highly committed to restoring their imagined international communities and using their newly won political influence as a force for preventing future wars. Despite the enormous difficulties and the strength of the forces threatening to fragment the movement, the three international women’s organizations managed to reintegrate women from defeated nations into their imagined communities remarkably quickly and effectively. We have also seen that the League of Nations,

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despite its flaws, was a focus for women’s international co-operation and a space for international political engagement denied to many women in their own nations.145 However, we have also demonstrated that despite outward-facing claims to the contrary there were considerable barriers to restoring the international women’s organizations after the destructive war, even within WILPF, an organization that had maintained and deepened ties across enemy lines since its founding as a transnational organization in 1915. We have seen that the obstacles to internationalism were compounded in defeated nations, where volatile political and disastrous economic conditions combined with a rise in nationalism and resentments of the harsh terms of the peace discouraged international engagement. In these nations, the progressive middle-class women’s movements that had campaigned for suffrage before the war were threatened by regimes hostile to them and by the rise of extreme left- and rightwing women’s organizations. We have looked at the specific national contexts in Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria and noted that despite the commonalities between these defeated nations there are also significant differences that affected the national women’s groups’ ability to play an effective role in international organizations and make use of the channels of influence available through membership. Our account shows that the membership of international women’s organizations could be used to further national causes, dilute nation-specific responsibility for wartime actions and give defeated nations a voice denied to them elsewhere, so governments were motivated to intervene to ensure that their preferred representatives attended international gatherings. We have seen that there were major benefits to using women’s international contacts for the rehabilitation of defeated nations on the international scene, especially in influencing public attitudes, and that the major organizations repeatedly used their influence to make a case for the revision of the hated peace treaties. Despite this solidarity, however, it was evident that the Hungarian and Bulgarian women’s groups whose aims had aligned so closely with those of the Western-dominated values of the IWSA and ICW before the war were marginalized in the post-war context and struggled to maintain contact and influence. We have argued that despite a climate in some ways supportive of and enthusiastic about internationalism in defeated nations, there were limits to the range of views that could be accommodated and that nationalism was an equally strong force. It was not just in defeated nations that the mindsets of war continued: women’s groups in victorious nations, too, had to be cautious

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in pursuing their international goals in a climate characterized by continued resentment, the suspicion of former enemies and a fear of the spread of Bolshevism.146 But in particular, we have shown that internationalism was a highly contested value in states brought to the brink of collapse by defeat in the war. Progressive and liberal middle-class groups that had flourished before the war found themselves forced to defend their record against left-wing, socialist women’s groups who accused them of protecting their own class’ interests and right-wing, nationalist groups who accused them of lacking patriotism and contested their right to represent the nation’s women abroad. It is testimony to the commitment of the women’s organizations to the international ideal that these nations were nonetheless reintegrated into the international community of women and able to work together for peace in the aftermath of war.

Notes 1 Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloosterman (eds), Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990). 2 Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 2006). p. 21. 3 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 11–44. 4 Helene Lange, ‘National oder International’, in Kampfzeiten, vol. 1 (Berlin: Herbig, 1928) [1900], p. 271. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991) [1983]. 6 Gertrud Bussey and Margaret Tims, Pioneers for Peace: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 1915-1965 (Oxford: Alden Press, 1980) [1965], p. 19, give the figure of 1,136 voting members and 300 visitors. 7 For accounts of the Hague Congress, see Annika Wilmers, Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914-1920): Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext, 2008); Regina Braker, ‘Bertha von Suttner’s Spiritual Daughters: The Feminist Pacifism of Anita Augspurg, Lida Gustava Heymann and Helene Stöcker at the International Congress of Women at The Hague, 1915’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 18/2 (1995), pp. 103–11; Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace; and Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London: Pandora Press, 1985). See also Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of

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Women Activists between War and Peace an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). For a contemporary account, see Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003) [1915]. This was not true for every nation. For example, the feminist press in Hungary gave a detailed and enthusiastic report about the event, drawing attention to the significance of Jane Addam’s and Rosika Schwimmer’s speeches and publishing the resolutions, while the German feminist press joined the mainstream press in condemning the congress. For further analysis of the press response see Wilmers, Pazifismus, pp. 221–44 (Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands); and Sharp, ‘ “A foolish dream of sisterhood”: Anti-Pacifist Debates in the German Women’s Movement, 1914–1919’, in Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader Zaar (eds), Gender and the First World War (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 195–213 (Germany). For studies of WILPF, see Catia Confortini, Intelligent Compassion: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Feminist Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Wilmers, Pazifismus; Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Ingrid Sharp, ‘Feminist Peace Activism 1915–2010: Are We Nearly There Yet?’ Peace and Change, 38/2 (2013), pp. 155–80; Sandi Cooper, ‘Peace as a Human Right: The Invasion of Women into the World of High International Politics’, Journal of Women’s History, 14/2 (2002), pp. 9–25; Jo Vellacott, ‘Feminism as If All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929’, Contemporary European History, 10/3 (2001), pp. 375–94; Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace; and Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women. See Judit Acsády, ‘Diverse Constructions: Feminist and Conservative Women’s Movements and their Contribution to the Reconstruction of Gender Relations in Hungary after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 309–33. See Karen Offen, ‘“Eruptions and Flows”: Thoughts on Writing a Comparative History of European Feminisms, 1700-1950’, in Anne Cova (ed.), Comparative Women’s History: New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Social Sciences Monographs, 2006), pp. 39–65 (here p. 41). As well as the essays on Central and Eastern Europe in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, see Susan Zimmermann, ‘The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Development of Feminist Inter/National Politics’, Journal of Women’s History, 17/2 (2005), pp. 87–117; Andrea Pető and Judith Szapor, ‘Women and “The Alternative Public Sphere”: Toward a New Definition of Women’s Activism and the Separate Spheres in East-Central Europe’, Nordic Journal of Feminist

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and Gender Research, 12/3 (2004), pp. 172–81; Andrea Pető. ‘The Future of Women’s History: Writing Women’s History in Eastern Europe: Towards a “Terra Cognita”?’, Journal of Women’s History, 16/4 (2014), pp. 173–82; Francisca De Haan, Margaret Allen, Krassimira Daskalova and June Purvis (eds), Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Francisca De Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Lutfi (eds). A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19th–20th Centuries (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006); Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950. A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), especially Chapter 10, pp. 277–310. The IWSA underwent a number of name changes to reflect their new role postsuffrage: it will be referred to as the IWSA or the Alliance throughout the chapter. WILPF was founded in 1915 under the name International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace or ICWPP. The name was changed at the Zurich Congress of 1919 and WILPF will be used throughout the chapter for the sake of consistency. Wilmers, Pazifismus, pp. 201–7. Eliza Ablovatsi ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest 1919’, in Wingfield and Bucur (eds), Gender and War, pp. 70–94 (here p. 73). Ibid., p. 74. Offen, European Feminisms, p. 272. Erika Kuhlman, ‘The Rhineland Horror Campaign and the Aftermath of War’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 89–109. Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace, pp. 30–1. On the early programme and ideas of the Women’s Union see Krassimira Daskalova, ‘Balgarskite zheni v sotsialni dvizheniya, zakoni i diskursi’, in Krassimira Daskalova (ed.), Ot syankata na istoriyata. Zhenite v balgarskoto obshtestvo i kultura (Sofia: Dom na naukite za choveka i obshtestvoto, 1998), pp. 11–41; Krassimira Daskalova, ‘Feminizam i ravenstvo v balgarskiya XX vek’, in Ralitsa Muharska (ed.), Mayki i dashteri. Pokoleniya i posoki v balgarskiya feminizam (Sofia: Polis, 1999), pp. 80–105; Krassimira Daskalova and Zhorzheta Nazarska, Zhensko dvizhenie i feminizmi v Balgaira (sredata na XIX – sredata na XX vek) (Sofia: Balgarska asotsiatsia na universitetskite zheni, 2007). This move was part of the ideological struggle within the Social Democratic Party in the early years of the twentieth century. Established in 1891, the Bulgarian Socialist Democratic Party merged in 1894 with the Bulgarian Social Democratic Union to form the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (BRSDP), which, after serious internal disputes, split in 1903 into two wings: ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ socialists.

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30 31 32 33

Women Activists between War and Peace In 1919 the ‘narrow socialists’ embraced Leninism and renamed themselves the Bulgarian Communist Party (Balgarska Komunisticheska Partiya or BCP). Here and further on in the text the words ‘Social Democrats’ and ‘socialist’ will be used interchangeably with reference to Bulgarian women’s activism. The first term refers to the party itself (Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party), while the second term relates to its ideological profile as ‘socialist’ (claimed by both the ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ wings), as well as to the Socialist Women’s Union, founded in 1914. See, for example, the series of lectures on this topic by Rayna Kandeva and other socialist women activists, ‘About the European War and Women’, Rabotnicheski vestnik, No. 109, 20 August 1915. See, for example, Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For the Bulgarian case in particular see Nikolai Vukov, ‘The Aftermaths of Defeat: The Fallen, the Catastrophe, and the Public Response of Women to the End of the First World War in Bulgaria’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 29–47. As Marilyn Boxer notes, the term ‘bourgeois’ was used pejoratively to describe the liberal, progressive feminists. Marilyn J. Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept “Bourgeois Feminism’”, The American Historical Review, 112, no. 1 (February 2007), pp. 131–58. See Rabotnicheski vestnik, No. 63, 25 June 1915; and Rabotnicheski vestnik, No. 59, 20 June 1915. Vassilka G. Kerteva, ‘“Ratnitsata za mir i svoboda”. Gospozha Ekaterina Karavelova i Balgarskata sektsia ot Mezhdunarodnata zhenska liga za mir i svoboda’, in Jubileen sbornik. Ekaterina Karavelova. 1878-1928 (Sofia: Darzhavna pechatnitsa, 1929), p. 140. The edition is without a listed editor and includes a collection of speeches and articles dedicated to the life and work of Ekaterina Karavelova on the occasion of her fiftieth anniversary. Elena Stoyanova, ‘Ekaterina Karavelova – skitsa za biografia’, in Jubileen sbornik. Ekaterina Karavelova, p. 32. Genoveva Chonkova and Emiliya Sabeva, ‘Prinosat na Zheni Pozhilova-Pateva v mezhdunarodnata deynost na balgarskoto zhensko dvijenie’, Economics and Society Development on the Base of Knowledge. International Science conference (4–5 June 2009, Stara Zagora), p. 31. Available at www.sustz.com/Proceeding09/ Papers/Social%20studies/History/G_CHONKOVA.pdf Ibid., p. 32. Ibid. Ibid., p. 31. Karavelova continued to promote these ideas throughout all her activities in the interwar period. As she pointed out in one of her journalistic interventions: ‘The Bulgarian section is in unison with the general principles of WILPF that

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34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45

46

47

48 49 50

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there is no permanent peace without just peace. The section works hard and acts everywhere it is possible – at the League’s Headquarters in Geneva, at congresses and conferences – for the revision of the treaties, for the disarmament of the victors and for the rights of the defeated.’ Zhenski glas, Nos. 5-6, 1 December 1931. Kerteva, ‘Ratnitsata za mir i svoboda’, p. 143. Ekaterina Karavelova, ‘Slovo po sluchai otkrivane na IV kongres na Mezhdunarodnata zhenska liga za mir i svoboda vav Vashington’. Zhenski glas, 1 May 1924. See Zhenski glas, Nos. 10–11, 5 February 1932. Fani Drenkova (ed.), Kato antichna tragediya. Sadbata na Ekaterina Karavelova i neynoto semeystvo v pisma, dnevnitsi, fotografii (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1984), p. 198. Kerteva, ‘Ratnitsata za mir i svoboda’, pp. 147–8. For a detailed discussion of the 1918 revolution see Matthew Stibbe, Germany, 1914–1933: Politics, Society and Culture (Harlow: Longman, 2010), pp. 54–9, and Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Germany 1914–1918. Total War as a Catalyst of Change’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 378–98. Helene Lange, ‘Die Schwerste Stunde’, Die Frau June 1919, pp. 261–2 (here p. 261). See, for instance, Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001). Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Das kranke Volk’, Die Frau, March 1920, pp. 161–4 (here p. 164). See Sharp, ‘A foolish dream of sisterhood’. See Ingrid Sharp, ‘Overcoming Inner Division: Post Suffrage Strategies in the Organised German Women’s Movement’, Women’s History Review, 23/3 (2014), pp. 347–54. See Ingrid Sharp ‘ “An unbroken family”? Gertrud Bäumer and the German Women’s Movement’s Return to Internationalism in the 1920s’ in Women’s History Review (forthcoming). BDF ‘Appeal of Berlin Women to President’s Wife and Jane Addams for Aid’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler and Susan Strasser (eds), Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998) p. 227. Irene Stoehr, ‘Gedämpfte Euphorie. Internationale Frauenkontakte und Friedensaktivitäten der deutschen Frauenbewegung in der Weimarer Republik’, in Susanne Elpers and Anne-Rose Meyer (eds), Zwischenkriegszeit Frauenleben 19181939 (Berlin: Ebersbach, 2004), pp. 33–58 (here p. 45). Helene Lange, ‘Die deutschen Frauen und der Frauenweltbund’, Die Frau, August 1920, pp. 239–42 (here p. 241). Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Prinzipienfragen des Frauenweltbundes’, Die Frau, August 1920, pp. 1–4. Gertrud Bäumer, Lebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich, 1933), p. 435.

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51 Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Zwischen den Zeiten’, Die Frau, December 1918, pp. 69–72 (here p. 70). 52 Ibid. 53 Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Rechtsfrieden?’, Die Frau, November 1918, pp. 37–40 (here p. 37). 54 Gertrud Bäumer, Heimatchronik III, p. 43. 55 Ibid., p. 11. 56 Ibid., p. 52. 57 Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Rede zum sozialen Teil des Regierungsprogramms’, Die Frau, April 1919, pp. 197–205 (here p. 204). 58 Lange, ‘Deutsche Frauen und Frauenweltbund’, p. 242. 59 Wilmers, Pazifismus, p. 201. 60 Ibid., p. 205. 61 Ibid., pp. 201–7. 62 Bäumer, Lebensweg, p. 435. 63 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 26. 64 Gertrud Bäumer to Marianne Weber, 8 December 1919, cited in Wilmers, Pazifismus, p. 201. 65 Bäumer, ‘Prinzipienfragen’, p. 3. 66 Ibid., p. 4. 67 Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Der Frauenweltbund im Haag’, Die Frau, June 1922, pp. 264–70. 68 Ibid., p. 264. 69 Ibid., pp. 269–70. 70 Bäumer, Lebensweg, p. 440. 71 Christiane Streubel, Radikale Nationalistinnen: Agitation und Programmatik rechter Frauen in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/M and New York: Campus Verlag, 2006), pp. 245–56. 72 Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Die nationalpolitische Stellung des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine während des Krieges’, in Jahrbuch des Bundes deutscher Frauenvereine (Leipzig: Teubner Verlag, 1920), pp. 6–14. 73 Gertrud Bäumer, ‘Ansprache bei der Friedenskundgebung des Weltbundes für Frauenstimmrecht, Berlin 1929’, Die Frau, June 1929, pp. 681–3 (here p. 681). 74 See Sharp, ‘A foolish dream of sisterhood’; and Wilmers, Pazifismus, esp. pp. 221–79. 75 Wilmers, Pazifismus, p. 63. 76 Ibid., p. 69. 77 Lida Gustava Heymann, Erlebtes, Erschautes, Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für Frieden und Freiheit 1850-1940 (Frankfurt/M: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1992), pp. 240–7. 78 Wilmers, Pazifismus, p. 89. 79 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 118; Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace, p. 30; Wiltshier, Most Dangerous Women, pp. 210–11. 80 Ablovatsi, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard’, p. 70.

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81 In fact, the Bulgarian Nadejda Stancioff, daughter of the Bulgarian diplomat Dimitar Stancioff, is considered to be the first European female diplomat. She was a translator and secretary of the Bulgarian delegation during the signing of the Treaty of Neuilly, and later the first secretary of the Bulgarian legation in Washington DC, until she resigned in protest at the coup against Stambolijski’s government in 1923. See Mari A. Firkatian, Diplomats and Dreamers: The Stancioff Family in Bulgarian History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008); and Helen McCarthy, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 93. 82 See Judith Szapor, ‘Who Represents Hungarian Women? The Demise of the Liberal Bourgeois Women’s Rights Movement and the Rise of the Right Wing Women’s Movement in the Aftermath of World War I’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 222–45. 83 Katalin N. Szegvári provides a good analysis of how the rate of women and Jewish students was reduced at universities in the 1920s because of the Numerus Clausus regulations. See: Katalin N. Szegvári, Numerus clausus az ellenforradalmi Magyarországon: a zsidó és nöhallgatók föiskolai felvételéröl (Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó, 1988). 84 Proclamation de l’Association Nationale des Femmes Hongrois a toute les femmes du Monde (Budapest: Imprimerie de la Société Anonyme: Budapesti Hírlap, 1920). 85 Ibid., p. 4. 86 Augusta Rosenberg and Countess Albert Apponyi, Arguments against the Territorial Aspirations of the Czechs, the Roumanians and the Serbs (Budapest: Hungarian National Council of Women of Hungary, 1919). 87 The card is described as follows: ‘Mechanically produced novelty card with a thumb wheel that moves the map segments representing the changes in Hungary’s boundaries according to the Trianon Treaty.’ Source: http://www.dvhh.org/ history/1900s/manza.htm. Holder: Wolfsonian-Florida International University, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection. 88 Kornélia Burucs, ‘Nők az egyesületekben’, Historia, 15/2 (1993), pp. 15–18. 89 Christiane Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles: The Extension of War Culture by Radical Nationalist Women Journalists in post-1918 Germany’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 69–88. 90 S-né Szegvári, ‘Fegyveszünetet, Magyarország népköztársaság, a nők politikai állásfoglalása!’ (Armistice, Hungarian Republic, women’s political statement), A Nő, V/11 (November 1918), p. 139. 91 Letter to Catherine E. Marshall from FE office, Budapest, 1923, in Correspondence of FE, Hungarian National Archive, P999/17, p. 492. 92 FE to secretariat of IWSA, 6 January 1920, in Correspondence of FE. Hungarian National Archive, P999, box 13, original in English.

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93 Chrystal Macmillan to FE, 24 February 1920, Correspondence of FE. Hungarian National Archive, P999, box 9. 94 Szapor, ‘Who Represents Hungarian Women?’, p. 260. 95 From the Hungarian Section of the Alliance, ‘Hungary’ Jus Suffragii: The International Woman Suffrage News, 14/3 (December 1919), pp. 40–1. 96 From the Hungarian Section of the Alliance, ‘Hungary: A Story of Suffering’, Jus Suffragii: The International Woman Suffrage News, 14/8 (May–June 1920), p. 120. 97 Szapor, ‘Who Represents Hungarian Women?’, p. 260. 98 Letter to Mrs Margery Corbett Ashby, from Budapest FE, 27 July 1923, in Correspondence of FE. Hungarian National Archive. P999/17, pp. 253–4. 99 On Schwimmer, see Dagmar Wernitznig, ‘Out of her Time? Rosika Schwimmer’s Transnational Activism after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). Also Chapter 1 in this book. 100 Helena M. Swanick, Maude Royden, Margaret Ashton and Kathleen Courtney, ‘Fellow Women’, Jus Suffragii: The International Woman Suffrage News, 13/3 (December 1918), p. 27. 101 Isabella Ford, ‘Short appeal to Alliance members’, Jus Suffragii: The International Woman Suffrage News, 13/3 (December 1918), p. 27. 102 Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship, p. 188. 103 List of delegates to the Eight Congress of the IWSA, Geneva, 6 June to 12 1920, Jus Suffragii: The International Woman Suffrage News, 14/9 (July 1920), p. 150. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. See also Wernitznig, ‘Out of her Time?’. 106 WILPF, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1938: A Venture in Internationalism (Geneva: Women’s International League, 1938), p. 22. 107 Ibid., p. 31. 108 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 125. 109 Ibid., pp. 63–9. 110 On women and the League of Nations see Carol Miller, ‘Geneva – the Key to Equality: Inter-War Feminism and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, 3/2 (1994), pp. 219–45; Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay’, American History Review, 112/4 (2007), pp. 1091–1117; Carol Miller, ‘Lobbying the League: Women’s International Organizations and the League of Nations’. PhD Dissertation, Faculty of Modern History University of Oxford, 1992; Rupp, Worlds of Women, esp. 217–22. 111 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 212. 112 ICW Report 1920, cited in ICW, Women in a Changing World: The Dynamic Story of the International Council of Women since 1888 (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 44. 113 Ibid., p. 167.

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114 Adele Schreiber and Margaret Mathieson, International Alliance of Women: Journey Towards Freedom (Copenhagen: IAW, 1955), p. 27. 115 Ibid., p. 37. 116 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 212. 117 For more detail on the WILPF critique of the League of Nations, see Jo Vellacott, ‘A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory’, Women’s History Review, 2/1 (1993), pp. 23–56. 118 Heymann, Erlebtes, Erschautes, p. 243. 119 Vellacott, ‘Feminism’, p. 380. 120 See Vellacott, ‘A Place for Pacifism’; and Bussey and Timms, Pioneers for Peace, p. 32. 121 Schreiber and Mathieson, Journey Towards Freedom, p. 11. 122 See Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace, pp. 34–5. 123 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, p. 19. 124 Miller, ‘Lobbying the League’, p. vi. For the importance of the League as a symbol of peace in Britain, see Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism 1918-45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 125 Miller, ‘Lobbying the League’, p. iv. 126 Ibid., pp. 281 and 291–6. 127 Ibid., p. 284. 128 Ibid., p. 286. 129 See Chapter 5 in this book. 130 Bussey and Tims, Pioneers for Peace, p. 101. 131 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 218. 132 Ibid., pp. 215–16. 133 See Christine von Oertzen, Science, Gender and Internationalism: Women’s Academic Networks, 1917-1955 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 58; and Kimberly Jensen, ‘War, Transnationalism and Medical Women’s Activism: The Medical Women’s International Association and the Women’s Foundation for Health in the Aftermath of the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). 134 Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 74 and 115–16. 135 Ibid., p. 116. 136 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 137 Raffael Scheck, Mothers of the Nation: Right-wing Women in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles’. 138 See letter from Ester Stahlberg, Helsinki, 6 July 1921, published in Magyar Asszony, 3 (1921), p. 27. 139 See Szapor, ‘Who Represents Hungarian Women?’

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1 40 Vellacott, ‘Feminism’, p. 384. 141 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 64. 142 Antoinette Burton, ‘The Feminist Quest for Identity: British Imperial Suffragists and Global Sisterhood 1900-1915’, Journal of Women’s History, 3/2 (1991), pp. 46–81; Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organisations, 1888-1945’, American Historical Review, 99/5 (1994), pp. 1571–1600. 143 ‘Primitive’ in Resolution of the 1st Congress 11b, and ‘backward’, Resolution of the Zurich Congress Section V 10h. 144 Confortini, Intelligent compassion, p. 15. 145 This is also emphasized, in particular for the 1930s, by Miller, ‘Geneva – the Key to Equality’. 146 See, for example, Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: The Politics of Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Erika Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender, and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

3

Women and Socialist Revolution, 1917–23 Matthew Stibbe (on Germany) with Olga Shnyrova (on Russia) and Veronika Helfert (on Austria)*

In the late 1950s an extraordinary reunion took place between two German women in East Berlin who had once been friends and political comrades but had not seen each other for many years. Martha Globig (1901–91), then a working-class activist in the Spartacist youth movement, and Franziska Rubens (1894–1971), a middle-class student at the Humboldt University, had both participated in the revolutionary socialist protests in the German capital at the end of the First World War, had subsequently joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1919, had gone into exile in the Soviet Union in the 1930s after the rise of the Nazis, and had then fallen victim to Stalin’s terror in 1937–8. After almost twenty years as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, Globig was finally allowed to come home – to communist East Germany – in April 1956 in the wake of the de-Stalinization measures initiated by Khrushchev. Rubens was able to return earlier, in 1948, with her second husband Joseph Rubens. Given their first-hand and extremely raw experiences of Stalinist repression, one might expect them to have become seriously disillusioned with the socialist project. Rubens, for instance, had seen the arrest of her first husband, Hermann Bergmann, in Moscow in 1936, and of her son Peter in 1941; both died in Soviet camps. Her second husband was also arrested but survived. Yet interestingly, in her account of her life as a communist and party functionary, she also finds room to dwell on her memories of the initial hopes, expectations and comradeship of the German Revolution of 1918–19: During the [revolution of] November 1918 we [i.e. her future husband Bergmann and herself] were active but very inexperienced fighters. We made * Matthew Stibbe, Department of History, Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Olga Shnyrova, Department of History and International Relations, Ivanovo State University, Russia; Veronika Helfert, Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria.

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permanent contact with comrades from the ranks of the working-class youth movement, especially with Fritz Heilmann and Marthel Globig. … This was how we experienced the November events, how we came to take part in demonstrations, in armed street fighting, how we greeted Karl Liebknecht when he waved down on the [revolutionary] crowds assembled in front of the [Kaiser’s] palace. … Every day brought new experiences. We stormed down [Unter den] Linden [Berlin’s central thoroughfare] as one mass … endless columns of vehicles, soldiers with bayonets, red flags fluttering. … And amid all this there is a quite personal memory, which Marthel and I still look back on even today. On one of the first days of the revolution we bumped into each other at a demonstration in the city. I squeezed Marthel’s hand in excitement and said to her: ‘Congratulations, Marthel! We’ve done it, we’ve won!’ Whereupon she smiled indulgently [at my naivety] and replied: ‘What are you saying! This is only the beginning!’ … In the [late] 1950s, when I met Marthel at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism for the first time in over forty years, I reminded her of this ‘dialogue’ – she had not forgotten it either.1

Rubens’ account has to be treated quite carefully as a source. It was recorded, probably in the 1960s, for the ‘Memoir section’ (Sektor Erinnerungen) of the Communist Party Archive in East Germany, not for open, critical, public consumption, and was deliberately crafted to fit in with dominant party narratives.2 The author took great care not to offend against communist ideological doctrine, in particular the need to put class interest before gender interest. The sections on her early years are full of formulaic references to her ‘inexperience’ as a political fighter, and the importance of her socialization through contact with genuine proletarian figures in the Berlin workers’ movement, including both men and women. The human suffering she witnessed in Berlin in 1914–18 had not only awoken in her an ‘emotional response’ which expressed itself in a desire ‘to fight against human misery, injustice and war’ but also had provided the more disciplined, focused, partisan insight ‘that … all the social measures in the world will not change a thing if the class system itself remains in place’.3 Yet in spite of the highly stylized nature of the source, Rubens’ portrayal of the events of November 1918 is significant, and not only because her positive memories of that time conflict in such a stark manner with the much darker personal and political experiences that she faced in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s. As an eyewitness account written by somebody who was an active participant in wartime protests, it also stands at odds with recent trends in historical writing about the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and in Central Europe in 1918–19 that stress the overwhelmingly male contribution to the overthrow of the old order

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and the establishment of soldiers’ and workers’ councils and the only marginal contribution of women. In the case of Austria, for instance, Gabriella Hauch has noted that although working-class women did take part in the anti-war strikes of 1917 and early 1918, the ‘new grass-roots [revolutionary] movement [of November 1918] was  … realised on sites dominated almost exclusively by men’. Above all the workers’ and soldiers’ councils ‘conceived themselves as a community of brothers’ and were not interested in theories of female emancipation or in ‘issues such as sexuality and gender equality’.4 Another Austrian specialist, Wolfgang Maderthaner, has written that, ‘as a product of the war, the revolution originated not so much in the factories but in the barracks’. The most visible manifestation of this was the presence of large numbers of troops, and sometimes even officers, at socialist demonstrations, pointing to the ‘total breakdown of military discipline in the garrisons of Vienna’.5 For Richard Bessel too, although the collapse of the old order clearly reflected a much broader process of social upheaval and dislocation brought about by the war, the common political denominator, beginning in Russia in 1917 and extending to Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918, was the ordinary soldiers’ loss of respect for the authority of the state and its ability to secure military victory (or at least to bring about a swift and satisfactory end to the fighting). As the ‘last line of defence of the old regime’, men in uniform were the key deciding factor – only when their discipline and will to carry on ‘cracked’ did full-scale revolution become possible.6 The German expert Benjamin Ziemann has gone even further, questioning – on the basis of his reading of soldiers’ letters to and from their families and other authentic sources – whether there was actually any aspiration towards female emancipation or towards new forms of ‘participatory citizenship’ among ordinary working-class and peasant women during the war. Material privations and the pain of bereavement, expressed in uncoordinated food riots and a ‘bleak language of despair’, were the dominant means by which female war experiences were communicated and shared.7 More recently, he has also asserted that ‘emancipation or empowerment are inappropriate terms to describe women’s experiences at the home front’ during and immediately after the First World War, and that if we want to look for new claims to political agency we would have to locate them ‘where the impact of the war was most intensely felt, at the front’. It was here that ‘the potential for protest was strongest’, ensuring that ‘when the revolution came in 1918, its gender was male’.8 In this chapter we do not intend to dispute the essential finding that men, as soldiers and workers on the home front, were the key element in the making

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of revolution at the end of the First World War. However, we do wish to test the assertion that revolutionary visions of ‘participatory citizenship’ were dominated by male experiences and aspirations to the complete, or near complete, exclusion of female war experiences. Certainly Hauch is correct to point to the male domination of and gross female under-representation in workers’ and soldiers’ councils, and not only in Austria. Here, as in Germany and Russia, women socialists were often derided by their male colleagues for their supposed lack of political and military experience and revolutionary discipline. Ziemann also provides compelling evidence that ordinary German peasant and working-class women (and men) were more interested in questions of peace, which for them implied the long-awaited return of their husbands from the war and the re-establishment of ‘normal’ domestic life, than they were in re-envisaging and restructuring class and gender roles in the aftermath of war and revolutionary upheaval.9 However, a key question remains: how and why, given the findings of Hauch, Ziemann and others, was it still possible for some women activists, whether they joined the revolution as spontaneous but ‘inexperienced’ protagonists, or as long-term members of organized socialist movements, to remember things differently? By uncovering several aspects of socialist women’s participation in revolution, this chapter will demonstrate that there is in fact some evidence of active female involvement in protest and insurrection, in debates about the meaning of citizenship and its relationship to the bearing of arms and/or civic engagement in the public sphere, and in the envisioning of a new society based on social justice and equality. To establish a comparative perspective, the chapter looks at the role played by socialist women activists in one country where proletarian revolution succeeded (Russia) and two where it failed (Austria and Germany), while also challenging what ‘success’ and ‘failure’ might mean when we move beyond standard linear accounts of ‘progress’ and ‘reaction’, or what Stefan Berger calls the ‘narrow politics of the revolution’.10 The first section will explore the participation of women in organs of revolution (political parties, strike movements, workers’ and soldiers’ councils, associations of women workers and proletarian housewives) and their relationship to male comrades. Subsequent sections will focus on socialist women’s evolving visions of internationalism, and on their attempts to shape an alternative proletarian morality in opposition to ‘imperialist’ war, ‘bourgeois’ legal and political reforms and ‘bourgeois’ pacifism. In particular, emphasis will be placed on the extent to which socialist and communist women were willing to tolerate, support or even participate in violence in order to destroy the ‘old’ and build the ‘new’.

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Revolutions and women’s representation One of the key questions to ask in relation to socialist movements during and after the First World War is the extent of women’s formal representation in bodies representing the revolution and seeking to drive it forward. While in the subsequent sections we offer a detailed examination of the particular national cases, there is also a common pattern, beginning with women’s mass participation in food riots, strikes and demonstrations, which were at first largely sporadic but became more directly political in 1917 and 1918 and often included demands for female suffrage; continuing with attempts to control and/or marginalize the importance of women’s activism on the part of male commentators and revolutionary leaders; and ending with the near complete subordination of autonomous women’s groups under the guise of party discipline. Women were still encouraged to participate in the construction of socialism, but they were increasingly excluded from the collective exercise of power, on the grounds that they were supposedly lacking in ‘political maturity’, too ‘timid’ or too beholden to outdated ‘petty-bourgeois prejudices and pacifist illusions’.11 Even so, it is also possible to find examples of socialist women actively opposing these stereotypes, or at least seeking to mitigate their effects by looking for new ways to gain recognition as comrades through participation in the process of social and political transformation. What they failed to do, in all three countries, was to develop a theory and practice of socialist activism which could satisfactorily explain – and at the same time challenge – the reluctance of working-class men to endorse the principle of female emancipation and gender equality in the home, the workplace and the political realm.

Russia Of all the belligerent powers in the First World War, Russia was the first to experience revolution, in February 1917 and again in October 1917. The first revolution saw the country transformed from autocratic monarchy to burgeoning democracy under a provisional government, and the second marked the triumph of the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Illyich Lenin (1870–1924) who proceeded to create a new state founded on the principles of ‘proletarian dictatorship’. The February revolution began with demonstrations of women workers and soldiers’ wives in Petrograd which took place on International Women’s Day (23 February in the old Russian calendar) and it not only led to the overthrow of the tsar but also made women workers the object of attention for a variety of competing

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political causes. This was reinforced when on 19 March another march was organized in Petrograd in support of female suffrage, in which around 40,000 working women took part.12 In April women aged twenty-one and over were granted the franchise in municipal elections, and in September were able to register as voters for the forthcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly, scheduled for November. The revolution alone had made this possible, for under the tsar, as Peter Gatrell puts it, women’s voluntary work for the war effort brought no political rewards and ‘did not qualify women for anything other than subordinate status on the home front’.13 Beyond the suffrage question, feminist groups in Russia took a keen interest in the condition of working-class women during the months from February to October 1917, and sought to enlist proletarian women into their ranks. A variety of organizations were active in promoting a new vision for female emancipation now that the revolution had swept away previous barriers to political and social change. Among them were the Russian League for Women’s Equality (RLWE), the Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society (RWMAS) and the Women’s Progressive Party (WPP). These organizations had already taken up the cause of female enfranchisement during and immediately after the 1905 revolution, but now did so with renewed vigour and determination.14 Especially active was the RLWE, whose members agitated in the working-class districts of Petrograd and played a key role in organizing the 19 March suffrage demonstration. In June 1917, the leader of RLWE, Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein was given a seat on the Committee for the Development of the Constitution (Komissia po razrabotke Konstitutsii). In the autumn of 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 RWMAS, which before and during the 1914–17 war lobbied the State Duma and local authorities and ‘never missed the opportunity to remind people about [women’s] demands and needs in the professional sphere’.15 But women workers also began to demonstrate grass roots activism: after the February revolution, they began to create their own unions and societies, and went on strikes and demonstrations. One of the most active was the laundresses’ union, which organized a month-long strike in May 1917 for better pay and conditions involving 40,000 of its members. In other instances, women took part in strikes alongside male colleagues, particularly those employed in poorly remunerated service sector jobs such as cleaning, dyeing, shop and restaurant work.16 However, they still faced a lot of hostility from men in large industrial plants in Petrograd and elsewhere, who actively pushed women out of factories

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and factory councils.17 Even so, some women socialist activists were successful in getting themselves elected, including Bolshevik and non-party women voted onto councils in the textile industry, with its largely female workforce.18 Municipal elections in August, and forthcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly made the existing political parties more aware of the importance of appealing for women’s support. The middle-class Cadet Party, which had a number of prominent feminists in its ranks, including Ariadna Tyrkova and Countess Sophia Panina, campaigned among women of all social classes through organizing meetings and literacy courses, distributing leaflets and including women among its candidates for high office. Tyrkova stood successfully in the municipal elections in Petrograd, and became the leader of the Cadet faction in the city Duma, while Panina became a minister of social welfare.19 The Mensheviks also established a central bureau for women’s affairs, agitated among female workers through trade unions and factory councils, and set up groups representing soldiers’ wives. The Social Revolutionaries (SRs) – including Maria Spiridonova (1884–1941), a left SR who was voted onto the Petrograd Soviet and became president of the First Congress of Peasants’ Soviets – were mainly interested in appealing to peasant women. However, while the Cadets and the Mensheviks were in favour of continued Russian military support for the Allied campaign against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the SR movement was deeply split on the question of war or peace, with Spiridonova belonging to the anti-war faction.20 Last, but not least, women were actively recruited into the Bolshevik Party, the one political force which after April 1917 consistently demanded the overthrow of the provisional government and an immediate end to the war. In part this was down to the efforts of ordinary working-class women who had been radicalized by wartime conditions and became involved in organizing strikes, factory councils and a pro-Bolshevik Union of Soldiers’ Wives after the February revolution,21 and in part to the return of a number of revolutionary women from exile abroad in March and April 1917. Among the latter was Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), a leading Bolshevik Party functionary who went on to become commissar for public welfare in Lenin’s first government, established after the October Revolution. In this capacity she helped to push through a series of radical measures in the spheres of divorce, communal maternity and childcare provision, family law and access to contraception and abortion – particularly the Family Code approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in October 1918.22 After 1918 she also played a key role in the formation of the

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Bolshevik Party’s women’s section (the Zhenotdel) and in 1924 became Soviet ambassador to Norway, the first woman ever to reach such a senior diplomatic position.23 The Bolshevik position on the ‘woman question’, which Kollontai shared and helped to shape alongside other well-known female party functionaries such as Concordia Samoilova (1876–1921), Ludmila Stal (1872–1939) and Inessa Armand (1874–1920), was characterized by a harsh condemnation of ‘bourgeois feminism’ together with support for the campaign for women’s right to the vote and admiration for the women workers who had involved themselves in the demonstration for suffrage in Petrograd in March 1917. With the organizational and ideological guidance of the Bolshevik Party as the vanguard of the working class, such spontaneous demands for democratization and mass participation on the part of proletarian women could be channelled into the broader campaign for the conquest of state power through the chief organs of the revolution: the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, or soviets. For this to happen, proletarian women would have to show solidarity with working-class men rather than seeking to make autonomous demands of their own. Even so, the workplace was not to be the only site of revolutionary struggle. Having lived for many years in exile in Europe, Kollontai – like Lenin – was also familiar with nineteenth-century theories of women’s emancipation through socialism put forward by German writers and activists, especially August Bebel (1840–1913), Friedrich Engels (1820–95) and Clara Zetkin (1857–1933). From

Figure 9  The head of the Women’s Department of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Alexandra Kollontai, with fellow party activists in Moscow, 1 January 1920. TASS news agency. Reproduced courtesy of Alamy Images, EK2R6K. Contributor: TASS.

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Bebel she took the moral critique of ‘bourgeois’ marriage as simply a reflection of capitalism’s need to protect private property through the social control of female (but not so much male) sexuality;24 from Engels the ‘scientific’ analysis of the family as a social construct which, like religion and the state, would eventually fade away once private property was abolished under socialism;25 from Zetkin the need for a radical separation of the ‘bourgeois’ and proletarian women’s movements in order to allow the latter to take part alongside men in the revolutionary struggle for ‘emancipation from capital’, that is, from economic exploitation in the workplace;26 and from Lenin himself the notion of unpaid female household labour as ‘barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-wracking and stultifying drudgery’ which – when it came to revolution – accounted for working-class women’s supposed political immaturity and lack of class consciousness, and held them back from active participation in proletarian struggles.27 For all that, while during the months of February to September 1917, leading revolutionary women like Kollontai had called on the Bolshevik Party to take women workers seriously and to push for their equal representation in revolutionary organs, there was no question of treating them as a special interest group with interests separate to those of male workers. Instead, the party’s journal for women, Rabotnitsa, published articles and readers’ letters stressing waged labour, agitation against high prices and other forms of social misery caused by the war, comradeship with male workers and campaigns for better pay, but at the same time demanding an end to discrimination by male trade unionists against women workers, the eradication of sexual harassment on the shop floor and the inclusion of women on factory councils.28 In May and June 1917, and again in the weeks, days and hours leading up to the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd on 25 October, the journal’s editorial board also staged public gatherings around the same themes.29 As we have seen, other leftwing parties also tried to attract working-class women to their side, including the Bolsheviks’ principal rivals within the Russian social democratic and labour movement, the Mensheviks. Both workers’ parties agreed that the provisional government’s decision to grant female suffrage for municipal elections and elections for the Constituent Assembly was not enough, that women needed to be freed socially as well as politically, but what they understood by freedom differed significantly.30 This became increasingly obvious after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the dispersal of the democratically elected Constituent

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Assembly in January 1918 following its refusal to adopt Soviet decrees. Henceforth the Bolsheviks turned against not only the ‘bourgeois’ parties (including the feminists represented in the All-Russian Women’s Union, made up of the RLWE, the RWMAS and other organizations) but also its erstwhile partners on the left – first the Mensheviks and right SRs, and, from March 1918, after they opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, the left SRs too. By the middle of 1918 at the latest only one vision of women’s liberation remained in the part of Russia controlled by the ‘Reds’: the Bolshevik vision.31 That vision was reiterated in detail at the First All-Russian Congress of Women Workers and Women Peasants, organized by Kollontai, Stal, Samoilova and other leading women party functionaries, and held in Moscow in November 1918, on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Opening its initial session Yakov Sverdlov (1885–1919), chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, made a special plea to the delegates to do more to organize women workers in conjunction with the Bolshevik Party: Up until now large parts of the population have not taken an active part in organisational and creative work. The Central Committee, fulfilling the task of uniting all [proletarian] strata, has appealed to the large and inexhaustible resource of women workers. … In communist society women need to work in all fields. At the moment of revolutionary triumph, and at the same time with the approaching threat from imperialists across the world … we need to decide how to consolidate and organise our ranks. Woman workers and peasant women have an important role here and we are sure that women workers will come to the defence of Soviet power, a power which we will need to keep until the victory of the world revolution.32

Lenin, as leader of the Bolshevik Party, also attended the Congress and made a welcoming speech in front of delegates in which he drew attention to the many emancipatory achievements of the revolution so far, including the ‘complete freedom of divorce’ and ‘removal of all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children’, but reiterated the claim that ‘there can be no socialist revolution unless very many working women take a big part in it’. In particular more ‘propaganda and education work’ was needed to combat ‘poverty and ignorance’ in the countryside, since economic backwardness and illiteracy were the root cause of the ‘religious prejudice’ that still stood in the way of ‘progress’: The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They

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will only be completely emancipated when we can get rid of the small peasant farms to proceed to co-operative farming and use collective methods to work the land. That is a difficult task. But now that the Poor Peasant Committees are being formed, the time has come when the socialist revolution is being consolidated.  … The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work.33

To this end, the Congress adopted a resolution promoting the creation of a new commission on agitation and propaganda among women workers, which from August 1919 became known as ‘the women’s section’ (Zhenotdel).34 At the top level, it was attached to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist (Bolsheviks) Party (RCPb), and, in theory at least, it also had branches at every other level of the party. Its first leader was Inessa Armand, one of the most prominent female communist leaders in Russia. After her death in September 1920 she was replaced by Kollontai, ensuring that the women’s section was led by committed campaigners on behalf of women workers and peasants. But in spite of Lenin’s claims to the contrary, inside the RCPb, the Zhenotdel was not an independent body. All instructions and plans for the Zhenotdel were discussed at joint meetings with the Organisational Department of the Central Committee, which was led by men. In addition, the Zhenotdel’s outreach activities came under the direction of the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda. The same situation existed in the regions, where women’s political work was guided by male party functionaries under the principles of ‘democratic centralism’. The majority of local communist leaders had strong patriarchal views and did not want to empower women by increasing their representation in the RCPb or allowing them to create autonomous structures within it. In this way, women’s aspirations to equal treatment were often blocked (but never eradicated) and they were forced to accept a subordinate role. Indeed, it was not until 1927 that a Second All-Russian Congress of Women Workers and Peasants was called, and this was to be the last such Congress before the Zhenotdel itself was closed down in 1930.35 Earlier, in 1920, one of the leaders of the All-Russian Zhenotdel, Concordia Samoilova, complained that many ‘party comrades’ held the opinion that the women’s sections were not necessary and could be dismissed without any harm for the communist cause. Their work could instead be distributed between other departments attached to the local and regional party committees. At other times, she suggested, Zhenotdels were treated as organs dealing with specific female tasks and were not integrated into the more general areas of party work.

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While they had been useful during the Civil War (1917–20), when the mass mobilization of women was needed to achieve victory, the final defeat of the Whites and movement towards demobilization allowed gender prejudices to again determine rank-and-file male communists’ policy towards women. Thus at local level, Zhenotdels were being refused access to office space and stationary, and in Perm the party leader had even burnt all documents pertaining to the work of the women’s section in his district.36 Even so, at the All-Russian level and under the guidance of Armand and Kollontai, the Zhenotdel provided a partial framework to express socialist women’s aspirations to ‘participatory citizenship’, at least in the first two years after 1918, and again, briefly, in 1927.

Austria Outside of Russia, the places that seemed most likely to fall to Bolshevik-style revolution in late 1918 were the industrialized areas of Germany and eastern Austria, with their strong social democratic and labour traditions, buttressed by wartime strikes and protests. The first pro-Bolshevik party to be formed in Central Europe was the KP(D)Ö (Communist Party of (German) Austria), founded in Vienna by student activist Elfriede Eisler-Friedländer (aka Ruth Fischer) and her then husband, the journalist Paul Friedländer, on 4 November 1918.37 In December 1918 representatives of the so-called radical left within the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) – including Anna Strö[h]mer (1890/91–1966), a functionary in the Socialist Youth who was later placed in charge of the KPÖ Central Committee’s women’s bureau – elected to join the communists,38 but over the course of the next few months they failed to win over the bulk of the SDAP rank-and-file, including its women supporters. Fischer, who held membership card number one in the KP(D)Ö, subsequently outlines the thinking behind the party’s formation in an address to its first conference on 9 February 1919: At first there was a lot of discussion about the use of the word ‘party’. Some people argued that we should simply call ourselves Communists. But this was rejected … on the grounds that we must form a strong organisation and that this would only be possible through ceasing to work within the Social Democratic movement and instead making a clean break from it. The decision was therefore made to call ourselves the Communist Party and to operate under this name.39

Following an initial recruitment drive, the KP(D)Ö was able to boast 40,000 members at the highest peak in late May 1919 – many of them unemployed men

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from the industrialized regions of Wiener Neustadt and Neunkirchen-Ternitz as well as radicalized workers and soldiers in Linz and Vienna.40 Ruth Fischer also claimed that 3,000 unemployed female tram conductors had spontaneously come over to the party via their representatives after they had faced the threat of ‘being thrown out of their jobs and onto the street without any material compensation’ by the new Social Democrat-led Viennese municipal transport authority.41 However, even in the first months of its existence, the party was never a real threat to the hegemonic position of the SDAP – the Austrian equivalent of the Russian Mensheviks – within the Austrian working class. The latter secured a big increase in female membership after the war, from 40,000 in 1918 to 210,000 by 1921. In 1929 up to a third of SDAP members in ‘Red’ Vienna – 149,000 in total – were women.42 Figures for the KPÖ are harder to come by, but the best estimate – by Paul Pasteur – suggests that women made up only 10 per cent of members in 1926.43 This was in spite of the strenuous efforts of activists like Ströhmer and Anna Grün to attract new members by agitating among women workers and founding a paper for women communists in 1924, Die Arbeiterin.44 Part of the reason for the KPÖ’s failure to become a mass party was that, in contrast to their German and Russian counterparts, the Austrian Social Democrats had not experienced a big split into pro- and anti-war factions during the war. As such the SDAP was able to contain attempted far-left risings – one on 12 November 1918, immediately following the declaration of a republic in Austria, a second in April 1919 in support of the short-lived Soviet regimes in Budapest and Munich and a third in June 1919.45 Indeed, as compared with other places in Central Europe, the transition from monarchy to republic, and from authoritarian to republican rule, was surprisingly smooth in Austria. The provisional government led by the Social Democrat Karl Renner (1870–1950) declared on 12 November 1918 that ‘German-Austria is a democratic republic’, meaning that there were no plans for an immediate or forceful transition to socialism or the establishment of a councils republic on the Soviet model. Meanwhile, parliamentary elections, narrowly won by the SDAP with the centreright Christian Social Party (CSP) a close second, were able to take place on 16 February 1919, leading to the formation of a new ‘grand coalition’ between the two dominant parties in the Constituent National Assembly.46 Even so, Austria had seen its fair share of radical socialist and communist agitation during the war. News of the events in Russia in February and October 1917 could not be prevented from reaching Habsburg troops on the front line, still less civilians on the home front. The military and civilian authorities were particularly concerned by the potential threat posed by former Austro-Hungarian

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POWs returning from Russian prison camps, many of whom, it was feared, had been ‘infected’ by Bolshevik ideas.47 In May 1917 the first of several big strike waves took place in the Austrian armaments industry. By the last winter of the war much of the urban population was in revolt over ongoing food shortages. In January 1918 over one million people in both the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the monarchy downed tools and the first workers’ councils (Arbeiterräte) were founded as ‘combat organs’ (Kampforgane) of the proletarian masses, in direct imitation of the Russian example. Female social democratic activists increasingly combined economic protest with political demands for the suffrage, and in March 1918 nearly 3,000 of them, doubtless influenced by events in Petrograd the year before, defied a police ban by staging a march around the Ringstraße in Vienna to mark International Women’s Day.48 Meanwhile, further labour unrest, involving women as well as male workers, was evident in Austrian (although less so in Bohemian and Moravian) factories in June 1918.49 These events posed a serious threat to wartime industrial production, to the gender order and to the authoritarian Habsburg state in general, and have often been seen in retrospect as the ‘real revolutionary moment’ in contrast to the rather peaceful transition from monarchy to republic in November 1918.50 The mass strikes of May 1917 and January 1918 are also significant because of the evidence that social democratic women were present in the early days of this movement, but were then actively pushed out of the strike committees by male trade unionists and senior SDAP functionaries. Women strikers were feared as an undisciplined and unruly element, not least because, unlike men, they could not be pulled into line through threats to conscript them into the army under the law on wartime service (Kriegsdienstleistungsgesetz).51 In a report on the January strike, sent to the emperor on 10 February 1918, the Austrian Ministry of Interior noted, ‘It began with complaints about insufficient food supplies, but spread just as quickly into the political realm and evolved finally into a peace demonstration in which 550,000 workers [from around Austria] took part.’52 The male leadership of the SDAP, while opposed to political interference from the Ministry of Interior, was determined to bring the strike to a quick end before it split the Austrian labour movement into pro- and anti-war factions. At a party meeting on 1–3 February 1918, participants in a 113,000-strong ‘wildcat’ anti-war demonstration in Vienna were described as being ‘unknown’ to the SDAP and as ‘sensation-hungry womenfolk’.53 It was against this background that rebellious women workers were gradually marginalized from the process of determining the political and social shape of the future First Austrian Republic, helping to

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explain why the political revolution, when it did break out in November 1918, appeared to be largely male in character. With the foundation of the First Republic in November 1918 women’s suffrage was finally granted by the provisional national assembly for German-Austria after nearly half a century of campaigning by both liberal, bourgeois women’s organizations and by socialist women. In the first parliamentary elections, held on 16 February 1919, it was paradoxically the centre-right CSP that benefitted most from women voters, although the SDAP boasted the largest number of female deputies in the new Constituent National Assembly – seven compared with just one for the CSP.54 Another important change for left-wing female activists was the reform of the Vereinsrecht (law regarding parties and associations) which allowed Austrian women to join political associations for the first time. Yet while this marked an important recognition of female equality, on the left it also spelled the end of independent and unofficial associations of radical socialist women and allowed the respective party machines to subordinate and discipline more independent female (and dissident youth) voices, in much the same way as the SDAP leadership had marginalized radical anti-war voices during the years 1914–18.55 In the case of the KPÖ, women were among the founding members, but at the First Party Congress on 9 February 1919 no woman was elected onto the Central Committee and only one, Anna Grün, became a member of the Press Committee. Communist women were not involved in the party’s decision to support the failed uprisings of 17 April and 15 June 1919, and did not take part in the fighting. Ruth Fischer’s decision to separate from her husband and move to Berlin in August 1919, where she joined the KPD and became a prominent figure on its ultra-left wing, also reflected her increasing marginalization within the Austrian party.56 In particular she objected to the party’s decision, made in April 1919, to cease publication of a separate newspaper for women members and to instruct them instead to read the KPÖ’s central organ, Die Rote Fahne. In her view, this was a ‘grave error’ and a ‘significant setback’ to the formation of a communist women’s movement in Austria which could actually challenge the ‘artificial culture’ and ‘sexual hypocrisy’ of ‘bourgeois’ family life as defended by the state and the Christian social and social democratic parties.57 Women’s representation in the workers’ and factory councils (Arbeiterräte and Betriebsräte) was also very low. After the transition from monarchy to republic in November 1918, the councils in Austria did not experience a gradual shift to the left, as they did in Germany or Hungary. Rather they remained in the hands of

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the moderate left SDAP which supported a parliamentary road to socialism and refused to back communist calls for a Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. That said, members of the KPÖ and the Poale Zion, a Jewish socialist party, could and did successfully stand for election as delegates from March 1919. Regardless of party affiliation, the majority of delegates, both in councils at factory and district level, and in the nationwide Reich Conference of German-Austrian Workers’ Councils (Reichskonferenz der deutschösterreichischen Arbeiterräte) were pro-SDAP industrial workers and workers in bigger enterprises. The main aim of the councils’ movement at national level was to ensure the continuation of the wartime working-class struggle for public ownership of industry and control of food distribution and housing allocation, albeit within the context of freely contested elections, which in turn marginalized the radicals and confirmed the overwhelming dominance of the SDAP. Attempts to include rural workers were largely unsuccessful. Very few women workers were elected onto the main group of social democrat-dominated workers’ councils, and only two of the 155 delegates who attended the second Reichskonferenz in July 1919 were women – Ruth Fischer for the KPÖ and the unaffiliated socialist Käthe Pick (also known under her married name, Leichter; 1895–1942) who later joined the SDAP.58 In spite of the councils’ movement’s commitment to widening the social base of democracy and creating an air of mass participation, in workers’ and factory councils in particular, female involvement in the selection and holding to account of delegates was ‘weak’.59 In order to counter this – and improve the effectiveness of the Arbeiterräte as ‘combat organs’ of the working class more generally – efforts were made to set up special electoral colleges of Arbeiterfrauen (women workers) and proletarische Hausfrauen (proletarian housewives), while female communist activists like Ruth Fischer pushed for women to have a strong presence in all work-based councils.60 The idea of creating separate women’s councils in factories was rejected, however, lest this weaken the class struggle by pitting supposedly less disciplined or class-conscious women workers against their male colleagues. As a result, the question of equal female representation (as opposed to boosting female participation) in working-class campaigns was not discussed in the Austrian councils’ movement at this time. Instead, the task of representation was left to the handful of women deputies in the Constituent National Assembly, including the veteran socialist Adelheid Popp (1869–1939), whose speech in the Austrian parliament in April 1919 – the first by a woman MP – nonetheless focused on the need to abolish the class privileges of the gentry rather than challenging men from all parties and classes to examine their own

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gender-based prejudices.61 Ending class inequalities and enacting social reform were indeed prioritized as socially and politically important tasks that both the SDAP in parliament and workers’ councils in factories could achieve by working in partnership with one another.

Germany Whereas in Austria most socialists, including women socialists, belonged to the SDAP, and in Russia after 1918 to the Bolsheviks, who were the only party permitted to exist, in Germany the left wing of the political spectrum was dominated by three distinct parties, all of them claiming their roots in the original pre-war Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Majority Social Democratic Party ((M)SPD) had supported the German war effort and championed the move from the imperial system to a parliamentary republic in November 1918. Its leaders, Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925) and Philipp Scheidemann (1865–1939), were convinced anti-Bolsheviks, as were some of its prominent women representatives such as Marie Juchacz (1879–1956) and Adele Schreiber (1872–1957). To the left of the (M)SPD was the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), formed in April 1917 by elements in the SPD who could no longer support the party’s pro-war stance. Among them was Luise Zietz (1865– 1922), the only female member of the SPD party executive (Parteivorstand) until she was pushed out and forced to resign due to her opposition to the official policy.62 In 1917–18 the USPD backed a wave of strikes and protests against the war, and in so doing won over a new group of radicalized women workers;63 and in November 1918 it lent its full support to the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils throughout Germany. Following elections to the national assembly in January 1919, in which the left in Germany failed to win an outright parliamentary majority, the (M)SPD moved to the right and formed a coalition government with moderate ‘bourgeois’ parties. The USPD, on the other hand, shifted decisively to the left, upholding the idea of workers’ councils rather than parliamentary rule and seeking membership to the Moscow-based communist Third International (Comintern). This paved the way for a split in the party in October 1920, when two-thirds of ordinary members, but a smaller proportion of the party’s leadership, voted to join the Comintern and to enter into formal negotiations for a merger with the German Communist Party (KPD). In the immediate post-war years, the (M)SPD and the USPD were the two big socialist parties, with mass female as well as male memberships. Between 1918

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and 1920, for instance, the number of women members of the SPD grew from 66,000 to 207,000.64 Likewise the USPD counted over 100,000 women members by 1920, many but by no means all of whom supported the party’s decision to join the Comintern at its Halle Conference in October of that year.65 The KPD, formed at the end of December 1918 from the wartime Spartacist League and other radical left elements, was at first a relatively small party with only a few thousand women members – perhaps 10 per cent of the total membership – but a formal merger with the left wing of the USPD in December 1920 provided it with its first significant female as well as male mass following.66 Two of the KPD’s most prominent leaders, Rosa Luxemburg (murdered at the end of the Spartacist Uprising in January 1919) and Clara Zetkin (a member of the party’s Central Committee until 1929 and a member of the ECCI or the Executive Committee of the Comintern until 1933) were women. The Berlin branch of the party also included (after 1920) prominent women activists from the wartime USPD, such as Martha Arendsee (1885–1953), who had accompanied Zetkin to the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Berne in March 1915 and later worked on social welfare issues for the KPD; and Cläre Derfert-Casper (1894–1976), a wartime functionary in the Metal Workers’ Union who was the only woman elected to the joint (M)SPD-USPD ‘working committee’ (Arbeitsausschuss) during the January 1918 strikes in Berlin and went on to play a leading role in the revolutionary shop stewards’ movement during the last phase of the war.67 Both Arendsee and DerfertCaspar were extremely hostile towards the (M)SPD and the male leaders of the official trade unions, but it is telling that their first political home was in the USPD rather than the KPD. Their focus during the war was on transforming the German social democratic movement in Berlin into a truly revolutionary force for the empowerment of women workers; along the lines suggested by Luise Zietz, from the moment that she first publicly announced her opposition to the official SPD line in October 1915, to her support for the shop stewards’ and councils’ movements in 1918 and her decision to stand as a candidate for the USPD in the elections to the post-war national assembly in January 1919.68 The split in the German left during and immediately after the war was mirrored in the different sections of the socialist women’s press. Admittedly, both moderate pro-war and radical anti-war voices had supported the decision to resume the marking of International Women’s Day from 1916, after a break at the start of the war.69 The granting of female suffrage by the new Council

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of People’s Commissars on 22 November 1918 was likewise applauded by all socialist parties and groupings. However, while the (M)SPD women’s journal Die Gleichheit also welcomed the victory of forty-one women candidates from all parties in the national assembly elections in January 1919, and the transition to parliamentary rule,70 Zietz, writing in the USPD party journal Die Kämpferin, was contemptuous: The election of female deputies from the bourgeois parties and even from the right-wing of the social democratic movement has done little or nothing to further the cause of social legislation or the practical enforcement of equality for women.71

KPD women were even blunter in their rejection of the parliamentary system. In May 1919, Clara Zetkin set out the communist agenda in the first edition of the new KPD women’s journal, Die Kommunistin: ‘It is no longer a question of reforming the capitalist order, it is a matter of abolishing this order. … The struggle against capitalism and for socialism is being waged with increasing clarity and determination [by proletarian women] under the banner of the Rätebewegung.’72 The problem, which both USPD and KPD women were well aware of, was that women were pitifully under-represented in the councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies which sprung up all over Germany in the wake of the

Figure 10  Campaigners for the USPD and Luise Zietz during elections to the German National Assembly, January 1919. Reproduced courtesy of the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, Germany, 6/FOTB011628.

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revolution. Indeed, they were even less well represented than in the Weimar National Assembly. A search through the councils formed in twenty-eight major cities in 1918/19, for instance, has uncovered only fifty women members. In Greater Berlin, of the 276 members of factory councils (Betriebsräte), only five were women. The central council and the executive council for Greater Berlin with twenty-seven and twenty-eight members each had no women at all, while a mere two of the 489 delegates who attended the Reich Conference of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils in Berlin in December 1918 were women.73 Throughout 1919 socialist women put forward various suggestions for how to remedy this.74 Representing the KPD and its Central Committee, Clara Zetkin recognized the importance of agitational work among proletarian housewives and wage earners but remained adamantly opposed to any move to recognize women as an independent interest group, separate to men and free to join in common cause with their ‘bourgeois’ sisters in the fight for gender and sexual equality, on the grounds that this would not be ‘in the interests of [class] solidarity’.75 The one set of proposals that drew the most attention, however, came in the form of a speech made by the radical leftist and member of the Frankfurt City Parliament Toni Sender (1888–1964) at the Women’s Congress of the USPD in Leipzig in November 1919. In it, she made a strong call for the guaranteed representation of women in the Betriebsräte according to their relative strengths in the workforce, and for efforts to include homeworkers, domestic servants and proletarian housewives in the councils. However, rather than supporting the notion of separate women’s councils, she suggested that – as in Austria – special electoral colleges of housewives should send delegates to ‘all plenary sessions of the Betriebsräte … in order to learn from men and their battles’.76 The bigger purpose – as in Russia and Austria – was to integrate women into the production process, to discipline them and increase their class consciousness by involving them in the struggle for equal pay, while at the same time convincing the men ‘that their quality of life will not be diminished, but rather will be increased, if their wives become something more than mere domestic work slaves [nur rein Arbeitswesen]’.77 Even so, Sender was willing to criticize the previous lack of representation of women in the councils, and the lack of opposition to the demobilization decrees, which she saw as handing a gift to the ‘bourgeois’ parties and the Majority Social Democrats to win proletarian women away from the revolutionary idea. ‘As socialists’, she concluded, ‘we demand the fundamental right to social and human equality above mere political equality’.78

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Sender’s speech was seen as so important to the socialist movement that it was officially endorsed by the central executive (Zentral-Vorstand) of the USPD and later published in pamphlet form. It also received a surprising level of approval in the communist press, even though Sender was in the USPD, not the KPD.79 In fact, many of her proposals were subsequently taken up by the KPD after its merger with the left wing of the USPD.80 However, while the speech appeared to address women’s concerns, what is most striking is Sender’s unwavering insistence that women must learn political consciousness from (older) men and their experiences of class struggle in the workplace. While she touched upon women’s personal experiences of the war on the home front, and claimed that it was these experiences which revolutionized them and spurned them on to demand a radical transformation of social conditions, ultimately she gave the revolution itself a decidedly male character: The revolution has begun under the sign of the red flag … and in the widest circles of workers the burning demand for the long-promised socialisation of industry can no longer be extinguished …! The war, the wretched life of the ‘common’ soldier in the trenches, while the majority of officers lived in relative comfort behind the staging areas or in secure dug-outs, has increased awareness of social differences. The worker no longer wishes to produce things for the profits of business. He has not become languid, but he simply wants to ensure that the fruits of his labour go towards the benefit of all the workers!81

So while Sender wished to encourage more equal female representation in the Räte, and while she was willing – like many other socialist campaigners in Russia, Austria and Germany – to ‘rap men’s knuckles’82 over their prejudices towards women workers, she continued to place men in the vanguard of the revolution and to marginalize the importance of working-class women’s personal and more fragmented experiences of the war. More than this, she gave a privileged position to the experience of the front-line soldier, who, as Ziemann has shown, tended in the years 1917–18 to support the (M)SPD rather than the USPD, and to criticize the January 1918 strikes as the work of a ‘feminised’, undisciplined, less deserving and less politically worthy home front.83 In this sense she did little to challenge deference to male norms or the gendered division between the fronts during and after the First World War. Nonetheless, she did at least assert that it was not just men who were entitled to participation and leadership in the imagined socialist Germany of the future. This was to be a revolution that would mobilize proletarian women too, and help them to transform their lives as workers and citizens.

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Socialist women’s international anti-war activism and attitudes to violence While revolutionary organs like socialist parties and workers’ councils offered some, albeit limited, space for socialist women to assert notions of citizenship at national level, another potential site of activity and protest lay in the sphere of international protest against war and militarism. The notion of proletarian internationalism had strong roots going back into the nineteenth century, but had suffered a severe setback in August 1914 when social democratic parties across Europe (with some notable exceptions, such as the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Independent Labour Party in Britain) had voted in favour of their respective national war efforts.84 At the same time, the experience of war and revolution in the years 1914–20 led to a complete rethink of the whole notion of internationalism, with the communist version emerging from the Russian revolution to compete with a more liberal Western version based on collective security through the League of Nations and a radical pacifist version which attracted the allegiance of a small number of mainly middle-class feminist activists. The latter organized an International Women’s Congress at The Hague in April–May 1915, followed by further congresses after the war, including one in Zurich in May 1919 and another in Vienna in July 1921.85 The same period also saw some significant changes in the socialist women’s movement’s relationship to internationalism. During the war working-class women activists to the left of the conventional social democratic parties played a leading role in keeping cross-border networks of socialists alive, including acting as members of the Zimmerwald movement and its Leninist off-shoot, the Zimmerwald Left. Women socialists had also staged their own conference at Berne in March 1915, although, unlike the feminist pacifists who met at The Hague and went on to form the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), they refused to organize separately from (socialist) men and did not formulate their understanding of internationalism around gender difference or the suffrage question. The thirty or so delegates who met at Berne came mostly from Germany, but there were also representatives from Russia, Poland, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and France.86 Gender-specific issues were not discussed. Instead, the resolutions proposed at the conference mirrored splits that were about to take place more broadly within the international socialist movement between ‘Bolsheviks’ calling for an outright rejection of pacifism and the transformation of the war into a ‘revolutionary civil war’, and

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‘centrists’ representing a more moderate position which harked back to the antiwar stance of the pre-war Second International. Towards the end of the conference the more extreme faction, led by the Russian journalist and delegate of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Inessa Armand, tried to secure a revision of the Berne manifesto adopted by the majority of the delegates, on the grounds that a more concerted, militant class-based revolutionary struggle was needed. However, Armand failed to carry the day and instead the Berne manifesto restricted itself to calling on workingclass women across Europe and the wider world to unite in support of the cause of peace while making vague allusions to the longer-term, gradual goal of achieving socialism.87 By doing so, they confirmed an earlier resolution passed by the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1910, which emphasized that women had a ‘“special duty” to resist war’.88 While the Berne manifesto was vital in demonstrating the international and transnational socialist women’s opposition to the war – indeed, delegates at the Berne Conference went so far as to send a message of support to the middleclass peace campaigners’ meeting at the International Congress of Women at The Hague in April–May 1915, a rare example of co-operation between socialist and ‘bourgeois’ movements89 – it was soon overtaken by key events, in particular the two Russian revolutions in 1917, Bolshevik Russia’s withdrawal from the war, the armistice signed on the Western Front in November 1918 and Allied intervention on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War (1917–20). Even before the two Russian revolutions, the Berne manifesto had been subsumed by the Zimmerwald Left, a network of radical socialists from all warring countries which was first formed by a breakaway minority faction at the Zimmerwald Peace Conference in Switzerland, in September 1915 and was the forerunner of the Comintern or Third International formed after the war in 1919. Although largely led by men, much of the underground transnational engagement and cross-border international work of the Zimmerwald Left was carried out by women.90 Its campaigning slogan was already drawn up at an earlier youth conference in Berne in April 1915 which Lenin directed behind the scenes: ‘War against the Imperialist War! War against the Political Truce!’91 In Germany the impact of the Zimmerwald movement was already evident by the end of 1915 when opposition to the wartime understanding with the imperial government became much sharper within the SPD. The split impacted on the women’s movement in the SPD too, ranging from the first protests against the official pro-war policy from women members in Berlin in October

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191592 and Stuttgart in November 1915,93 to the expulsion of Luise Zietz, the only woman member of the SPD executive, in April 1917. In July 1916 police spies in Berlin were already reporting on the appearance of a radical group of women social democrat functionaries, led by Mathilde Wurm, wife of the left-wing Reichstag deputy Emanuel Wurm, who were supposedly seeking to infiltrate and take over the SPD Committee for Greater Berlin and shift its policy in an anti-war and pro-Zimmerwald direction.94 The two leading revolutionary women in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, were also arrested on several occasions during the war, Luxemburg spending a total of more than three years behind bars. In her ‘Junius pamphlet’, published illegally in 1915 and attracting much praise from Lenin, she attacked the policy of national defence pursued by the Majority Social Democrats and called for ‘the creation of a [new] revolutionary International to lead the fight for an alternative’.95 Smaller ‘revolutionary currents’ were evident in Austria too, but here – at least until 1917–18 – the resistance to the moderate pro-war policy of the SDAP was ‘relatively weak’, and manifested itself largely in the desperate act of murder carried out by the radical leftist Friedrich Adler (1879–1960) against the wartime Chancellor Count Karl von Stürgkh in October 1916 – an act denounced by Lenin as ‘immature and counterproductive’.96 Inspired by Adler’s act, the Hungarian woman revolutionary Ilona Duczynska Polanyi (1897–1978) – later to play a key role in Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 before fleeing to Vienna and eventually rejoining the Social Democrats as an ex-communist  – also planned to assassinate Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza in 1917, changing her mind only after his resignation on 15 June.97 Earlier in the war Duczynska had worked with Katja Adler, the wife of Friedrich Adler, to smuggle copies of the Zimmerwald manifesto from Switzerland to Vienna. Here she made contact with other women activists on the left of the SDAP such as Therese Schlesinger, Anna Strö[h]mer and Käthe Pick (Leichter).98 By the time Duczynska had abandoned her assassination plans in Budapest, debate in international socialist circles about the way to re-establish peace and the role of violence in the reordering of society had shifted to Russia owing to the two revolutions there. In the summer of 1917, for instance, Alexandra Kollontai strongly criticized the visit of the British suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst to Petrograd and the support that she gave to the provisional government’s continued contribution to the Allied war effort, while taking care to heap praise on the younger of her two daughters, Sylvia, who stuck by the international socialist and anti-militarist cause. In a booklet entitled ‘Who Needs War?’, Kollontai argues that the class perspective had to come before the

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gender perspective when it came to ending war: ‘If we want peace, we have to put those who started the war on trial. Let everybody struggle in his own country against our oppressors, let’s clear the country of the true enemies of the people: tsars, kings, emperors.’99 This was of course the standard Bolshevik position on anti-militarism, which called for the transformation of the ‘imperialist’ war into a class war in each of the belligerent nations and the mobilization of all resources to these ends. During the Russian Civil War, for instance, the Zhenotdel, under Armand’s and then Kollontai’s leadership, campaigned to encourage women to take part in the armed struggle against the Whites and their Western allies, whether as officers or soldiers serving in uniform, as auxiliaries providing first aid and communication support, or as party cadres working in the political departments of the Red Army. In this sense, they were able to build on an earlier statement from the Petrograd City Conference of the Red Guard in November 1917 that women were already being recruited into its ranks as co-fighters and workers in medical brigades.100 A new journal, Kommunistka (The Woman Communist) was founded in 1920, with the express intention of promoting women’s contribution to the armed defence of the revolution. For one of its first issues, it published an article by Kollontai on ‘class struggle and the woman worker’. In it she argues, under the slogan ‘Through defence of the workers’ republic to the practical realisation of equality!’ that Bolshevism was achieving real female emancipation under the impact of war: Yesterday’s proletarian or peasant woman now leads the army’s political department, holds the position of commissar on the railways, organises food supplies, leads the department for protection of mothers … establishes reading rooms, controls canteens, enlists herself in construction detachments, … takes an active part in all political campaigns of the Republic, fights against devastation, hunger, epidemics. … The woman worker is everywhere where her duty calls her.101

In 1920 the party newspaper Pravda also went out of its way to praise female officers in the Red Army for their ‘boldness, decisiveness, resourcefulness [and] devotion to the revolutionary cause’.102 Such publicity brought results. Indeed, around 79,000 women fought in the Red Army during the Civil War, among them fifty-five who were awarded the Order of the Red Banner.103 From 1920 women members of the party and its youth wing, the Komsomol, were also called on to take part in compulsory military training (the so-called Vseobuch). The first cohort was recruited in May 1920. During their initial training women

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needed to live in barracks for a month, learn to shoot with a rifle and listen to lectures by Bolshevik propagandists. Alongside this military mobilization, women’s direct membership of the party increased, although piecing together accurate figures is a difficult exercise. According to a census conducted in early 1922, the Bolsheviks had 30,547 women in their ranks, 29,172 of whom had been recruited in the period since February 1917. However, if this seems like an impressive tally, it still meant that fewer than one in twelve party members were women.104 The involvement of socialist women in armed struggle also had an international dimension and an impact on the revolutionary imagination outside of Russia’s borders. In Germany, for instance, in the parties to the left of the SPD there was a broad consensus in the years 1918–20 that proletarian power needed defending and protecting from internal and external enemies, by force of arms if necessary.105 In Berlin, Cläre Derfert-Casper, the metal workers functionary who had been radicalized by her involvement in the January 1918 strikes, risked her life to hide weapons on behalf of the revolutionary shop stewards, having come to the conclusion that the SPD and the ‘right-wing trade union bosses’ [rechte Gewerkschaftsbonzen] would never stand up in support of the working masses. This was obvious, for instance, when in late December 1918 units of the old army, under the command of General Lequis, were ordered to

Figure 11  Soviet Russian women soldiers c.1922. Reproduced courtesy of Alamy Images, EC85R8. Contributor: World History Archive.

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clear the former royal palace in Berlin of members of the revolutionary People’s Naval Division, a move undertaken in agreement with SPD leader and chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, Friedrich Ebert. In Derfert-Casper’s view, armed resistance against the authorities was the only way to bring an end to the violence meted out by the capitalist system towards workers and their families. On Christmas Eve, she was present when Spartacist and pro-USPD demonstrators converged on the royal palace in order to block Lequis’ advance and then went on to seize control of the headquarters of the SPD’s newspaper, Vorwärts, situated on Lindenstrasse, a few blocks away. Later, in early January 1919, several of her male comrades took part in the fighting around the newspaper quarter in Berlin between pro-government troops and Spartacist rebels, using the illegal weapons that she had helped to supply.106 During the Russian Civil War, USPD and KPD women were also clearly on the side of Reds (unlike the leading USPD Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky who had already broken with the Bolsheviks in 1919).107 There was much praise too for the female contribution to the Red Army and its war effort, in marked contrast to pre-1914 notions of socialist women’s ‘“special duty” to resist war’.108 At home there was support for the use of force to get rid of the leaders of the old bourgeois parties, reactionary bureaucrats from the Imperial era, members of the old officer corps and other ‘useless persons’.109 In Dachau, near Munich, women workers at the wartime Munitions Works (Pulverfabrik) helped the ‘Reds’ to win a short-lived military victory in mid-April 1919 against reactionary troops loyal to the former government by surrounding and disarming several ‘White’ officers and by persuading some of the solders to lay down their arms. When Red Guardists arrived on the scene, they were handed 150 prisoners, several machine guns and four artillery weapons which had been captured in these earlier skirmishes.110 The USPD activist Toni Sender, in her memoirs, also recalled that the feeling among leftists in Frankfurt am Main during the monarchist Kapp Putsch of March 1920 was that the brutal methods of the regular army had to be met by arming the workers and that the second revolution ‘had to take power away from the Putschists’, just as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in October 1917, shortly after the Kornilov affair. ‘No revolution can succeed without revolutionizing the military,’ she noted.111 What seemed to create new divisions over the use of violence was the Polish– Soviet war of 1920–1 and in particular the surprising, albeit temporary, success of the Red Army in pushing forward to the gates of Warsaw by early August 1920. Zietz, Sender and others came out against Russian ‘terroristic methods’ which were seen as a threat to international socialism and to the independence

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of the German and other national parties.112 By contrast, the rhetoric in Die Kommunistin indicates a renewed determination to remove the association between proletarian women and a pacifist refusal to engage in violence. ‘Of course we despise war,’ Clara Zetkin told delegates at the Women’s Congress of the United German Communist Party in December 1920, before adding, ‘But our enemies will not grant us peace, and instead we must fight to the death for peace, man and woman!’113 Russian women who had received military training in the Red Army, she said, were a spur to class-conscious German women ‘not to be sentimental, but to be ready for the fight, up for the fight, willing to engage in the fight’ [nicht sentimental, sondern kampfesmutig, kampferfüllt, kampfeswillig].114 Henriette Roland-Holst (1869–1952) likewise praised violence and Bolshevik terror as a ‘creative force’ in an article in June 1921, arguing in truly Orwellian fashion that because the Red Army was on the side of the people it was a force not for ‘bourgeois’ militarism but for ‘proletarian’ anti-militarism: It is a tool not for the oppression of the working masses, but its salvation. And we communist women, as great as our instinctive rejection of violence and bloodletting is, we should honour and love the soldiers in the Red Army, who sacrifice their lives so that the bigger cause, the new society, should grow and live.115

And Ruth Fischer took this one step further, stating at a meeting of the KPD’s Central Committee (Zentralausschuss) in November 1921 that a workers’ government in Germany could only be established ‘following a [period of] civil war [and] armed struggle’.116 Approval or rejection of violence thus became a crucial way for socialist women to assert their identities as socialists and internationalists, but in a manner which after 1920 led to further fragmentation on the left and a partial reaffirmation of the gendered expectation that men were the fighters, women the followers. In particular, as Benjamin Ziemann rightly suggests, the intense fighting in the Ruhr area of Germany in the spring of 1920 between radicalized workers and units of the Reichswehr deployed by the Berlin government can be interpreted in part as a sign that the frequent class injustices that many male proletarian soldiers had experienced while serving in the wartime military had not been forgiven or forgotten by a significant minority on the revolutionary left.117 For members of the Red Army of the Ruhr, in other words, class war had nothing to do with aspirations for gender equality. And yet in Bolshevik and far-left circles more generally after 1917, ‘possession of guns’ and support for violence was not solely a masculine – or soldierly – affair.118 In revolutionary Russia carrying a firearm became a ‘status symbol’ for

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party members of both sexes, an entitlement introduced during the Civil War even for those Bolsheviks who did not join the ranks of the Red Army.119 For KPD women – ever anxious to follow the Bolshevik lead – hiding or supplying weapons for use in post-war communist insurrections and the removal of inhibitions about bloodshed became a way of demarcating themselves from all traces of ‘bourgeois’ ideology, particularly after the radical feminist WILPF, at its July 1921 Vienna Congress approved a resolution, by a narrow majority of one vote, repudiating violence even in the cause of social justice.120 Communist internationalism now clearly distinguished itself from a defining ‘other’, namely pacifist internationalism.121 For moderate USPD women, on the other hand, the rejection of force and a return to pre-war notions of internationalism were made easier by the shock and horror at the murder of the ‘bourgeois’, non-socialist German foreign minister Walther Rathenau by anti-Semitic assassins in June 1922. It was this event, above all else, which finally persuaded radical socialist campaigners like Toni Sender that the Weimar Republic was worth defending against the threat of right-wing political extremism, and that the only way to achieve this was through a reunification of the two social democratic parties, the SPD and the USPD.122 The return of moderate USPD women to the SPD in July–September 1922 was a significant moment, allowing them to come to terms with the parliamentary system in Germany and put the era of revolutionary turmoil behind them, as indeed their social democratic counterparts in Austria were able to do between the defeat of the last attempted communist uprising in Vienna in June 1919 and the onset of a new period of intermittent civil unrest from 1927 to 1934.123 But it also came at a price. Indeed, when searching for a model for female participation in revolution, socialist women in both countries hardly looked back to the immediate post-war years with a sense of pride or satisfaction. By the mid-1920s, neither obtaining the vote and the first women MPs, nor the memory of the wartime strikes and the emergence of the councils’ movement as ‘fighting organs’ of the working class, and still less the radical uprising led by the ‘Red Army of the Ruhr’ in 1920, were easy to connect with the achievement of ‘concrete steps towards gender equality’.124 Instead, social democratic women in Austria and Germany, when looking for historical moments to inspire them, had to go back much further in time, to the years 1848–9. It was then – in the words of a female writer for the SDAP’s main newspaper, the Arbeiterzeitung, in March 1928 – that the ‘laughed at and slandered columns of women’ who fought on the barricades of Vienna, Berlin and Budapest paved the way for the disciplined, class-conscious ‘body of women … who today stand behind

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the red flag’.125 By contrast, those women who did remember the international revolutionary struggles of 1917–20 with a sense of pride and achievement were usually communists – and they were the ones who marched not only behind the red flag but also behind the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

Communist women between vision and reality After 1920 what Jochen Böhler calls the ‘enduring violence’ of the ‘post-war struggles in East-Central Europe’126 forced Bolshevik women leaders in Russia and communist women in Austria and Germany to consider the broader dilemma as to whether revolutionary ends could ever justify violent and terroristic means – or, in other words, whether the utopian ‘dreamworld’ of history leaping forward to a new stage of human development could help to justify a present ‘reality of oppression’ and ‘arbitrary violence’ against ‘bourgeois’, ‘counter-revolutionary’ and pacifist elements.127 The evidence that we have seen so far suggests that they did, but this begs the question as to whether they also recognized that violence and the resort to arms in defence of Soviet power ultimately helped to consolidate male privilege and entrench gender inequality – with the ‘new man’ held up as a normative ‘model of bodily discipline’ willing to forge himself as a soldier in the Red Army, or a class-conscious member of the proletariat willing to become a ‘creative instrument’ of the party and the revolution.128 Unfortunately there is little evidence of transnational or crossparty dialogue on these questions. Rather, for communist women, the rhetoric of revolutionary struggle and emancipation through class solidarity and engagement in productive labour prevented discussions with social democratic women, let alone those representing ‘bourgeois’ or feminist groups. One set of communist utopian ideas which we know to have crossed borders relates to Ruth Fischer’s work on communism and sexual ethics. Here the Austrian-turned-German communist developed some radical ideas about free love and the importance of sexual liberation for women as well as men under socialism. Her vision of a future communist society was profoundly radical, and included ‘the complete independence of sex from economic life [and] complete freedom for the individual to choose the form of sexual life that most suits them, whether this be promiscuity, polygamy or monogamy’.129 Citing Engels, she provides a theoretical justification for her views: ‘At the psychological root of capitalism, at the very heart of its existence, lies the bourgeois family. …

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Whoever destroys [the family] also shakes the very foundations of bourgeois society.’130 Free love was necessary, in her view, if communism was to fulfil its ‘historic task’ of destroying ‘bourgeois order’: Only when the entire rotten construction which is known today as ‘social order’ collapses will our painful ordeal be over and the path set free for us to reach a still unimaginable, but nonetheless tantalisingly close realm of new beauty, new freedom, new happiness and new culture.131

In Berlin such words contributed to her position as an ‘idolized’ figure within the KPD’s ultra-left opposition faction in the early 1920s.132 However, Lenin, speaking in conversation with Clara Zetkin during the latter’s autumn 1920 visit to the Kremlin in her capacity as secretary of the Comintern’s International Women’s Secretariat (IWS), disapproved: It is said that a pamphlet on the sex question written by a Communist authoress from Vienna enjoys the greatest popularity. What rot that booklet is! The workers read what is right [about sex] long ago in Bebel. Only not in the tedious, cutand-dried form found in the pamphlet but in the form of gripping agitation that strikes out at bourgeois society. … I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problem. … It springs from the desire to justify one’s own abnormal or excessive sex life before bourgeois morality and to plead for tolerance towards oneself. This veiled respect for bourgeois morality is as repugnant to me as rooting about in all that bears on sex. No matter how rebellious it may be made to appear, it is in the final analysis thoroughly bourgeois. … There is no room for it in the Party, among the class-conscious fighting proletariat.133

During the Ruhr crisis of 1923 Fischer again adopted an ultra-left stance, depicting the national struggle against the French and Belgian military occupiers as an opportunity to establish a new international workers’ republic on German soil through the use of revolutionary military force and rejecting any co-operation with the SPD on the grounds that this would be a deliberate avoidance of the need for civil war. For a brief period from 1924, she in effect led the KPD alongside Arkadi Maslov, but she was removed from office in October 1925 and expelled from the party for good in September 1926 – on the instructions of the ECCI, the Comintern’s Executive Committee, which now demanded full subservience to Moscow.134 In May 1925, the Comintern decided to downgrade its International Women’s Secretariat so that it was now known simply as the ‘women’s section’ of the ECCI and lost much of its previous dynamism. The IWS’s earlier position, which followed Lenin’s line in his aforementioned conversation

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with Zetkin, was most forcefully put in point six of the ‘Theses for Propaganda among Women’ adopted by the Third World Congress of the Comintern in 1921: ‘Women’s struggle against their double oppression – capitalism and family and domestic dependency – must, in the next phase of its development, take on an international character as it transforms itself into a struggle of the proletariat of both sexes for dictatorship and the Soviet regime.’135 By the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, however, even the Soviet Union and the Comintern no longer believed in the possibility of imminent world revolution. Traditional attitudes towards gender order began to reassert themselves too. The impact that this had can be seen in a curious incident in the KPD in 1925 when Fischer was still leader. In 1924 the German communists had set up a Red Front Fighters’ League (Roter Frontkämpferbund, RFKB) which initially included women; but at the Tenth Party Congress in July 1925 Fischer announced that henceforth women would have to be recruited into a separate body since ‘the admission of women [into the RFKB] contradicts the military character of the organisation’.136 A similar move was made in the mid-1920s inside the two main pro-republican paramilitary groups in Germany and Austria, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold and the Republikanischer Schutzbund, both of which closed their doors to female members and developed a ‘masculine aesthetic’ based on the ‘idealized figure of the worker’.137 The gendered division between the fronts  – men as proletarian heroes and fighters, women as nurturers and supporters – which had to some extent fallen by the wayside during the 1917– 20 period was now more or less fully restored, even if communist newspapers such as Die Arbeiterin in Austria continued to advocate the arming of women in response to exceptional threats from ‘counter-revolutionary’ forces and rightwing militia groups. The IWS – which was founded by the ECCI in April 1920 with Zetkin as its first secretary – could also easily be dismissed as a tool of the masculine political leadership of the Third International. Some activists even questioned whether women’s interests needed separate representation at all. Nonetheless the IWS enjoyed some freedoms in its first few years, until it was downgraded to a mere ‘section’ of the ECCI in 1925.138 In the winter of 1922–3, for instance, as part of its strategy for mobilizing proletarian women inside and outside of Russia’s borders, it directed international campaigns on inflation, wages, education and anti-abortion laws, working directly with women’s commissions in national communist parties. Communist women and their newspapers, guided by Zetkin’s monthly German-language periodical Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale,139 not only backed this call for greater participation by

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Figure 12  Front cover of the Austrian communist women’s newspaper Die Arbeiterin: Organ für die Interessen der werktätigen Frauen in Österreich, vol. 6, no. 11, November 1929. ANNO/Austrian National Library, http://anno.onb.ac.at/

women in class struggles and in the marking of International Women’s Day, but also launched further campaigns demanding the protection of prostitutes from ‘capitalist exploitation’ and the abolition of police control and regulation in all countries, while praising the Soviet Union’s efforts to ‘open childcare facilities, communal kitchens, and recreational facilities for working women’ as the best means of ending women’s economic and sexual exploitation.140 They cited approvingly from a resolution adopted by the first All-Russian Congress of Women Workers and Peasants in November 1918 which called for prostitution to be eliminated across the world through social measures including ‘the replacement of the bourgeois family with free marriage and equal pay for equal work’.141 They opposed family and abortion legislation that they felt upheld the moral inconsistencies of the ‘bourgeois’ state, but supported measures that

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seemed to move in the direction of greater state control of health and welfare, for instance the new Midwifery Reform Law in Prussia in 1922.142 In general, and particularly through Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale, Zetkin encouraged the International Communist Women’s movement to follow ‘the progress of [non-communist] women’s movements’ and to offer a more radical and ‘progressive’ alternative to them, based on the Soviet model of female emancipation.143 Not all national communist parties had women’s committees or sections, however, and even those that did often failed to devote sufficient resources to them. In her report to the Third World Congress of the Comintern in June 1921, Zetkin remarked that only the Russian, German and Bulgarian parties had succeeded in involving women fully in the communist movement by encouraging the formation of women’s committees and by offering them the ‘freedom to take initiatives’ and ‘some scope for their activity’. She complained that the majority of communist parties were indifferent or even hostile to this task, and urged ‘men, with their greater political experience and knowledge’, not to exclude themselves from organizational ‘work among women’.144 Inside Russia, too, the ending of the Civil War in 1920 and the transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, rather than creating new opportunities for women to participate in the construction of socialism, strengthened gender prejudices in the regional party organizations and led to a new wave of Zhenotdel closures as it was considered that these organs had already fulfilled their tasks. While it was claimed – following the theories of Bebel – that the availability of divorce and the removal of any legal distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children had helped to rid Russia of the last vestiges of ‘feudal’ and ‘bourgeois’ privilege based on ownership of property, in practice women were still expected to take on the bulk of household chores. Worse still, NEP also led to mass unemployment among women, with those working in the spheres of administration, medicine, communications, consumer industries and education particularly affected.145 As women’s contribution to the non-household waged economy dwindled, and as their economic dependency on men increased, it became easier to argue that there was no need to invest additional party or state resources in organizing them. After 1921 factory managers in Soviet Russia gave priority to Red Army soldiers returning from the Civil War, and saw their unskilled female labour force as easily expendable (‘last hired, first fired’). Mass poverty meanwhile led to a significant rise in prostitution, although as Elizabeth Waters points out, communist activists like Kollontai were anxious not to put any moral blame

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on the prostitutes themselves by reintroducing ‘hypocritical’ bourgeois laws that regulated the sale of sex by impoverished working-class women but not its purchase by financially more secure men.146 Even so, as the Soviet grip on power became stronger, it became more and more conservative, both in terms of domestic legislation and international revolutionary policy. Kollontai’s dispatch to Oslo, first as part of a Soviet trade delegation in the autumn of 1922, and then as ambassador from February 1924, meant that she was increasingly sidelined from internal affairs.147 In 1926, as we have seen, the IWS was also renamed (and downgraded). As the ‘women’s section’ of the ECCI, it managed to stage two international conferences in Moscow, in 1927 and 1930, involving delegations from the women’s departments of various national communist parties, but its function was purely decorative and it lacked the clout of the IWS. In November 1935 it too was dissolved.148 In the Soviet Union itself, many bold gender social experiments were postponed and later forgotten, including the 1918 Family Code which was superseded by a new code in 1926 and done away with almost completely under Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. The ‘reversal in family law’, which saw an increasing intervention of the state in the spheres of reproduction, divorce and marital and parental ‘responsibility’, culminated in the ban on abortion in 1936 and the introduction of a new, highly authoritarian Family Code in 1944.149 Yet if, by the mid-1920s, it was increasingly difficult to connect the ideas of socialist revolution and gender equality, what made communist women look back on the immediate post-war period as an era promising ‘something new and fascinating, something different … a better world’?150 What did they imagine that socialism would bring? Were its proposals for ‘abolishing the privileges of men’ by abolishing the privileges of property, regarded as properly ‘scientific’? Or utopian ‘castles in the air’? Or both?151 And most importantly of all, how did left-wing women activists fit their experiences of revolution into their broader experiences of the twentieth century, including the era of the First World War?

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, historians face a number of obstacles when trying to assess the role played by women activists in the revolutions of 1917–20 and their aftermath. Accounts that seek to write a purely institutional history of

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the revolutions, or a history of the leading protagonists, immediately come up against the undeniable fact that there were very few women in leadership roles in any of the socialist or communist parties of Central or Eastern Europe, and a pitifully small female representation in the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Scholars focused on the social and cultural history of war, on the other hand, have remained preoccupied with the near universality of the experience of mourning and grief and the undoubted shadow which it cast over women’s lives and their readiness for political action in particular. Finally, ever since the 1960s, historical writing on the revolutions has tended to be framed around the questions of ‘failure’ and ‘missed opportunities’ rather than questions of cultural breaks and upheavals. ‘Failure’ here has been interpreted both in an immediate sense (the crushing of councils and strike movements in Germany; the loss of power by social democrat parties at the national level in both Austria and Germany by 1920) and in the long term (the failure of the ‘Soviet experiment’; the alleged continuities between Leninist and Stalinist terror or between Marxist understandings of history and the Gulag). Against the background of this linear approach to revolution, depicted as a narrow series of political events ending in triumph or disillusion, or in victory or defeat for a new anti-Western/anticapitalist/anti-Christian ideology in the shape of Bolshevism, it is easy to see why the question of female subjectivity, agency and experience has all too often been neglected. Some of these barriers can be overcome, however, if we adopt the suggestions recently made by Kathleen Canning and Stefan Berger for ‘recontexualising’ and ‘resituating’ the revolutions as broader social and ‘imaginary’ events.152 The first of these is a proposal to recast the entire period from 1905 to the mid1920s as an era of sustained and serious challenges to the existing ‘bourgeois’ economic and political order at the national, regional and global levels. These challenges incorporate both the conscious threat posed by the organized international socialist movement – including, before 1914, its largely separate women’s movement – and the unprecedented set of demands posed by the mass mobilization of huge numbers of civilians as well as soldiers during the three or four years of the First World War. Such an approach also allows us to understand the different experiential and temporal frameworks that women brought to revolution. Some, including Alexandra Kollontai and Clara Zetkin, were longterm socialist activists with a firm theoretical understanding of historical events, including the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, and a solid grounding in Marxist teachings and organizational practice. Others, however – such as the Berlin

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activists Martha Globig and Franziska Rubens mentioned at the beginning of this essay, and the revolutionary shop steward leader Cläre Derfert-Casper – became spontaneous participants in social protest as a result of radicalization through their experiences.153 Among these experiences were not only despairinducing hunger and war-weariness on the home front but also a feeling of alienation from established social democratic parties and trade unions, with their largely male-centred, organizationally rigid and politically timid way of confronting the abuses of state authority and economic injustice. Particularly objectionable to revolutionary women was a tendency among wartime and postwar social democratic leaders to hold fast to outmoded ‘distinctions between home/factory’ of the kind that underpinned labour struggles and notions of ‘masculine’ productivity in the workplace before the war, even if it is true that parties and unions further to the left were also largely dominated by men and male-led agendas.154 The second terrain for exploring women’s agency in revolution is to place it in the context of a radical challenge not only to the political and economic order but also to the state and state power as it existed in Europe after three or four years of war. Violence is a crucial part of this story. During the war, belligerent states had acquired extensive new powers to crush political dissent and control female sexuality and reproduction in the name not just of (male) private property, but of ‘military necessity’ and defence of national or imperial ‘security’.155 Nonetheless, as we have seen, socialist women were more than just hapless victims of gender-specific state coercion. They fought back, and were sometimes willing to endorse violence as a means of doing so. Revolution was expected by its female as well as male protagonists to deal a crushing blow to the moral, social and political foundations of the pre-war world. Ruth Fischer was indeed not the only woman activist to envisage the overthrow of bourgeois sexual morals and the ‘socialisation of the family’ as the cornerstone of a future socialist society. Even those who deliberately distanced themselves from the Bolshevik model still believed they were living in unprecedented times in which anything could happen. The Austrian activist Therese Schlesinger, writing in the SDAP journal Der Kampf in April 1919, argued that the post-war goal of socialism was to channel the will of ‘all those exploited towards the same ends’ and to ‘transform this will into power’.156 Yet power here was not just imagined in narrow political or organizational terms (the battle for control of public bodies or spaces such as factories, parliaments and newspaper buildings) but also in terms of gender and social order.157

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What this might mean in practice can be seen in a regional German example from 1920. On 6 December 1920 the USPD in Frankfurt am Main organized a big protest against the state secretary in the Reich Office of Interior, Theodor Lewald, who had made a statement in the German Reichstag defending the continued practice of dismissing unmarried mothers from state employment. The protestors argued that such measures were illegal under Articles 119, 121 and 128 of the Reich constitution of August 1919, and, more importantly, that they were a product of an unacceptable wartime prejudice shared by ‘men in general, but also “upright” bourgeois women [who] see in the unmarried mother an inferior being and at the same time an unwelcome competitor’. Women, it was asserted, were now equal citizens with the same civic rights and duties as men, irrespective of marital status. The revolution had established an egalitarian vision of a new society in which class and sex discrimination would no longer be acceptable in the work place and the family, as they had been in the past.158 The final terrain on which women’s agency might be recast was mass participation in the process of social and political transformation (even if participation did not always bring with it equal representation or broader emancipation). The strikes and street demonstrations of 1916, which grew in number in 1917 and 1918, were essentially protests against poor living conditions, and in particular the price of food, but increasingly these actions turned against the war itself and the old regimes that kept it in operation. As members of strike movements and revolutionary crowds, socialist women symbolized the collapse of traditional authority and what Kathleen Canning calls the various ‘states of exception’ that existed between 1914 and 1920.159 They also demonstrated the link between citizenship, war and revolution, in the sense that the former had brought forth the novelty of the woman munitions worker and metal worker – a figure who already stood outside of prevailing gender norms and threatened older patterns of collective bargaining and older understandings of ‘discipline’ and hierarchy, both within the family and the workplace.160 Finally, the hundreds and thousands of socialist women who took part in strikes and demonstrations embodied the ‘mass’ nature of war and revolution, and with it a radical potential for new forms of involvement in public life, often in direct competition with established organizations like official trade unions and in defiance of the conventional norms of social behaviour. In particular, before 1914 ‘women were always forced to take their concerns to the male union leaders’. The war, and the industrial unrest and associated political protest that took place in its last two years, changed this.161

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Admittedly, it is important not to exaggerate the longer-term emancipatory impact of the strike waves of 1917 and 1918 for gender relations within socialist movements. In 1917–20 the fighting units of the Red Army in Russia, and the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Germany and Austria were dominated by men; women usually played subordinate or invisible roles, for instance as secretaries rather than actual delegates.162 Gender stereotypes of women as ‘apolitical’ or ‘domestic’ were revived in male socialist circles after 1920 and contributed to a situation in which women were either ignored or rendered harmless through being cast as ‘martyrs’ or ‘nurturers’ of the revolutionary movement.163 Nonetheless, socialist women campaigners continued to demand action on a range of issues of national and international concern, such as factory conditions, wages, housework, prostitution and sexual exploitation; and they continued to position and represent themselves in the vanguard fighting for peace, democracy and social justice, a battle which did not end with the formal cessation of hostilities in November 1918 (or with the Red victory in the Civil War in Russia in 1920). For some women, the opportunities created by these campaigns were emancipatory and led to the development of new forms of political consciousness. Indeed, alongside the more universal experience of mourning for the dead and rebuilding families and communities, spaces did exist within wartime and post-war socialist movements – and even within workers’ councils and military formations – for the expression of female aspirations for equality, citizenship and public engagement within a radically changed social order. These aspirations were marginalized after 1920 and especially after 1923, but nonetheless were remembered and cultivated under the surface, during the Stalinist period and beyond.

Notes 1 ‘Erinnerungen Franziska Rubens’, no date, in Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv Berlin (henceforth SAPMOBArch), SgY 30/0787, pp. 4–5. 2 On the Sektor Erinnerungen in the East German central party archive and its role in ‘disciplin[ing] longtime [party] cadres’ see Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and their Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 134 and 194–8. 3 ‘Erinnerungen Franziska Rubens’, p. 4. 4 Gabriella Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades: Women’s Movements and the “Austrian Revolution”. Gender in Insurrection, the Räte Movement, Parties and Parliament’,

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Women Activists between War and Peace in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 221–43 (here pp. 227 and 231). Wolfgang Maderthaner, ‘Utopian Perspectives and Political Restraint: The Austrian Revolution in the Context of Central European Conflicts’, in Günter Bischof, Fritz Plasser and Peter Berger (eds), From Empire to Republic: PostWorld War I Austria (New Orleans, LA: University of New Orleans Press, 2010), pp. 52–66 (here p. 53). Richard Bessel, ‘Revolution’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. II: The State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 126–44 (here p. 142). Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Weimar was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic’, German History, 28/4 (2010), pp. 542–71 (here p. 549). Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Germany 1914-1918: Total War as a Catalyst of Change’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 378–99 (here pp. 387–8). See also Ziemann, Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg: Töten – Überleben – Verweigern (Essen: Klartext, 2013), esp. pp. 120–33. Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914-1923, translated by Alex Skinner (Oxford: Berg, 2007) [1997], pp. 162–3. See also Elisabeth Domansky, ‘Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany’, in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 427–63 (here pp. 458–9). Stefan Berger, ‘Commentary’, in Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn (eds), Germany, 1916-23: A Revolution in Context (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 251–6 (here p. 252). See also Kathleen Canning, ‘“Sexual Crisis,” the Writing of Citizenship, and the States of Exception in Germany, 19141920’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), pp. 169–213 (here esp. p. 188). Such accusations even found their way into agitational literature aimed at socialist women. See for example ‘General Principles for Agitation Among Women’ adopted in December 1920 by the KPD at its unification conference with the left-wing of the USPD, in Ben Fowkes (ed.), The German Left and the Weimar Republic: A Selection of Documents (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015), pp. 256–60 (here esp. pp. 258–9). Olga Shnyrova, ‘Feminism and Suffrage in Russia: Women, War and Revolution, 1914-1917’, in Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 124–40 (here pp. 130–1).

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13 Peter Gatrell, ‘The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 1914-1917’, in Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 198–215 (here p. 211). 14 See Olga Shnyrova, ‘After the Vote was Won: The Fate of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Russia after the October Revolution’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 159–77 (here pp. 160–1). 15 Poliksena Shishkina-Yavein, ‘Activities of the Russian League of Women’s Rights during the War’, Jus Suffragii, 11/4 (January 1917), p. 56. 16 Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (London: UCL Press, 1999), pp. 159–61. 17 Shnyrova, ‘Feminism and Suffrage in Russia’, p. 137. 18 McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution, p. 158. 19 Shnyrova, ‘After the Vote was Won’, p. 163. 20 McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution, pp. 171–2. 21 Ibid., pp. 74, 158 and 161. See also Moira Donald, ‘Bolshevik Activity Amongst the Working Women of Petrograd in 1917’, International Review of Social History, 27/2 (1982), pp. 129–60 (here esp. pp. 141–5). 22 For further details see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–3 and 48–57. 23 Helen McCarthy, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 93–8. 24 August Bebel, Women in the Past, Present and Future, translated by H. B. Adams Walther (London, 1885), here esp. pp. 43–68. The German original was published in 1879 under the title Die Frau und der Sozialismus. 25 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, translated by Alick West, revised by Dona Torr (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940). The German original was published in 1884 under the title Die Ursprünge der Familie, des privaten Eigenthums und des Staates: Im Anschluss an Lewis H. Morgans Forschungen. 26 On Zetkin’s ideas, especially as expressed in her 1889 pamphlet The Question of Women Workers and Women at the Present Time, see Werner Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German Social Democracy, 1863-1933, translated by Joris de Bres (London: Pluto Press, 1973)[1969], pp. 44–5 (here p. 45). 27 Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, p. 5. See also Goldman’s very useful analysis of the ideas of Bebel, Engels and Zetkin in ibid., pp. 36–43. 28 Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 132–3.

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29 Donald, ‘Bolshevik Activity’, pp. 145–8 and 152. 30 McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution, pp. 69 and 134–5. 31 On the negative treatment of middle-class feminist campaigners in particular see Shnyrova, ‘After the Vote was Won’, pp. 166–76. 32 Y. M. Sverdlov, Selected articles and speeches (Leningrad and Moscow: Gospolitizdat Publishing House, 1939) pp. 113–14. 33 V. I. Lenin, The Emancipation of Women: From the Writings of V. I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1995) [1934], pp. 59–60. 34 Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, p. 111. 35 Ibid., pp. 111–15 and 338; McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution, pp. 195–6. 36 Concordia Samoilova, Organizatsionnye zadachi otdelov rabotnits (Moscow, 1920), p. 3. 37 Hans Hautmann gives the 3 November as the date of the KPÖ’s foundation – see Hautmann, Die verlorene Räterepublik: Am Beispiel der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschösterreichs (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1971), p. 80. See also Mario Keßler, Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895-1961) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013), p. 42. 38 On Strö[h]mer see Irma Schwager, ‘Anna Hornik-Ströhmer (1890–1966): Eine Frau, die nicht vergessen werden darf ’, Mitteilungen der Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft, 15/4 (2006), p. 21; and ‘Anna Hornik-Ströhmer (1890-1966): Eine Frau plant den Aufstand’, in Frauenreferat der KPÖ (ed.), Frauen der KPÖ: Gespräche und Porträts (Vienna: Globus Verlag, 1989), pp. 12–15. Ströhmer did write a short piece on her involvement in the revolutionary events of 1918 under her marrried name, Hornik, in 1958 – see Anna Hornik, ‘40 Jahre Jännerstreik’, Weg und Ziel: Monatsschrift für Fragen der Demokratie und des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus, 16/1 (1958), pp. 46–51. However, publications by her are otherwise sparse. 39 Ruth Fischer, ‘Die Geschichte der Begründung und Betätigung der Kommunistischen Partei’, speech to the first party conference of the KP(D)Ö, 9 February 1919. Reproduced in Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde (eds), Kampfname Ruth Fischer: Wandlungen einer deutschen Kommunistin (Frankfurt/ Main: Dipa Verlag, 1995), pp. 93–8 (here p. 95). 40 Francis L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918-1919 (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 229. This number had admittedly fallen to 10,000 by August 1919 – see Keßler, Ruth Fischer, p. 63. 41 Fischer, ‘Die Geschichte der Begründung und Betätigung der Kommunistischen Partei’, p. 97. 42 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 233. 43 Paul Pasteur, ‘Femmes dans le mouvement ouvrier autrichien 1918-1934’ (PhD thesis, Université de Rouen, 1986), pp. 301–4.

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44 Ibid., pp. 270–301. Die Arbeiterin, 1924–1931, should not be confused with the SDAP’s Die Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, 1892–1924. 45 Hautmann, Die verlorene Räterepublik. 46 Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, p. 30; Barbara Jelavich, Modern Austria: Empire and Republic, 1815-1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 154. 47 Hannes Leidinger and Verena Moritz, Gefangenschaft, Revolution und Heimkehr: Die Bedeutung der Kriegsgefangenenproblematik für die Geschichte des Kommunismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1917–1920 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003). 48 Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Women’s Citizenship and the First World War: General Remarks and a Case Study of Women’s Enfranchisement in Austria and Germany’, Women’s History Review, 25/2 (2016), pp. 274–95 (here p. 281). 49 Hannes Leidinger and Verena Moritz, Der Erste Weltkrieg (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011), pp. 64–5. 50 Rudolf Neck (ed.), Österreich im Jahre 1918: Berichte und Dokumente (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1968), p. 17; Wolfgang Maderthaner, ‘Die eigenartige Größe der Beschränkung: Österreichs Revolution im mitteleuropäischen Spannungsfeld’, in Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner (eds), … der Rest ist Österreich: Das Werden der Ersten Republik, Vol. 1 (Vienna: Gerold, 2008). pp. 187–206. 51 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 224. 52 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 84. 53 Ibid. 54 Gabriella Hauch, Vom Frauenstandpunkt aus: Frauen im Parlament 1918–1933 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1995), p. 74. 55 This point was made by Ruth Fischer in an article published in the German newspaper Die Kommunstin in September 1919, shortly after her arrival there. See Fischer, ‘Die sozialistische Frauenbewegung in Österreich’, reproduced in Hering and Schilde (eds), Kampfname Ruth Fischer, pp. 99–102. 56 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 231. 57 Fischer, ‘Die sozialistische Frauenbewegung in Österreich’, pp. 100–1. 58 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 229. Pick/Leichter was arrested by the Gestapo shortly after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938. In 1940 she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women and in 1942 was murdered at the Bernburg ‘euthanasia’ centre, south-west of Berlin. See Sarah Helm, If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück. Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (London: Little, Brown, 2015), pp. 154–6 and 652; and the forthcoming biographical study by Jill Lewis. 59 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 229. 60 Keßler, Ruth Fischer, pp. 55–6.

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61 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 231. 62 Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, translated by Stuart McKinnon Evans, 2nd edition (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997) [1986], pp. 164–5. 63 Canning, ‘Sexual Crisis’, p. 184. 64 Frevert, Women in German History, p. 174; Helga Grebing, Frauen in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19 (Heidelberg: Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-EbertGedenkstätte, 1994), p. 15; Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women, p. 144. 65 Robert F. Wheeler, ‘German Women and the Communist International: The Case of the Independent Social Democrats’, Central European History, 8/2 (1975), pp. 113–39 (here p. 117). 66 Ibid., p. 116; Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 97–8. 67 On Arendsee see Ingo Materna and Hans-Joachim Schreckenbach (eds), Berichte des Berliner Polizeipräsidenten zur Stimmung und Lage der Bevölkerung in Berlin 1914-1918 (= Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, Bd. 4) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1987), p. 61; and on Derfert-Casper see Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 50–1. Also Cläre Derfert-Casper, ‘Bericht aus dem politischen Leben der Genossen Derfert-Casper’, 14 April 1958, in SAPMO, SgY30/0148; and Materna and Schreckenbach (eds), Berichte, pp. 241–2. 68 On Zietz see also Materna and Schreckenbach (eds), Berichte, pp. 94–5 and Derfert-Casper, ‘Bericht aus dem politischen Leben der Genossen DerfertCasper’, p. 2. 69 Bader-Zaar, ‘Women’s Citizenship and the First World War’, p. 280. 70 See for example ‘Die erste Parlamentsrede einer Frau in Deutschland’, Die Gleichheit, No. 12, 14 March 1919, pp. 89–93. The same article also praises the maiden speech of Gertrud Bäumer, who was the first woman from one of the ‘bourgeois’ parties (the DDP) to address the national assembly on 21 February 1919. 71 Luise Zietz, ‘Die Frauen im Reichsparlament’, Die Kämpferin, No. 8, 29 April 1920, p. 59. 72 Clara Zetkin, ‘Im Zeichen der Weltrevolution’, Die Kommunistin, No. 1, 1 May 1919, p. 2. 73 Figures in Grebing, Frauen in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19, p. 11. Kathleen Canning, ‘Gender and the Imaginary of Revolution in Germany’, in Weinhauer, McElligott and Heinsohn (eds), Germany, 1916-23, pp. 103–26 (here p. 120), puts forward a slightly different set of figures, including nineteen women among the 370-strong membership of the Workers’ Council of Greater Stuttgart, and thirty-seven women represented in various Betriebsräte in Berlin, most of them

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75 76

77 78 79 80

81 82

83 84 85 86 87

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delegated to speak for groups of female department store workers or nurses, but she too notes that ‘only a few women became Rätevertreterinnen at the city or provincial level’. The lack of female representation at the Berlin conference of workers’ and soldiers’ councils was already criticized by the (M)SPD women’s periodical Die Gleichheit in December 1918 – see ‘Die Frauen und die Arbeiterräte’, Die Gleichheit, 29/6 (20 December 1918), pp. 47–8. For a useful and detailed discussion of these debates, see the East German dissertation by Peter Kuhlbrodt, ‘Die proletarische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland am Vorabend und während der Novemberrevolution (Herbst 1917 bis Anfang Mai 1919), Dissertation A, eingereicht beim Wissenschaftlichen Rat der Pädagogischen Hochschule ‘Clara Zetkin’, Leipzig, 1981, pp. 162–78. Ibid., p. 167. Toni Sender, Die Frauen und das Rätesystem: Rede auf der Leipziger Frauenkonferenz am 29. November 1919, hrsg. im Auftrage des Zentral-Vorstandes der USPD (Berlin: Verlagsgenossenschaft ‘Freiheit’, 1920), p. 26. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Wheeler, ‘German Women and the Communist International’, pp. 120–1 and 134–5. See esp. ‘General Principles for Agitation Among Women’ adopted in December 1920 at the unification conference, reproduced in Fowkes (ed.), The German Left and the Weimar Republic, pp. 256–60. Sender, Die Frauen und das Rätesystem, p. 9. The phrase comes from an essay by Christiane Streubel on the rather different subject of right-wing women – see Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles: The Extension of War Culture by Radical Nationalist Women Journalists in post-1918 Germany’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 69–88. Ziemann, Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg, pp. 123–4 and 131. Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). For further details see Chapter 2 in this book. R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin the Zimmerwald Left and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 68. See Manifest der Internationalen Sozialistischen Frauenkonferenz in Bern vom 26. bis 28. März 1915, in Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED (ed.), Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Vol. 1: Juli 1914-Oktober 1917 (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1958), pp. 125–7. Craig Nation, War on War, p. 67. Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997), p. 35.

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90 See Veronika Helfert, ‘Eine demokratische Bolschewikin: Ilona Duczynska Polanyi (1897-1978)’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 26/2 (2015), pp. 166–89 (here esp. pp. 170–3). 91 F. L. Carsten, War against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London: Batsford, 1982), p. 36. 92 Materna and Schreckenbach (eds), Berichte, pp. 94–5. 93 Carsten, War against War, p. 43; Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women, p. 80. 94 Materna and Schreckenbach (eds), Berichte, pp. 138–9. 95 Craig Nation, War on War, p. 117. 96 Ibid., pp. 118 and 151. See also Keßler, Ruth Fischer, p. 39. 97 Helfert, ‘Eine demokratische Bolschewikin’, p. 181. 98 Ibid., p. 171. 99 Shnyrova, ‘Feminism and Suffrage in Russia’, p. 134. 100 Donald, ‘Bolshevik Activity’, p. 154. 101 A. Kollontai, ‘Klassovaya voina i rabotnitsa’, in Kommunistka. No. 5 (1920), p. 9. 102 Clements, Bolshevik Women, p. 179. 103 A. Bogat, Rabotnitsa I Krestianka v Krasnoi Armii (Leningrad and Moscow: Gospolitizdat Publishing House, 1928), p. 5. 104 Clements, Bolshevik Women, p. 162. 105 Toni Sender, Autobiography of a German Rebel (London: Routledge, 1940), p. 163. 106 Derfert-Casper, ‘Bericht aus dem politischen Leben der Genossen DerfertCasper’, p. 2. On the role of radicalized women workers in the 24 December 1918 protests in central Berlin see also ‘Flugblatt des “Roten Vorwärts”’, 25 December 1918, in Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED (ed.), Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Vol. 2: November 1917-Dezember 1918 (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957), pp. 660–2; and Werner Bramke and Silvio Reisinger, Leipzig in der Revolution von 1918/1919 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005), pp. 22–3. Also Mark Jones, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 153–8. 107 On Zietz’s appeals, as late as July 1920, for solidarity with the Bolsheviks against the ‘Whites’ and their Entente backers, see Dieter Engelmann and Horst Naumann, Zwischen Spaltung und Vereinigung: Die Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands in den Jahren 1917-1922 (Berlin: Edition Neue Wege, 1993), p. 155. On Kautsky see Matthew Stibbe, Germany 19141933: Politics, Society and Culture (Harlow: Pearson, 2010), p. 75. Also Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism (London: The National Labour Press, 1919). 108 ‘Die russische Frau in der Roten Armee’, Die Kämpferin, No. 11, 17 June 1920, pp. 83–4. Article reprinted from Die Rote Fahne, Zentralorgan der Kommunistischen Partei Österreichs.

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109 Sender, Die Frauen und das Rätesystem, p. 20. 110 According to an eyewitness account written by Erich Wollenberg and reproduced in Gerhard Schmolze (ed.), Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten, dtv edition (Munich, 1978), pp. 318–19. This incident is also related by Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s First Victims and One Man’s Race for Justice (London: Bodley Head, 2015), pp. 84–5; and Christopher Dillon, Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 18–19. 111 Sender, Autobiography of a German Rebel, p. 146. 112 Wheeler, ‘German Women and the Communist International’, p. 122; Engelmann and Naumann, Zwischen Spaltung und Vereinigung, p. 177. See also Toni Sender, Diktatur über das Proletariat oder: Diktatur des Proletariats. Das Ergebnis von Moskau, special reprint of article in the Volksrecht (Frankfurt/M: Volksrecht, n.d. [1920]); and Sender, Autobiography of a German Rebel, pp. 163–7. 113 Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Vereinigungsparteitages der USPD (Linke) und der KPD (Spartakusbund), abgehalten in Berlin vom 4. bis 7. Dezember 1920: Anhang: Bericht über die 1. Frauen-Reichskonferenz am 8. Dezember 1920 in Berlin (Berlin: Frankes Verlag, 1921), p. 282. 114 Ibid., p. 283. 115 Henriette Roland-Holst, ‘Antimilitarismus und Rote Armee’, Die Kommunistin, No. 12, 25 June 1921, pp. 89–90. 116 Keßler, Ruth Fischer, pp. 103–4. 117 Ziemann, Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg, p. 165. 118 Weitz, Creating German Communism, p. 202. 119 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 286. 120 June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 188. 121 Equally, radical pacifist women like Rosika Schwimmer in Hungary and Anita Augspurg and Gustava Lida Heymann in Germany demarcated themselves from Lenin and Bolshevism, with Heymann arguing in March 1922 that ‘violence and [true] Communism stand in total contradiction, the latter encompasses the principle of mutual aid, construction, while the former destroys and brutalizes’ – see Amira Gelblum, ‘Ideological Crossroads: Feminism, Pacifism, and Socialism’, in Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 18701930 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 307–27 (here p. 318). 122 Anette Hild-Berg, Toni Sender (1888-1964): Ein Leben im Namen der Freiheit und der sozialen Gerechtigkeit, mit einem Vorwort von Susanne Miller (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1994), p. 86. On the central role played by the Rathenau murder in prompting successful merger talks between the SPD and the USPD see also Engelmann and Naumann, Zwischen Spaltung und Vereinigung, p. 203. 123 Jelavich, Modern Austria, pp. 177–208.

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1 24 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 230. 125 Marianne Pollak, ‘Barrikadenbräute’, Arbeiterzeitung, 11 March 1928. Reproduced in Eva Geber (ed.), ‘Der Typus der kämpfenden Frau’: Frauen schreiben über Frauen in der Arbeiter-Zeitung von 1900-1933 (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2013), pp. 84–7 (here p. 87). See also Anna Blos, Frauen der deutschen Revolution 1848: Zehn Lebensbilder und ein Vorwort (Dresden: Kaden & Comp., 1928). On the often-forgotten role of ‘democratic-socialist movements’ in the years 1848–9 in ‘open[ing] a space for women to demand equal rights, to become active in the public sphere, and to found newspapers and journals of their own’, despite much male opposition, see Bonnie S. Anderson, ‘Early International Feminism: The Contributions and Difficulties of Comparative History’, in Anne Cova (ed.), Comparative Women’s History: New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2006), pp. 67–85 (here p. 73). 126 Jochen Böhler, ‘Enduring Violence: The Postwar Struggles in East-Central Europe, 1917-21’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50/1 (January 2015), pp. 58–77. 127 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), p. 67. The contributors to a recent volume on political violence also note that after the First World War ‘women might be [found] … as readily in the ranks of those advocating violence as of peace activists’, but their examples are confined to the nationalist right and middle-class feminists. See Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses and Klaus Weinhauer, ‘Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence’, in Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 11–39 (here p. 35). In fact, little to date has been written on women who supported violence from a revolutionary left perspective during this period, but one significant exception is Helfert, ‘Eine demokratische Bolschewikin’, esp. pp. 180–3. 128 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 107. On the ‘new Communist man’ see also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 127–32; and Weitz, Creating German Communism, esp. pp. 189–205. 129 Elfriede Friedländer (i.e. Ruth Fischer), Sexualethik des Kommunismus (Vienna: Neue Erde, 1920). Extracts reproduced in Hering and Schilde (eds), Kampfname Ruth Fischer, pp. 103–8 (here p. 106). 130 Ibid., p. 105. Italics in the original. 131 Ibid., pp. 107–8. Fischer’s radical ideas were already developed in articles she commissioned or wrote for the short-lived journal Die revolutionäre Proletarierin, a supplement to the Austrian Communist Party paper Die soziale Revolution, which she edited from February to May 1919. See for example ‘Die Befreiung der

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132 133 134

135

1 36 137

138 139

1 40 141 142

1 43 144

145 146

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Frau’, Die revolutionäre Proletarierin, No. 5, 5 March 1919, pp. 1–2; ‘Kommunismus und Familienleben’, Die revolutionäre Proletarierin, No. 6, 15 March 1919, pp. 1–2; and ‘Mann und Frau (Schluß)’, Die revolutionäre Proletarierin, No. 8, 29 March 1919, pp. 1–2. See also Keßler, Ruth Fischer, pp. 55–6, and for a discussion of her brochure Sexual Ethics and Communism, see ibid., pp. 52–4. Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky: The Prophet Unarmed, 1921-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 121. Lenin, The Emancipation of Women, p. 101. Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 32, 46, 57 and 64–5. See also Keßler, Ruth Fischer, pp. 116–268; and Fowkes (ed.), The German Left and the Weimar Republic, p. 336. On the IWS see Jean-Jacques Marie, ‘The Women’s Section of the Comintern from Lenin to Stalin’, in Christine Fauré (ed.), Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 275–85 (here p. 279). Fowkes (ed.), The German Left and the Weimar Republic, pp. 243 and 322. Mosse, The Image of Man, pp. 122–3. On the Reichsbanner see also Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 78–9. To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921, edited and translated by John Riddell (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 1212. Liberty P. Sproat, ‘The Soviet Solution for Women in Clara Zetkin’s Journal Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale, 1921-1925’, Aspasia: International Year Book of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 6/1 (2012), pp. 60–78. Ibid., pp. 64 and 66. See, for example, ‘Zur Frage der Prostitution’, Die Kommunistin, No. 2, 15 January 1921, pp. 3–4. See, for example, ‘Das Hebammengesetz’, Die Kommunistin, No. 3, 10 February 1922, p. 19; and ‘Die Abtreibungsparagraphen müssen fallen’, Die Kommunistin, No. 8, 22 April 1922, pp. 58–9. Sproat, ‘The Soviet Solution for Women’, p. 65. Clara Zetkin, ‘Report on the Communist Women’s Movement’, in Riddell (ed.), To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, pp. 779–90 (here p. 785). On the impact of NEP on women’s employment see Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, pp. 109–18. Elizabeth Waters, ‘Victim or Villain? Prostitution in Post-Revolutionary Russia’, in Linda Edmondson (ed.), Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 160–77 (here esp. pp. 163–4).

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147 McCarthy, Women of the World, p. 93. 148 Marie, ‘The Women’s Section of the Comintern’, pp. 281–3. 149 Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, pp. 340–1. See also Mosse, The Image of Man, pp. 128–9. 150 Maderthaner, ‘Utopian Perspectives and Political Restraint’, p. 62. 151 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 67. 152 See Canning, ‘Gender and the Imaginary of Revolution’; and Berger, ‘Commentary’. 153 See also Keßler, Ruth Fischer, esp. pp. 48–56 and 94–5; and (for Russian women) McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution, esp. pp. 135 and 144–6. 154 Canning, ‘Sexual Crisis’, p. 185. 155 Domansky, ‘Militarization and Reproduction’. 156 Hauch, ‘Sisters and Comrades’, p. 231. 157 See also Kathleen Canning, ‘Das Geschlecht der Revolution – Stimmrecht und Staatsbürgertum 1918/19’, in Alexander Gallus (ed.), Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 84–116; and Keßler, Ruth Fischer, p. 82, n. 59. 158 ‘Uneheliche Mütter’, Die Kämpferin, No. 1, 15 January 1921. 159 Canning, ‘Sexual Crisis’, p. 169. 160 Donald, ‘Bolshevik Activity’, p. 131. The importance of the woman munitions worker is also emphasized by Antoine Prost, ‘Workers’, in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. II, pp. 325–57 (here p. 335), who notes that, as far as changes in female employment patterns during the war is concerned, ‘the shift towards war industries was greater than the move into paid manual labour’ more generally. 161 Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics, p. 51. 162 Ibid., p. 64. 163 This was the case, for instance, with Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. The revolutionary left’s instrumentalization of socialist women as ‘martyrs’ in the face of right-wing counter-revolutionary violence is also emphasized by Eliza Ablovatski, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919’, in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds), Gender and War in TwentiethCentury Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 70–92.

4

Mediating the National and the International: Women, Journalism and Hungary in the Aftermath of the First World War Maria DiCenzo, Judit Acsády, David Hudson and Balázs Sipos*

This chapter brings together four case studies to examine political and popular forms of media and exchange written by and about women in the immediate postwar period, with a particular focus on Hungary, Britain and the United States. It looks first at how women’s activism crossed borders, through organizations like the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and the feminist press, and how national organizations such as the Feministák Egyesülete (FE or Feminist Association) in Hungary participated in international dialogue and drew on support in their local struggles. An overview of feminist campaigns in these years reveals the tensions generated by a growing reform agenda hampered by setbacks at international and national levels – nowhere more evident than in Hungary where women were granted the franchise in 1918 only to have it partially revoked in 1922. But to look only at overtly feminist/activist media would be to ignore wider social and cultural developments in post-war societies. To this end, this chapter turns to case studies focusing on the representation of women and their involvement in more popular and mainstream genres. While women in these contexts may have varied in their public or private commitment to feminist causes, their presence in itself contributed to the growing post-war normality of seeing women in professional journalistic roles. Working with a framework informed by media/women’s/cultural history, literary studies and social science perspectives, we attempt to expand the scope of the function * Maria DiCenzo, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; Judit Acsády, Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest; David Hudson, Department of English, Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA; Balázs Sipos, Department of Modern and Contemporary History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.

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of media in envisioning the post-war order, with an emphasis on women participating in or as agents of international and transnational exchange. These case studies touch on the relationship between media and women’s activism across national borders. What they demonstrate is that this activism was both international and transnational in nature. It was international in the sense that, although women shared a common cause and engaged in crossborder exchanges of information and ideas in their struggle for voting and other political rights, the focus of their campaigns was primarily on national governments because they had the ability to extend and respect these rights. The institutions and organizations that women formed in pursuit of their goals were primarily oriented towards making substantive changes at the national level. At the same time, the activism and exchanges were also transnational inasmuch as women provided material and symbolic support for their peers in other countries in ways that were not mediated by, channelled through or focused on national governments. These two aspects of activism merged as co-operation at the international level became a way of using progress in some parts of the world to leverage rights for women in countries that were less willing to embrace change, and this explains, in part, the proliferation of women’s international organizations in the period. Their goals, as impressive as they were, proved difficult in practice because of the very diversity of attitudes, needs and means within and across national contexts and because of the opposition and resistance to the emancipation of women. In addition, the growing influence of mass media and the restoration of communication between countries cut off from one another by the war stimulated a reciprocal exchange of cultural images. Many of these exchanges depicted the lives and conditions of women, and some were mediated by a small but growing number of women reporting and writing for the popular press. In these cases, however, there was no unified attempt to promote understanding or social change. Accounts of the ‘other’ were just as likely to be presented as warnings as they were examples to be sympathized with or emulated. Inevitably, they were read and understood in the context of local preoccupations. Our focus is on the roles played by different forms of print journalism in these cross-border or global exchanges, at a time when print media were the chief means by which ideas were debated and circulated. In this way, the international organizations, individual journalists and the various sectors of the press that we examine in this chapter were instrumental in what Glenda Sluga identifies as the transnational spread of ideas. Indeed, these media provided the vehicles

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for the internationalism that she argues was a product of the social and political modernity of the times.1 The post-war period presented new opportunities for exchange through the greater availability and movement of journalists, media and popular culture. Communication was, however, also restricted by self-imposed policies of neutrality and official forms of state censorship. Because the debates about women’s rights found their public expression and were circulated in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, media history has much to tell us about how and where the currents of thought about the role of women in public life formed and travelled. Media are often used as sources of information in historical research, but this chapter demonstrates why they deserve attention as objects of study in their own right and how a more contextual and relational analysis of media reveals the problems of taking them at face value. Magazines, periodicals and newspapers – at national and international levels – self-consciously engaged in ‘chronicling’ and framing events, developments, organizations and leading figures, thus suggesting the official, public modes of self-representation of particular groups or institutions at work. In the context of social movement research, Sidney Tarrow identifies ‘print’ and ‘association’ as key factors in the historical development of social movement networks. He argues that print made it possible for people to communicate and join together, hence diffusing specific conflicts into national social movements by contributing to the development of the solidarity necessary for collective action among larger numbers of people and spreading awareness of issues and causes to wider, more disparate and dispersed publics.2 The potential of print as an organizational and mobilizing tool (building solidarities among otherwise disparate groups, communities and geographic regions) has been central to the analysis of historical forms of movement media in other fields and has some bearing on less overtly politicized media as well. While the American and British campaigns for women’s suffrage resembled something of a linear progression in the extension of political rights, the Hungarian case was quite different, characterized by a more uneven process of struggle and setback. Hungary provides an unusual and interesting focus because it suffered not only the destruction wrought by the war itself, but also a significant loss of its territory (more than 60 per cent) and population (30 per cent) as a result of the peace treaties. Although fighting did not take place on Hungarian soil, about 530,000 Hungarians died during the First World War while on active service in the monarchy’s army. After the war, about 3,000,000

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Hungarian citizens became expatriates in neighbouring countries without leaving their homes due to newly delineated national borders in 1920. This, in addition to an economic downturn and political turmoil (four changes of government between 1918 and 1922), resulted in a strong wave of ethnic nationalism. Prior to 1918 Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and, although it was a parliamentary democracy, a very low percentage of the population had the right to vote. Hungary was declared a fully independent state only after the First World War. In terms of women, the situation may have been without precedent, in that women were granted voting rights in 1918, but these rights were then reduced and eventually revoked in the years that followed. It was ‘the very first attempt ever made in history to disfranchise the enfranchised’.3 Progress in the emancipation of women had been made since the last decades of the nineteenth century in Hungary. There was an increase in the number of women who entered secondary education and who started to work as professional employees. After 1895 they were also admitted to universities, although not all faculties. The idea of women’s suffrage was acknowledged very slowly. Nonetheless, feminists had supporters among contemporary politicians and other social actors. As elsewhere in Europe, women replaced men in many fields of work and increasingly took part in political activities in Hungary during the war. For example, the number of female members of the social democratic trade unions increased by 6,000 to 131,000 between 1913 and 1918.4 These new types of female activity helped to modify established gender relations. After the war in 1918 the Aster Revolution led to the establishment of a democratic political system in the newly independent Hungarian republic. Mihály Károlyi formed a liberal government that gave voting rights to women, equal rights to female students and also prepared a democratic press law. Following a second revolution in 1919, the Soviet regime of the Hungarian Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party of Hungary led by Béla Kun gave voting rights to every worker, but eliminated them for ‘bourgeois’ women (and men). In August 1919 Kun’s government collapsed after military defeat and the occupation of much of Hungary by Romania. In 1920 a counterrevolutionary right-wing (Christian, Christian socialist and nationalist) regime took power. It gave women the right to vote but allowed the universities to restrict the rights of female students (referring to the conflict of interest between male and female students). In 1922 the conservative government changed the voting system: 800,000 women lost their voting rights and the competitive multiparty system was transformed into an authoritarian political regime with

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the reintroduction of open ballot systems. It is remarkable that, having partly lost the rights extended in 1918, women did not vote on the same terms as men in Hungary until 1945. The initial construction phase of the Horthy regime ended in 1926. The following case studies examine activist periodicals, as well as popular and mainstream genres, at the international and national levels, to highlight the challenges organizations and individuals faced as they tried to negotiate and intervene in the rapidly changing conditions of the immediate post-war period. In the case of Hungary, we offer perspectives on developments from the inside looking out and suggest what it might have looked like to those looking in.

The role of the women’s press in international feminist activism in the aftermath of the First World War It is not only that the Alliance forms a bridge by which the enfranchised women may reach the unenfranchised to give them all the sympathy, help and encouragement … The women’s campaign is not won when the vote is won, and there are other reforms very near to our hearts which call aloud to be considered internationally which cannot fully be solved by any nation alone. It is these reforms that the Alliance brings before its members at its Congresses, and constantly through the columns of this paper.5

The activities and influence of women’s international organizations after the First World War have received closer scholarly scrutiny in recent years as part of wider attempts to understand the structure and contribution of the women’s movement in the interwar period. While some of the other key international women’s organizations – such as the International Council of Women (ICW) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) – also played an important role in facilitating transnational exchange, the following section will foreground the IWSA, an organization designed to move across borders. It will do so by focusing on its official monthly organ, Jus Suffragii (later subtitled: the International Woman Suffrage News). From its formation in 1904, the IWSA was committed to co-operation between movements and activists operating internationally, including in belligerent and neutral countries. Jus began publication in 1906 and was instrumental in promoting and facilitating participation in internationalism for its broad and growing membership. It remains a valuable record of the organization’s composition, changing priorities and the expanding post-war mandate of

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women’s groups in a wide range of countries. International women’s publications such as Jus offer a critical starting point for identifying transnational activities and engaging in comparative analyses of national movements. They offer access to that history, even if they provide only partial means for interpreting it. Given the emphasis in recent years on the ‘transnational turn’ and the need for comparative approaches, one of the keys to moving across borders is to follow those who engaged in these forms of activism at the time.

The IWSA after the First World War Feminist organizations used the destruction wrought by the war to argue for a more prominent role for women in determining international affairs and the combination of the extension of the franchise in a number of countries and wide-scale post-war reconstruction provided a range of opportunities and the impetus for the movement to continue and expand its programme for the emancipation of women worldwide.6 As an international organization, the IWSA worked to effect change for women in their specific national contexts, often by using the status and resources of women’s movements in wealthy and powerful Western countries such as the United States and Britain to put pressure on other countries to extend the franchise to women. IWSA congresses were located strategically as part of these efforts. The IWSA is a useful case in point, particularly in the years between 1918 and 1923. It formed as a suffrage organization in 1904, when it broke away from the ICW because the latter would not adopt suffrage as part of its official platform. With its more overtly feminist agenda, the IWSA negotiated the troubled transition from the pre-war suffrage campaign to a peacetime or postwar society. It represents both continuity and transformation in the movement, but also serves as a noteworthy attempt at international co-operation long before the war itself and the post-war advocacy for greater internationalism. Its original commitment to the ‘common cause of suffrage’ for women provided a concentrated and concrete goal, one which had gained legitimacy by the war and proved to be a key factor in the organization’s survival – in part because this focus could be used to obscure more contentious forms of national and transnational activism among member groups, including pacifism. The object here is not to offer a history of the IWSA; there are other useful sources on the organization and many of its leading figures.7 Instead, the purpose

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is to use the IWSA to illustrate both the continuation and diversification of women’s activism at the international level after the war. Leila J. Rupp, in her valuable work on international women’s organizations in the twentieth century, stresses how international women’s movements disrupt the assumptions about Euro-American ‘first wave’ and ‘second wave’ models, noting: On a global level, women’s movements emerged in countries newly free or struggling for political or economic independence and the transnational women’s movement crested in the 1920s and 1930s. From a global perspective, then, the trajectory of women’s movements is more complicated than the wave model would suggest.8

By the end of the war, the IWSA included twenty-six affiliated countries, reaching fifty-one by 1929.9 It expanded its mandate in the 1920s, passing a growing number of resolutions between its Geneva Congress in June 1920 and its Rome Congress in May 1923. Growth resulted from the momentum of successful suffrage campaigns, as well as the Alliance’s willingness to embrace a broader set of issues, making it relevant or useful to a wider range of member groups. Delegates of the IWSA came together for the first time after the war at the 1920 Geneva Congress and voted to continue their work. They believed there was a need for an international organization ‘to secure a real equality of liberties, status and opportunities in all spheres of life between men and women’, because no other existing international women’s organization concentrated on this essential aim.10 Crystal Macmillan argued the Alliance was needed to outline a specifically feminist policy on the civil, moral and economic enfranchisement of women, and to convert the world to these reforms.11 In her view, the war and the peace to follow, rather than seeing the demise of the women’s movement, created a range of new and exciting opportunities for those committed to the emancipation of women. The congress arrived at a list of new resolutions related to women’s political, domestic, educational, economic and moral rights. The report for the 1920 Congress describes the IWSA as ‘a humanitarian and an internationalising force … a force that the world has need of, and no Government should be so blind as to ignore it’.12 In 1923, Margery Corbett Ashby replaced long-time president Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt’s final address at the Rome Congress of 1923 foregrounded the distinction between enfranchisement and emancipation (and how the former could be used to secure the latter) and endorsed the role of the IWSA in achieving both goals worldwide.13

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Jus Suffragii The coherence of purpose and exchange among the IWSA’s member groups was reinforced through its journal, Jus Suffragii. Jus (as it was affectionately called) offers a perspective on the conditions and progress of women’s enfranchisement and emancipation in a wide range of countries in the period. It is difficult to separate a discussion of the IWSA from that of its paper because the relationship

Figure 13  Front cover of Jus Suffragii. Monthly organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 15 July 1911. Reproduced courtesy of the International Alliance of Women.

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was a symbiotic one; the periodical helped to solicit proposals and information as much as it served to report on activities and to distribute information to the membership. It was the information hub and the ‘voice’ of the organization. Jus was the first, the longest running and the best known of the international publications. WILPF did not publish Pax International until November 1925 and it was more limited in its scope. The title, Jus Suffragii, means ‘the right to vote’. The more explanatory subtitle, International Woman Suffrage News, was added in January 1917 because the Latin title was considered a ‘stumbling block’ for prospective readers and sales, even though it remained part of the masthead.14 Much of the scholarly attention paid to the journal has focused almost exclusively on the war years, particularly its controversial editor, Mary Sheepshanks.15 Angela K. Smith notes that the fact it survived the war at all was ‘little short of miraculous’,16 given it represented and provided news from women in opposing countries, doing so by way of neutral countries. It was partly through its attempts to prevent international contention that it was able to survive the war. British and French reactions to Sheepshanks’ endorsement of pacifism in 1915 led to an official policy of neutrality on all questions that were strictly national. The policy of neutrality informed the nature of the coverage and is crucial to how we read the substance of the journal now. Conflicts within the organization or with other groups were occasionally evident through the correspondence sections of Jus, as well as in the pages of national publications which monitored its activities. After Sheepshanks left the paper, there was far less ‘editorializing’ or interpretation of the developments in the paper. She edited Jus from 1913 and, when she resigned in October 1919, Emilie Gourd (editor of the French edition) praised her contribution and highlighted the role of the paper: When communications were more or less cut, when suffragists of various countries were necessarily employed in activities other than woman suffrage, and when the international reports were ‘burning’ on several points, Miss Sheepshanks, with marvellous generosity and tact, to which everyone pays homage, knew how to maintain the only possible link between the countries affiliated to our Alliance; how to give the news of each country to the other feminists who were working with the same object in view, and in this way to throw a ray of light into the darkness of even the darkest days. There are many to whom the arrival of Jus has always been a joy and comfort. … We have so often admired the tact with which Miss Sheepshanks edited our journal, and her talent for getting information and turning it to such good use. Thanks to her, Jus has become a publication whose authority and usefulness are brought home to

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all who want to keep in touch not only with the suffrage, but with the feminist movement all over the world.17

Changing editorial styles and policies highlight the problem of trying to generalize about periodicals, particularly those with long runs and which survive through different periods in an organization’s history. The lack of a strong editorial voice after 1919 did not, however, preclude forms of debate in the journal. Jus published proposals for new directions in anticipation of congresses, as well as series on controversial topics. From November 1922 to February 1923, there were several articles and letters on the theme of women and their role in politics, intended to generate discussion. In spite of changes in personnel and the growth of the organization, the paper’s overall appearance and format changed very little over time. On the surface, Jus looked like an umbrella publication – Smith calls it a ‘patchwork’18 – since the bulk of the text was compiled from reports sent in by member organizations. Affiliated organizations could submit contributions in English or in their own language and its headquarters in London provided translation where necessary (there was a full French edition until 1920). There were often complaints about the amount of coverage devoted to the British campaign, but the response to members was always to ask them to send more news. In January 1921, as part of a campaign to increase the circulation of the paper, Jus began to include the Supplement of the World’s Young Women’s Christian Association (WYWCA), noting it was not responsible for the material published in the supplement, but believed that subscribers would be interested in the WYWCA’s work.19 The decision to develop and invest in the paper was taken at the Budapest Congress in 1913. The report stresses that ‘it must be distinctly understood that Jus Suffragii is in no sense a rival of any national paper, and that it must always serve as a medium of exchange of international news for the common benefit of all national papers and national auxiliaries’.20 As part of the same initiative in 1913, the IWSA set up a bureau of information and made a point of collecting, among other things, the official organs of member organizations. A feature titled ‘International List of Feminist Papers’ in February 1922 lists feminist journals published in each of twenty-six different countries, designed to encourage contact between feminist movements around the world.21 The 1920 Geneva Congress endorsed the funding of an Information Bureau to collect and record important facts and statistics, a Press Bureau for the dissemination of information, as well as proposals for increasing the

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circulation of Jus. In this way, the paper served as the chief means of sharing relevant data with member organizations, but also increasingly with a wider readership by drawing attention to its work in the mainstream press.22 The features published in Jus encouraged a comparative perspective on progress at national levels. Examples in 1923 include subcommittee reports on issues such as the employment position of women in different countries in March, and the laws governing the nationality of married women and the economic provision for wives and mothers and their children, legitimate and illegitimate, in May and June. The information was gathered from questionnaires sent out to member organizations and presented alphabetically by country. These are examples of the kind of information that would not have been available elsewhere and that would have been difficult to gather without the bureaucratic network provided by such an organization. The interwar feminist press, like the pre-war suffrage press before it, deliberately sought to provide coverage of activities and information ignored by the daily press. Jus was symptomatic of both the potential and the limits of women’s international organizations. The potential lay in facilitating the sharing of resources, knowledge and mutual support among its member countries. The IWSA did this in both practical and symbolic ways, from resources to solidarity. It exercised some international influence through its congresses which functioned to generate awareness and to pressure governments to extend franchise rights in host nations, as well as through official visits worldwide by prominent figures such as Carrie Chapman Catt. The Rome Congress in May 1923, for instance, set out to highlight and publicize the cause in Italy and leaders of the Alliance met with Mussolini in the interests of Italian women. Catt also toured South America in 1923 to help organize women in South and Central America and Mexico, publishing reports in Jus along the way. At the same time, the IWSA was far from radical, working well within the constitutional and reformist bounds of liberal women’s organizations in the period. This was reflected in Jus, a paper ambitious in its attempt to provide a link between a wide range of countries by compiling and circulating information and offering words of support. At the same time, it could be described as less than the sum of its parts. It was too cautious, in part because it chose to operate within the restrictive parameters of neutrality in order to ensure unity and avoid highly divisive issues. As a result, what we do not find in the paper is almost as interesting as what we do find, underscoring the extent to which movement media or ‘official organs’ are just that, the public voice or face of any organization, and they must be read against other sources wherever possible.23

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It is not, however, surprising that an organization of this scope faced serious challenges, as did any group engaging in international forms of advocacy and activism among groups operating in different national contexts and with differing resources. Neutrality begins to make sense in light of the problem of negotiating international and national concerns – namely, the difficulty of reconciling conflicting needs at the national level, and how these conflicts magnified at the international level. For instance, the endowment of motherhood and protective labour legislation were discussed at the 1920 Congress in Geneva, but they proved to be highly contentious, forcing possible resolutions to be deferred to the next congress. Considering that there was no consensus on these issues at the national level – in Britain these very issues caused rifts within and between feminist groups – achieving consensus about priorities and policies at the international level would necessarily prove more difficult. Jus’s format as a collection of national reports was the journalistic equivalent of this neutrality – disseminating news, but letting readers draw their own conclusions. Communication and consensus at the international level were further exacerbated by the status or privilege of member groups and by language. Differences of means, status and power among member countries were a source of tension. For individual and national organizations, travel to congresses required considerable financial resources. This was true of most of the international organizations, as Rupp explains: ‘Limitations on participation flowed from the nature of international organising and from unacknowledged assumptions about the superiority and natural leadership of Euro-American societies.’24 The language, interests, expectations and assumptions of the leaders of the organization are evident in Jus, through the use of concepts such as Old World and New World or North and South to distinguish advanced versus emergent feminist movements.25 The ‘we’ of Jus and the IWSA was a constructed and perhaps enforced collective identity, as Rupp suggests.26 Given the expansion and diversification of the membership, language itself was a serious obstacle, particularly for members who did not speak English, French and/or German (the association’s official languages). Tributes to the paper over the years, nevertheless, reinforce the sense of the overall importance Jus held for IWSA members and readers. The advertisements for annual indexes and bound copies stress its function as a useful reference book for campaigners in Europe and further afield. While the journal was both practical and symbolic – ‘the thin gold link’ – at the time, it remains a useful reference book for historians now, helping to identify and situate issues relevant to the inter/transnational dimension of women’s activism.27

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Feminist press at the national level At the national level, feminist organizations embraced international developments by reporting on progress in women’s campaigns in other countries, sometimes for comparative purposes, but also to encourage a greater awareness of and engagement with world affairs on the part of their local members. Rather than reinforcing nationalist sentiments, women’s organizations envisioned a role for women in a (re)constructive internationalism. Attention to the global issues in the feminist press at the national level often underscored the link between international and domestic policy, all the more significant because, as these papers often note, it was in the international sphere that women were least expected to show interest, let alone to participate, since it continued to be assumed that women’s political ambitions would be limited to and most effective at local levels. This separation between the national and international levels has tended to be reinforced in the scholarship on the history of women’s movements, with studies of national campaigns on social policy and legislative reform taking place in different contexts than those devoted to women in the peace movement and the League of Nations after the war. Instead, the intersections and interrelatedness of the two spheres are striking. In Britain for instance, by 1919 there was a strong emphasis in the media of national organizations and IWSA member groups such as the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) and the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) on the importance of internationalism. The NUSEC engaged in citizenship training initiatives, encouraging women to exercise the rights enfranchisement entailed, and this extended to fostering an awareness of internationalism – clearly one of the key lessons learnt from the war. A feature in Woman’s Leader, the unofficial organ of NUSEC, on ‘Women and International Politics’ claims: If all the sorrow and misery we have suffered, and seen others suffer, has not convinced us that not only are we bound to our own country with cords of flesh and blood, but that all countries of the world are interdependent, so that not one of them can suffer, or do wrong, without, in the end, harming all the rest, then, indeed, we have failed to learn the most terrible lesson ever set to mankind.28

The same article goes on to stress that ‘these days women have no longer any excuse for not trying to give as close attention to international affairs as they give to their own homes’.29 So, rather than reinforcing nationalist sentiments, these organizations envisioned a role for women in a constructive internationalism. Periodicals like Woman’s Leader and Time and Tide (an independent feminist

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political and literary review) worked to ensure that these issues would remain front and centre for their readers and provided a vehicle to express and share their views. The commitment to strengthening international ties could be seen in the reports of IWSA member countries generally. While reports from Euro-Western countries (namely the United States, Britain and France) appeared regularly, those from other countries were sporadic. In the years following the war, Jus carried occasional reports from numerous Central and Eastern European countries, including Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. These reports varied considerably, including extracts from articles written for national women’s or mainstream newspapers, reports of the activities of particular organizations and articles by individuals linked to the movement in their own countries and to the IWSA. Jus provides a valuable means of identifying organizations and publications devoted to advocating women’s rights in member nations, but it can only offer glimpses into those movements and developments. It does not tell us what the reporting organizations represented in their respective countries. As the following case study argues, the distinctions between feminist and women’s organizations and their political affiliations are crucial to reading such reports and to understanding the complex dynamics of reform campaigns in a country like Hungary in these years. The case of the Hungarian Feminist Association illustrates how and why national organizations, facing hostile internal conditions, appealed to international groups such as the IWSA for solidarity and support. These organizations operated on the assumption that the bond between feminists was stronger than nationality. Communication proved crucial to the formation and maintenance of connections and processes of exchange between national groups and international networks.

Feminist journals in Hungary: Interactions between local and international publications The Feminist Association (FE) in Hungary, founded in 1904 as an auxiliary of the IWSA in Budapest by Rózsa Schwimmer (known as Rosika30) and Vilma Glücklich, was the country’s most significant progressive women’s organization in the first half of the twentieth century. It formed dozens of local groups, not only mobilizing progressive-minded intellectual or upper-middle-class urban women as well as some men, but also finding support among women regardless

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of their class, education, employment and place of living.31 The FE drew on the heritage of the Hungarian women’s movements of the nineteenth century (aimed mostly at the development of women’s education and participation in public life) and established an innovative social-critical approach by attacking the very foundations of patriarchal social order. As a mark of its significance it won the right in 1913 to organize the Seventh Congress of the IWSA, due to the good relations the feminists had with local authorities in Budapest and the significant levels of support they received from the City Council.32 The event attracted thousands of activists from all over the world and publicized the agenda of women’s rights more widely. This congress was also one of the last significant events in the fruitful years of the international movement until the First World War.33 During and after the First World War, feminists in Budapest engaged in several forms of organizational and political activities. They opened labour offices for women, organized a number of public events, engaged in support networks for war widows and orphans, and successfully lobbied the headmasters of different vocational schools to open their gates for female students during the war years when there were vacancies in many professions due to men’s absences.34 Their political work concentrated on the suffrage campaign and the cause of peace, and their pacifism was explicitly expressed in their periodicals. The regulation of the printed press in Hungary at that time fell under the 1912 law that set out the exceptional steps to be taken in the event of war. In 1914 a Press Subcommittee of Military Control was formed with the mandate to censor all publications in order to suppress information about the army and content deemed rebellious or unpatriotic.35 After the war the same regulation was maintained under Horthy’s rule. The periodical of the FE was also monitored and many times issues containing empty columns were printed as a sign of authorities banning content. Unlike in other countries, where restrictions and censorship may have prevented the publication of pacifist ideas,36 Hungarian feminists managed to find a balance between observing the censorship and yet expressing their philosophy. They rejected militarism and violent conflicts between nations, and denied the right of any state to annex the territories of other countries. Similar to the IWSA standpoint, Hungarian feminists considered democratic government, including elected women representatives, a necessary precondition for guaranteeing permanent peace and the peaceful resolution of conflict. Tolerance was seen as vital in social life, in family life and in schools, where feminists aimed to introduce education in non-violence. After the war, they took part in and also contributed to the

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organizing of several initiatives to propagate non-violent action, pacifist courses, summer schools and camps for young people.37 After the First World War, the FE continued its activities under fundamentally changed conditions: ‘Our circumstances are such that very little could be done in our line of work and even that little cannot be published.’38 Nevertheless, the Association made special efforts to carry on with the agenda defined at the time of its formation in 1904: gender equality in all spheres of social life, suffrage and other rights, and the extension of opportunities for women’s education at secondary and higher levels by opening more university faculties and vocational schools in fields that were previously closed to female students. Feminists also focused on reforms in the welfare system, such as pensions and women’s legal family status. In the international scene, the Association mostly represented its earlier pacifist endeavours, connected to international organizations like WILPF. The turbulence of the early post-war period, however, took its toll. In 1920, during the rule of Admiral Horthy, Rosika Schwimmer and Vilma Glücklich fled the country. Association activists were harrassed and spied on by the authorities, and their publications censored for their political views and involvement in pacifism, which was now seen as ‘unpatriotic’. In 1922 Glücklich was elected as a secretary of WILPF and spent three years working at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva before returning to Hungary in 1925 and continuing her activities with the Association until her early death at the age of fifty-five in 1927. Schwimmer, after her escape to Vienna in 1920, later settled in New York and continued her activism mostly as a pacifist and largely estranged from her former colleagues in WILPF.39 Although she still maintained strong connections with her colleagues in Budapest – with whom she shared common ideas – mostly via correspondence, she became distanced from the leadership of WILPF probably due to misunderstandings concerning organizational and financial affairs and regrettable personal conflicts.40 However, Dagmar Wernitznig explains this distance more as being a result of Schwimmer’s unique and often intellectual ‘professional interpretation of and approach to peace’.41 In 1922 the FE appointed a new board at their first general assembly following the war, comprising Oszkárné Szirmai, Eugénia Mellerné Miskolczy and Melanie Vámbéry who remained in their positions until 1948.42 Despite the hostile political climate of the 1920s, the Association was insistent on remaining independent of party politics, and pragmatic in its strategies to gain supporters for women’s rights across the political spectrum. The political values of the FE reflected an ‘integrative’ standpoint, namely the integration of different political views from social democracy and liberalism to various progressive ideas. It even included Christian

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Democrats among its activists and supporters. This integrative approach reflects the challenging social and political context where restricted access to publicity and the difficulties of sustaining ties with members and supporters accentuated the role of communication and the need to remain optimistic and creative.43 Special efforts were made to keep international links strong and active, primarily with the IWSA and WILPF. When financial circumstances allowed it, delegates from the FE in Budapest visited congresses and meetings, continued their correspondence with several organizations and regularly sent national reports as their contributions to the issues of Jus. International correspondence contains evidence of the concern and sympathy shown by fellow organizations abroad towards the feminists in Budapest, including occasional offers of financial support.44

Feminist periodicals in Budapest Difficulties after the war had a significant impact on the publication strategies of the FE. Journals had previously served as the most effective way for the Association to reach and influence the public, beginning with the first issue of their journal, which appeared in 1907 as a fortnightly publication with the title Woman and Society (Nő és társadalom). The title of the journal changed after 1914 to The Woman (A Nő). During the First World War, between 1916 and 1918, the Association published another periodical called Women’s Journal (Nők Lapja). These journals fulfilled all the functions of pressure group periodicals: being informational, helping the goals and the everyday mechanism of the organization and inspiring others by communicating the editors’ and authors’ enthusiasm for social reforms and gender equality to other activists of the movement, to members of other organizations, to supporters and to outside readers.45 Beyond reports, interviews and accounts of the activities of both national and international suffrage activists and progressive movements, these journals contained detailed and precise gendered analyses of social issues. The journals also became one of the most important tools for establishing and strengthening contact with international organizations by serving as an expression of solidarity with women elsewhere. In the same way, the journal became the medium that let Hungarian readers know about such expressions of solidarity during the war from women abroad, even from ‘enemy nations’ as indicated, for example, in a letter from a French suffrage organization to the Budapest feminist office that was published in The Woman in 1915: ‘Let us 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

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Figure 14  Front cover of the Hungarian feminist periodical A Nő (The Woman), 15 January 1918. Reproduced courtesy of the National Széchényi Library, Budapest, Hungary.

to be a bridge.’46 The significance of supportive messages in international journals such as Jus became even greater after the war, especially from the point of view of Hungarian women who, after 1920, gradually started to lose their previously gained rights to vote, to access higher education and to work. The political atmosphere in Hungary at this time was mostly preoccupied with recovering from the losses of war and dealing with the impact of the Treaty of Trianon, signed in June 1920. Political issues became more and more subordinated to the revanchist efforts to regain lost territories. The Hungarian political leadership interpreted the peace treaties as an unfair punishment. Feminists criticized the peace treaties as well, although they also argued that nations should solve any future conflicts peacefully. This view made feminists increasingly a target

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of hostility by the official press and the authorities, and adversely affected the Association’s ability to publish its journals regularly. The Association faced financial difficulties, which also hampered publication of its periodical The Woman each month. There were years when only one or two issues appeared, and even years when none were published. Despite all of the Association’s efforts to save the journal and publish it whenever circumstances made it possible, the actual number of issues gradually decreased year by year after 1918.47 In the second issue of the 1923 volume the editors explain the dire situation to their readership in the column ‘News of the Association’: It has been almost a year since we have last spoken to our members and readers on these pages. We finally had to give up on our most important strength, our most effective means of propaganda by the loss of the possibility to publish our journal regularly. Nowadays the expenses of a publication are huge, however a regular payment of membership fees by the members of the Association and occasional donations by those who can afford it could make the financing possible. Our Association can by all means be proud that it has been able to survive so far. … Its significance is acknowledged here and abroad as well even among our opponents. Our work is serious and we keep on going.48

Beyond financial difficulties and the danger of losing subscribers because of economic difficulties, the editors also had to struggle with the ever-stronger control of the authorities, as manifested for example in the regular censorship of publications and the restriction of public events.49 In a letter to Carrie Chapman Catt, Vilma Glücklich informed her that ‘the strictest prohibitions of public meetings has been released’.50 After 1927 the editors gave up trying to publish. As a consequence, the importance of the connection with Jus and its function as a vehicle for communicating news became even greater for FE activists in Budapest. The editors of The Woman were in personal contact with the editors of Jus, and Jus’s local correspondent in Budapest, Eugénia Mellerné Miskolczy, regularly sent detailed reports about women’s rights and other political issues in Hungary.

International news in feminist journals By embracing information about local, national and international events, as well as the women’s movement generally, The Woman attempted to influence changing post-war gender relations in Hungary. Besides printing regular

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overviews of changes in the legal system, women’s economic situation, women’s representation in public life and the construction of the social welfare system in Hungary, it devoted significant space to covering similar topics in foreign countries. Although the regular column ‘News From the World’ no longer appeared after the First World War, news of women’s movements in foreign countries still enjoyed special attention, including news about events in formerly belligerent countries. The news of the achievements of sister organizations and the improvement of women’s status in other societies was reported in the hope of encouraging Hungarian readers living under difficult social conditions not to lose faith in democratic initiatives. Each piece of positive international news concerning women’s movements served to reinforce the idea that sisterhood existed among nations and was an effective political tool. The original sources of news articles from abroad published in The Woman were not (or only very occasionally) identified in the paper. A close comparative reading of Jus and The Woman, however, shows that in certain cases articles published originally in English in the former were translated into Hungarian for the latter. A typical example is the ‘Latest suffrage map of America’ containing information about women’s right to vote in North and Central America. The map was originally published in Jus in December 191751 and appeared in The Woman in its spring issue of 1918.52 News of such developments was regularly present in both journals as well as news of national elections or by-elections where female candidates were successful, for example in Denmark (1918),53 Germany (1919),54 Britain (1919)55 and Sweden (1921).56 Such news appeared more or less simultaneously in these publications, though in some instances the Hungarian journal reported the results of elections earlier than Jus.57 During the December 1918 general election campaign in the United Kingdom, the Women’s Freedom League organized an action to support women candidates. Jus published a report about it in December 1918, which reads: ‘With regard to men candidates, our members are systematically questioning them as to what they are prepared to do, if returned to the House of Commons, in order to secure for women equal voting rights with men.’58 The Woman published the same piece of news a month later, and Hungarian activists from the FE organized a similar action in Budapest by distributing questionnaires to MPs in order to discover their positions concerning women’s right to vote and ask what position they would support if re-elected.59 The dynamics between the two journals, therefore, can be called active; the questionnaires are an example of how activities in one country were able to motivate initiatives elsewhere. As far as the similarities

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between articles were concerned, except when an article published in Jus was the direct source for an article in The Woman and contained a translation or summary of the original text, there were cases when the two journals probably had independent sources covering a piece of news of international relevance. In such cases, the Hungarian journal occasionally published the news earlier, and Jus published it in its next issue, a month or more later. As for the frequency of interrelated articles, there seem to be more articles taken from Jus, translated into Hungarian and published in The Woman during the years after the war. After 1920, when the Hungarian feminist periodical was published less frequently, the issues cover a longer period of time, often giving a summary of news and international events from earlier months that year.60 The content of these reports about international events can easily be identified with articles in Jus published some months before. In 1922, however, no equivalent texts can be found between the two journals. Nothing in the Hungarian publication was taken from Jus, which might be due to difficulties in correspondence, restrictions on the foreign post services in Hungary or strict surveillance of the publication by the authorities.61 A major difference between the two journals was the coverage of international news related to peace initiatives. After 1919, The Woman published significantly more news about international peace organizations than Jus. For example, in 1918 both journals published a call by Swedish women to American women signed by eleven organizations for the sake of peace ‘based on justice and reconciliation’,62 and in 1919 both journals reported on two conferences in Berne in which women participated actively. One of the events was organized by the Labour and Socialist International and the other was an ‘informal conference’ connected to this, involving the participation of international women delegates and called together by the Swiss Branch of the Women’s Committee for Permanent Peace. Both Jus and The Woman informed their readers about the resolutions of this meeting.63 Yet later Jus, some of whose member countries had opposed pacifism during the war, increasingly avoided the subjects of peace conferences and women’s international peace organizations.64 The Woman devoted significant attention to international peace initiatives and stressed the importance of an internationally acknowledged overview of the results of the peace treaties after the First World War, pointing out the danger of new conflicts and the need to strengthen reconciliation processes during these years. Jus was not, however, the only source of information for Hungarian feminists about world news. The feminist group in Budapest maintained personal

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connections with foreign organizations and media and so the editors of The Woman often received news of international events and women’s situations in other countries directly from them. As an article in The Woman about international reflections on the Hungarian suffrage bill in 1918 notes, ‘After the Feminist Association informed several foreign sister organizations about the reform suffrage bill of Vázsonyi, several foreign journals published the reflections of the feminists on this particular bill, including La Verité, The Hamburger Fremdenblatt, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), the Avondpost (The Hague) and Het Volk (Amsterdam).’65 The difference between Jus and The Woman was also related to the publishing policies and strategies of the two journals. While Jus was primarily the medium that reported the international women’s movements, particularly the work of the auxiliaries of the IWSA via the contributions of its national correspondents, The Woman was a more eclectic feminist journal containing contributions of very different genres, from reports of events and analyses of women’s situations in different parts of the world to petitions, essays and literary works, as well as summaries of activities of the IWSA branch in Budapest and groups elsewhere in Hungary. Despite this, the importance of the correspondence with Jus became more and more significant for feminists in Hungary during a worsening economic situation and volatile political atmosphere. As the issues of The Woman gradually came out less frequently and even stopped, the regular reports about Hungary written by the correspondents in Budapest and published in Jus became the only way for Hungarian feminists to make their voices heard. ‘A Story of Suffering’, an article about Hungary published in 1920 in the same issue of Jus that reported on the IWSA Congress in Geneva, explains how important the international links were in times of worsening social conditions. The article lists a number a foreign visitors and lecturers who came to give presentations in Hungary about suffrage, peace movements and other political, economic and social matters. The feminists in Budapest who organized these events expressed their gratitude for these acts of international solidarity and made an appeal to maintain such relations.66 The international network, even if only in symbolic terms, came to represent a lifeline for feminists who must have felt they were fighting a losing battle. While groups such as the FE consciously used the media as a means to contribute to the development of a democratic society by promoting the suffragist agenda, activist media constituted only one of many gendered discourses circulating in the post-war period. Popular and mainstream media offer very

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different and competing (sometimes diametrically opposed) perspectives on gender roles in these years.

Media representations of femininity and gender relations in post-war Hungary: Conflicts between the national and the international Apart from the feminist press, three other spheres of Hungarian media culture can be identified as influential in the post-war construction of femininity and gender relations in the early Horthy era. Mainstream media (supported by the government) attempted to restrict women’s presence in public life and to promote a return to traditional gender relations. In the sphere of the so-called middlebrow culture,67 conservative supporters and opponents of women’s emancipation influenced the representation of femininity. The third sphere of popular media, however, promoted international cultural stereotypes such as the flapper, the modern girl and the New Woman. These appeared both in Hungarian and imported (for instance American or French) media products such as films and novels. The media products of these three different spheres were in constant interaction and they referenced one another. Mainstream media, for example, explicitly rejected the kind of transnational gender relations represented in popular culture, especially because of their ‘foreign roots’. These parallel tendencies resulted in intercultural interference. That is to say, these debates over femininity and Hungarian and ‘foreign’ models resulted in transcultural conflicts. It is not easy to define exactly how gender relations were shaped by these media spheres, but some effects can be postulated. High circulation suggests that a media’s content already resonated with audiences’ existing opinions and perspectives, and was influential at least in terms of reinforcing these. At that time media with high circulation also tended to address issues concerning contemporary social relations, much more so than lower circulation media such as high culture novels (which are omitted from the analysis here for that reason). Secondly, the weeklies and other magazines of this period contained letters to the editor as well as other content written by readers themselves, such as dating advertisements, whose language indicates that the media influenced how audiences thought about and expressed their views (an example of this is discussed below).

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The ideology of separate spheres, which underscored nationalist and Christian values, was both anti-liberal and anti-feminist. According to the propaganda of the mainstream media, women were supposed to sacrifice themselves for the recovery of the nation by staying at home with their families instead of undertaking paid labour, higher education or political activities. Instead of autonomy, the acknowledged goals of a woman’s life became defined around the family, in her role as a wife and mother. To underline this ideal, the cult of the Virgin Mary became more strongly recognized as the symbol of normative motherhood. Turn-of-the-century anti-feminist arguments enjoyed a revival, including the idea that employment and roles in public life were incompatible with family and femininity. Some mainstream media outlets endorsed the creation of a national culture free from unwanted foreign influences. The authors considered foreign influences such as the notion of individualism to be dangerous for the nation because, according to their judgement, the interest of the national community should have primacy over that of the individuals constituting that nation. They considered feminism to be an international movement that advocated individualism. These opinions were represented in the anti-feminist and propagandist periodical A Magyar Asszony (Hungarian Lady), the official journal of MANSZ, the country’s largest conservative women’s organization of the time. According to various articles in this journal, post-war Hungary was ‘wounded and mutilated’ as a result of the Trianon Peace Treaty, and it was women’s duty to ‘cure’ the homeland, as a continuation of their benevolent activities during the war. Furthermore, it was also women’s responsibility to nurse the disabled soldiers returning from the front and at the same time oppose the enemy in its ‘war against the Christian world view’.68 The notion of a ‘war against the Christian world view’ was often represented in anti-Semitic and nationalist media of the period. Such media referred to a divided social world that was constituted by the ‘in-group’ or ‘We-group’ of Christian Hungarians and the ‘out-group’ or ‘Others group’ of the ‘non-Hungarian’ Jewish enemy.69 The nationalistic arguments that rejected feminism on the basis of its internationalism drew on this division. In the 1922 article ‘National Vocation of the Hungarian Woman’, Lutheran bishop Sándor Raffay bemoaned the decline of Hungarian national consciousness since the war. According to Raffay, the reason behind the decline was that foreign novelties were accepted as Hungarian ones, and such novelties were ‘the products of the false Western civilization, decadent internationalism and cosmopolitanism destroying national consciousness’ that infected Hungarian art, media, ‘our customs, our social life and morals’.

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Hungarian women were complicit in this ‘destructive process’ as well: they were flighty, they had ‘Europeer’ attitudes (meaning they aped the European way of thinking) and frequented coffee houses. In the desired new world, women’s vocation should be cultivating ‘national consciousness’ and encouraging men to exhibit bravery and defend national virtues.70 The journal Hungarian Lady represented mainstream ideas of femininity and gender relations, yet it did not become a popular publication in spite of the fact that local authorities were instructed by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 1922 to facilitate its distribution.71 There could be two reasons why members of MANSZ did not buy the issues of the organization’s journal regularly: competition and ambivalence. The target audience for Hungarian Lady – conservative women – had had their own weekly since 1895: New Times (Új Idők), which became one of the most popular Hungarian journals. New Times was a conservative literary periodical that belonged to middlebrow culture. It published essays, fashion news and household advice, and contained a correspondence column with responses to readers’ letters about the issues of emotional life, love affairs and everyday matters. It was less overtly reactionary than Hungarian Lady and published diverse views and opinions. It promoted traditional gender roles along with ideas about the modern ‘New Woman’. In 1920, for example, it published two contradictory articles in the same month. In the first, on the occasion of the election of the first Hungarian woman MP, Margit Slachta, conservative lawyer and journalist Géza Kenedy writes about the ‘unfavourable consequences’ of women’s emancipation and modern roles. He argues that educated women did not want to get married and have children, adding that ‘most of them become infertile’, which was harmful and dangerous for the nation. According to Kenedy all these tendencies had already been present in the United States before the war, where ‘women’s new way of thinking and their new types of emotions made them turn away from their families more and more. All this had frightening results.’72 Two weeks after the first article a response was published by Mrs Ferenc Mók about American women’s ‘healthy and balanced philosophy’ and ‘simply noble psyche’. The author claims that American women were ‘honest, impulsive, natural and autonomous, at the same time they are broad minded and venturesome’. She continues that in the States ‘all professions are open for women’ including universities where they are ‘faithful fellows of the male students’ and take part in their ‘entertainments and amusements without narrow-minded prudery’.73 Both these opposing articles by Kenedy and Mók describe the New Woman and

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both cite American examples. The debate offered Hungarian readers foreign alternatives to traditional and anti-feminist views. This encounter resulted in what Ulrich Beck refers to as a ‘transcultural conflict’.74 A second possible reason for the small readership of the Hungarian Lady is that some of the targeted subscribers might have had ambivalent feelings towards this weekly, particularly those women who were employed or publicly active, yet politically conservative (for example, followers of some of the Christian political tendencies). These women refused traditional gender roles only in part, considering motherhood important while at the same time claiming the necessity of women’s and men’s equality in marriage. According to them, women should be publicly active and should have access to education, employment and self-realization. These conservative supporters of women’s emancipation opposed internationalist feminism, and the frameworks of their discourse were motherhood-centred feminism on the one hand, and national and Christian values on the other. Their argument supporting (partial) emancipation was that adult women deserved some rights as they fulfilled their duties both as mothers and as independent persons as a result of economic and social changes since the war. Therefore, from the point of view of the nation, women’s activities could be seen as activities which contributed to the nation’s prosperity. One representative of these views was the aforementioned Margit Slachta, who was a nun. She was the first woman elected as an MP in Hungary and also the editor of the weekly papers Christian Woman (A Keresztény Nő) (1915–18) and Hungarian Woman (Magyar Nő) (1918–20), whose subtitle identifies it as a ‘Christian feminist’ journal. After her first election victory in 1920, Slachta wanted to run again as a candidate, but was forced to resign by her Mother Superior in 1922 in the wake of women’s political demobilization. The writer and journalist Anna Szederkényi can also be listed in the same camp. She was considered to be the first female professional journalist in Hungary since, in 1905, she was the first woman to join the Union of Journalists. In 1908 she founded the Hungarian Feminist Association. She believed that tradition-respecting Hungarian society could not deal with the already existing FE, founded four years earlier, thereby creating the need for a ‘middle ground’ feminist organization. A number of Szederkényi’s novels discuss the problems of women’s love and erotic life in a rather daring way for the time. The heroines of these novels break with their traditional surroundings and family ties, and they initiate new intimate relationships. They become followers of free love but after many disappointments they return to their original lives.

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Erotic literature for women as well as novels and films discussing women’s sexual lives or gender inequality were popular after the war. In his volume The History of Hungarian Literature, littérateur and writer Antal Szerb identified two main tendencies in popular literature in post-war Hungary. The first of these was defined as ‘white novels’, which are about innocent young girls and women following traditional gender roles. The second type of novel deals with women’s sexual lives and moral problems.75 These ‘erotic’ novels were interpreted by contemporary male critics in the mainstream media in two different ways. The first interpretation argues that Szederkényi promotes conservative gender relations as the morals of her novels reinforce traditional roles and values.76 According to the other view, however, these novels are close to pornography and immoral. The critic Béla Szira claims that Szederkényi’s art is an example of a general tendency to follow foreign models. He adds that the heroines of several Hungarian novels of the time represent the ‘unappreciated married woman’ who is ‘disappointed’ and ‘suffering’, and who ‘plays feminism and free love and finally commits adultery and has a bad conscience. She commits adultery once or even several times.’77 Similar ideas kept turning up in mainstream media relating ‘free love’ to feminism and criticizing it as something immoral and alien. Another contemporary woman writer, Renée Erdős, achieved even more significant success than Szederkényi with her similarly erotic novel, The Big Scream (A nagy sikoly), published in 1922, which occupied the border between middlebrow and popular culture at the time. It was reprinted eight times in the 1920s, and was also interpreted in diverse ways. Although it was seen as emphasizing women’s traditional roles, because in the end the heroine forgives her unfaithful husband and stays with him, the novel was also considered pornographic as the woman initiates a love relationship with another man. Foreign literature in translation also reached a wide audience in Hungary at the time. French writer Victor Margueritte’s novel, La Garçonne, published in French in 1922 and in Hungarian in 1923, caused a real scandal in both countries.78 The Hungarian censorship authorities banned distribution of both the original French version and the Hungarian translation. Nevertheless, an Austrian publishing house sold a Hungarian edition from 1923 to 1924 and the ban was lifted in 1925. (The film based on the novel was banned, too, yet after a while a shorter version was licenced for audiences over the age of sixteen.) La Garçonne exemplifies how cultural transfer allows literary and other media to be open to diverse interpretations and occupy the border zone of  middlebrow and popular culture. It also contributed to the creation of the

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post-war gender order in Hungary because it became a bestseller after 1925 and, according to some, it influenced the way of thinking of some readers. In the mainstream media the novel was defined as the lowest form of pornography.79 Ironically, however, La Garçonne – a novel propagating the New Woman, free love and sexual relationships – was translated into Hungarian by the columnist for a Catholic daily paper. Why would such a translator translate such a work? The main explanation given in popular media at the time was that he assumed the reader would have an easy moral choice between the heroine’s ‘disgusting adventures’ and mannish way of life and her decision at the end of the novel to live a traditional married ‘wife-life’.80 The ambivalent, hybrid nature of identity in popular media can also be seen in relation to the direct impact of La Garçonne on readers. The magazine Theatre Life (Színházi Élet) published a letter from the daughter of a landowner asking for advice from the editors. She admits that La Garçonne had changed her way of thinking about marriage and she had subsequently decided to leave her fiancé. In his response, Renée Erdős argues that because the Trianon Peace Treaty and its consequences had left Hungary ‘wounded and mutilated’, all Hungarian girls must be self-sacrificing wives and mothers and should not follow their individual desires.81 As a new and easily accessible genre, movies became a very popular form of media in the 1920s. The Hungarian movie market was dominated by mostly American and, to a smaller degree, Swedish films. Among these, the so-called garçonne films by the studio Svenska were especially popular, as well as the American flapper films about young, easy-going girls. Across the board Hungarian media viewed both the garçonne and the flapper genres in terms of the damaging consequences of the war for people’s mentality and behaviour. Both genres were seen to represent the same post-war phenomenon in terms of modern gender relations. The principal difference between the two was that independent women faced fewer societal obstacles in the United States.82 Contemporary writers and journalists found that the American examples were the most influential, and it was the American type of modern woman that many aimed to imitate in Budapest. The author Antal Szerb describes this process as ‘girlisation’ in an article published in 1928.83 As the 1930 yearbook of Hungary’s then largest media concern observes: ‘The women of Budapest saw so many American films that many times they are more like flappers than the flappers themselves.’84 American women could be seen not only in movies but also in the streets of Budapest, as a result of growing tourism after the war. In 1913 1,506 Americans visited Budapest, falling to only six in 1918 because of

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the war. In 1923, however, 2,089 American tourists visited Budapest, more than the number of visitors from other European countries such as Britain or Italy.85 Young American women received special attention and, according to the local stereotypes, were often described as easy-going, rich ‘Miss Dollars’.86 In the post-war period Hungarian media played an active role in the representation of transnational cultural types of femininity such as the flapper, the modern girl and the New Woman. These cultural types stood in contrast both to traditional images of womanhood defined in terms of domesticity, family and religion, and to the feminist ideal of gender equality, political engagement and female self-determination. This vivid attention to these new cultural types could not have been sustained without the continuing interest of audiences. The sheer number of articles about the United States in print media suggests Hungarians were interested in changing ideas about and images of femininity, and in the American way of life and way of thinking in general. Hungarian journals also provided information about American media and discussed their views about the post-war order in Europe. By the same token, Hungary was of particular interest to American journalists. A former enemy nation, Hungary was nonetheless seen sympathetically as having been a reluctant participant in the war. It was now looked upon as being in a period of political and social turbulence, facing the loss of territory and population and experiencing a rapid succession of governments from across the political spectrum. Hungarian journals sometimes mentioned American journalists working in Hungary, such as Hiram K. Moderwell, J. F. Marcosson, P. A. Waring and Malvin I. Brorby.87 Two Americans, Eleanor Franklin Egan and Alice Riggs Hunt, were among the first Western journalists to visit Hungary after the end of the war, and their reporting provides an interesting contrast into how this situation of turbulence and change was understood.

American women reporting from Hungary in 1919 The two journalists in question, Egan and Hunt, both visited Budapest in the spring of 1919. Each came from a privileged background and had moved in elite social circles in New York. Their differences, however, outweighed these similarities in ways that reflected the political and ideological divisions then emerging in post-war Hungary, as well as in Europe and the United States generally. Egan was a seasoned journalist with substantial experience in covering international news as a long-time correspondent for the weekly Saturday Evening Post. She

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was a staunch conservative who raised repeated alarms about the dangers of communism. Moreover, she was avowedly not a feminist and admitted to having taken little interest in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Hunt, on the other hand, had worked as an organizer, speaker and writer for the suffrage cause at local and national levels. She had opposed America’s entry into the war, and had joined the New York Socialist Party in 1917. She arrived in Budapest with a contract to write several articles for two New York papers, the Evening Post and the New York Tribune. Although the number of women entering journalism began to grow after the war, according to Linda Lumsden, their numbers remained small, so female foreign correspondents such as Egan and Hunt were still a rarity at the time.88 In fact, most news and analysis of Hungary came not from on-theground, eyewitness reporting but in the form of letters from visiting officials or government communiqués. This makes these journalists’ accounts particularly valuable as insights into the complex ways images of Central Europe, and Hungary in particular, were being constructed and reconstructed in the wake of the war. In his analysis of American images of pre-Second World War Hungary, Tibor Frank notes that most English-language accounts came from British rather than American writers.89 Frank’s analysis, however, is confined to books about Hungary, and does not consider the growing importance of the mass media representations that were usually able to reach much larger audiences than books. At the same time, Egan and Hunt were like all foreign observers who, as Tibor reminds us, brought with them their own prejudices and agendas and took away the versions of reality given to them by the people they relied on for information.

Eleanor Franklin Egan By the time Egan reached Budapest in March 1919, she had already visited Italy, Yugoslavia and Austria. Her post-armistice tour would take her on to Bucharest, Odessa, Istanbul and finally to the scenes of mass starvation in Armenia. It was truly a descent into hell, and it resulted in a series of long discursive articles in an American weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, that documented deprivation, hunger, social disarray and political turmoil in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.90 Egan’s reporting is significant not only for its comprehensive, comparative scope, but because it was among the first eyewitness accounts of conditions beyond the more familiar Western Front to reach a large domestic readership.91 Beyond that, Egan’s position as a female observer so soon after the armistice was highly

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unusual. In fact, while writing about her visit to the new, post-war republic of German-Austria she mentions that she was ‘the only woman in Vienna from the ranks of the victorious enemy’.92 Given these unusual circumstances, it is useful to examine Egan’s reports as examples of national and regional image construction at a crucial transitional moment. Egan’s role was somewhat compromised. She presented herself as an independent observer, documenting conditions and offering her assessment of the situation. But she was employed by George Horace Lorimer at the Saturday Evening Post, a man and a publication deeply committed to the project of promoting American values, which in this context meant raising the alarm about the encroachment of Bolshevism.93 In addition, she had had a long association with the international aid efforts, and was particularly beholden to Herbert Hoover’s United States Food Administration (USFA). In fact, she carried with her a letter of passage signed by Hoover claiming that she was ‘traveling in behalf of the United States Food Administration for the sole purpose of food relief ’.94 This distortion of her mission was not the first, nor was it the first time Egan had made use of her powerful connections to aid her in her reporting. Married to former journalist and J. P. Morgan assistant Martin Egan, she was on familiar terms with some of the most powerful men of her time. During the war, she had used these connections and others to travel to Baghdad to report on the British occupation, the only correspondent, male or female, to be granted such access.95 The fifth article in her post-armistice series is based on Egan’s visit to Budapest just days before the fall of the Károlyi government. ‘“Nem! Nem! Soha!”: The Hungarian War Cry and Claims’ emphasizes the political situation by quoting the slogan of the resistance to the proposed dismemberment of Hungary being devised by the peacemakers at Versailles: ‘This means “No! No! Never!” and it is displayed on banners and posters everywhere above a map of Hungary cut up into five small pieces. Perhaps no multitude ever voiced a battle cry so charged with hopeless anguish.’96 The sense of collective emotion and the ‘multitude’ are the overriding impression left by this article. The only individuals singled out are an unnamed American official from the peace conference, the US president (‘Mr. Wilson’), an aide to Hungarian president Károlyi and the president himself. Beyond that, the Hungarian population is depicted as a united entity, divided by class, but sharing an attitude of defiance and despair. This attitude is presented against an exotic background, and Egan indulges in a kind of ‘orientalism’ that feeds into familiar clichés about Hungarian character: ‘There are environments in which one is capable of nothing but a negative kind of receptivity, but in Hungary life

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Figure 15  Photocopy of a passport issued to Eleanor Franklin Egan by the United States Food Administration, 14 January 1919. Martin Egan Papers, Box 18. Gift: Richard P. Wunder, 1982. Reproduced courtesy of the the Morgan Library & Museum, ARC 1222. Photographic credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

seems to play a piper’s tune to which humanity dances in spite of itself.’97 Egan is clearly not attempting to challenge her readers’ preconceptions about Hungarian character, and just as she generalizes about Hungarians, she also includes the US government, her readers and herself in the all-embracing pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’. For example, she writes, ‘With respect to all war-shattered Europe we are like the proverbial anxious and responsible relative of a hungry monster, and our main idea is to “feed the brute,” hoping thereby to smother his passions in contentment’ (emphasis added).98 Egan leaves her readers with an image of a brave and suffering Hungary, but the story of its tragedy is subordinated to a larger and more American-focused narrative. That narrative involves a critique of Wilson’s idealistic philosophy of

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self-determination and a fear of encroaching Bolshevism through Central and Eastern Europe. In fact, events had moved so swiftly that Hungary had already undergone a communist takeover by the time Egan wrote the article. The setpiece interview with President Károlyi concludes that it was by then somewhat old news, as she was forced to concede: ‘But even though last month’s events are ancient history nowadays a glance at the state of affairs that existed in Budapest just before the break may yet be interesting and somewhat illuminating.’99 This ‘glance’ includes the interview with Károlyi, perhaps among the last he gave to a journalist while still in power. Blending personal opinion, physical detail (‘He is blind in one eye – staringly blind – has a cleft lip, and talks in his throat without controlled enunciation’)100 and extended quotation, Egan’s interview with the Hungarian president is part serious political commentary and part descriptive narrative written in a firstperson style. But despite frequent self-reference, Egan never in this interview and rarely elsewhere refers to herself as a woman. This, in itself, is perhaps not surprising; Egan, as she once remarked in a speech, was doing ‘men’s work’,101 and shunned any special status or distinction as a woman. In fact, when she was named as one of the four women delegates to the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference in 1921, she was at pains to disassociate herself from any women’s groups who might have influenced her selection. When the president appointed her, she said, ‘He was not yielding to the demand of any women’s organization, nor was he thinking of me as being representative of American womanhood.’102 Egan’s sensitivity to perceptions that her qualifications would be suspect was justifiable given the condescending attitudes that professional women faced. It perhaps accounts for the traditional male-oriented focus of her writing. Few of the sources in any of her articles were female; in the Hungary article none of them were. She was, however, interested in, if not overly critical of, class divisions, and although it is not evident in ‘Nem! Nem! Soha!’, she made a point of visiting orphanages, hospitals and sites of suffering and relief. But her reluctance to make more than passing references to her gender extended to avoidance in these articles of any issues that dealt primarily with women’s rights, although these were very much in contention in some of the places she visited. Perhaps this simply indicates a political bias. As an avowedly conservative woman Egan’s priorities were more concerned with Bolshevism and American involvement in the world. But it might also be seen as the result of her resistance to, and even resentment of, a perceived pressure from women’s groups to ‘represent women’ as well as an insecurity about her status as a public practitioner of ‘men’s work’.

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Alice Riggs Hunt Given the scarcity of any credible independent sources in Hungary during the tumultuous months of March to July 1919, it is remarkable that a second accredited journalist to visit Budapest and interview the Hungarian leader was also a woman. Unlike Egan, Hunt arrived in Budapest with an explicit mandate to write about the lives and experiences of women. The New York Tribune Institute had commissioned Hunt to write three articles about the ‘industrial and political conditions of women’ in Britain and France as well as the ‘domestic service situation’ in other countries she visited.103 She was given a similar charge by the Evening Post.104 The accounts she delivered, however, were rejected by both the Tribune and the more liberal Evening Post and appeared eventually in British and American socialist periodicals, often without her by-line. As purposeful as Egan, although miles apart in political identification, Hunt had a polemical style and a clear agenda in reporting from Hungary. She sought to portray the Soviet revolution there in as positive a light as possible, and several of her articles seem to be written as correctives to the more alarmist accounts of what was being written about life under communist rule. In doing so, she downplayed issues most directly affecting women, not ignoring them, as Egan did, but nevertheless relegating them to a secondary status in her published work. Hunt’s first articles, appearing on the Post’s women’s page, deals with French women farmers as well as participation by women for the first time in elections in Germany.105 They reflect the Post’s centrist politics, supportive of the new roles that women were playing in public life, but wary of Bolshevism. An article in the New York Tribune’s Sunday women’s supplement on the difficulty of finding female servants in Paris fitted Hunt’s mandate to report on ‘the domestic service situation’, but she shifts the emphasis from the wealthy middle class unable to find good help to the establishment of training in ‘domestic science’ to provide employment for war widows and opportunities for women to take on managerial positions in service industries.106 Perhaps the most serious and moving article of hers to appear in the mainstream press was a description of a home for French women who had been abused during the German occupation and had borne children. Although sentimental in tone, ‘Little Girl Victims of War’ brought the brutal reality of rape, sexual slavery and trafficking home to the middle-class readers of the Tribune.107 After these articles nothing further appeared in the pages of the Post or the Tribune. Hunt continued to write, but from this point her articles became openly partisan, and specifically set out to defend the new communist government in

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Hungary. These articles found homes in several radical journals, and most of them were ultimately gathered together in a single volume. Hunt herself later wrote simply, ‘Gave my articles about Communist Hungary to Labour groups for publication in pamphlet form under title of Facts about Communist Hungary. … These articles were refused by New York Evening Post as too factual.’108 The Hungary articles drop all pretence of journalistic objectivity or scepticism and portray the new Hungarian government as valiantly struggling with the problems of creating a new and fairer society. Hunt was at pains to counter the notion that a Bolshevik takeover would cause a breakdown in public morals or a bloodbath. It was true, for instance, that houses and personal property had been appropriated from bourgeois owners, but this was to provide housing for the proletariat, 10,000 of whom had now been able to marry. After Paris, it was refreshing to spend hours with commissaries ‘discussing frankly work already accomplished in two months and hopes and problems of the immediate future’.109 Among these officials was communist leader Béla Kun, who impressed Hunt by agreeing to an interview one hour after she requested it: ‘His direct and explicit answers’, she writes, ‘were a surprise to a press correspondent used to indiscreet formulas at the Peace Conference interviews.’110 Like Egan with President Károlyi, Hunt gives the Hungarian leader a prominent place in her articles and an opportunity to explain and defend his policies, including one statement that seems to have been intended to appeal to feminists: he pointed out that although only workers could vote, ‘housewives are recognised as workers’.111 Unlike Egan, Hunt showed an interest in women’s working conditions and participation in public life. In several articles, including a chapter in Facts About Communist Hungary and an article in Jus Suffragii, she describes a meeting with women members of the Budapest Soviet that included Adel Spady, secretary of the Social Democratic Party; Therese Braddstein, editor of the Woman Worker; Maria Chober, an organizer of peasant women; and other trade union, pacifist and child welfare advocates.112 Although like-minded in many ways, the women expressed some differences that suggest a tension between feminism and communism as it was being practised. Spady, for instance, says that prior to the second revolution ‘the overwhelming majority of women were socialist, but not communist’. She adds rather dogmatically: ‘There should not be any separate woman’s movement, as this is contrary to the teachings of Marx.’ Gosthonyi identifies herself as a socialist first: ‘I never worked with feminists but joined the Socialist Party at the beginning of the war.’113 Paula Pogyani, ‘a strong antimilitarist and pacifist worker’, supported the communist government, ‘but believe[d] that women must teach men the folly of organized murder’.114 Besides

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Figure 16  Alice Riggs Hunt at the New York State Fair in 1915. Reproduced courtesy of the University of Waterloo Library, Ontario, Canada, Special Collections & Archives, WA 15-1.

these statements, Hunt also illustrates the diversity of opinion in a description of a gathering of 5,000 women in the Buda Concert Hall where ‘several of the women communist leaders held the audience spellbound for five hours’. ‘After the announced speakers had finished,’ she writes, ‘there were spontaneous speeches from the audience, and women young and old, rich women and poor women, peasant women and women from Budapest spoke vehemently for or against the Government.’115 Hunt presents the situation for women in a broadly positive light: there were new opportunities for political and economic equality, and space for public debate and difference of opinion. She is honest enough, though, to make some

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critical observations, such as that women were ‘not yet holding high office in the Government’. She continues: ‘The work of women in public life in Budapest has been more for feminism than for revolution, and the feminist Leaders are not found among those working with the Communist Government.’116 This statement carries some characteristic ambiguity. Is it a criticism of the government or of the women who worked ‘more for feminism than revolution’? In either case, it shows a certain degree of reticence to challenge the Kun government or to advocate for any kind of separate mobilization on the part of women. Interestingly, though, an unpublished letter to Carrie Chapman Catt, written in the same spring, shows Hunt making a strong plea for an independent women’s movement. Hunt argues that ‘these economic, political, dynastic and territorial circles of hate must be broken by women’.117 In this letter Hunt calls on Catt to lead an international meeting of women, but Catt believed such a meeting was unwise and possibly illegal, and that she was not the person to do it.118 Hunt was ultimately committed to both the causes of international socialism and women’s equality, and although her writing for various audiences tended to give priority at times to one over the other, her articles shared a tone of political engagement. Her 1919 tour of Europe, which was initially sponsored by two establishment media organizations, may have radicalized her, or she may have been using the Evening Post and the Tribune as vehicles to gain access to a Europe that was still technically at war. These journalists demonstrate how the ability of women to act as distinctive, or even representative, voices in the mainstream Western press in this period was severely limited, but evolving. This is evident both in the fact that two of the first American reporters to report from Budapest in the spring of 1919 were women, but also that their accounts were to some degree attenuated. Egan had access to a national readership that numbered in the millions, but her reliance on cultural stereotypes and official sources failed to advance any multidimensional or differentiated image of the Hungarian people. Hunt was constrained first by her editors’ consignment of her to the ‘women’s pages’, and then, when her writing became more overtly political, the loss of her mainstream audience altogether. She found a new audience in the leftist press, but here, aside from one article in Jus Suffragii, accounts of women’s experiences were subsumed within the larger narrative of theoretically gender-neutral socialist progress. Of the two, Hunt had a more internationalist perspective, but in both cases, the contending ideological forces of this period coloured what they ‘saw’, and ultimately the national images of Hungary that they communicated to their readers.

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Conclusion By examining media across different sectors, this chapter illustrates the need to recognize how both political and more popular forms of journalism and media competed for the attention and interest of audiences in a period of social uncertainty and change. There were conflicts and tensions at all levels. Feminists working in national and international contexts had much to offer one another in terms of resources and solidarity, but the exigencies of activism were further complicated by a climate of hostile reaction and the massive challenges of post-war reconstruction, as we see in the specific case of feminist groups in Hungary but also more widely. Conservative women’s publications were able to draw from nationalist, religious and traditional sociocultural beliefs that tried to subsume gender expectations under other normative obligations (to the nation, God and the family). In the sphere of popular culture (movies, news features, mass circulation novels), the status and lives of women were seen to be in flux. Here international, especially American, cultural images were beginning to circulate widely and provide an alternative to traditional gender models, especially for women. But these new cultural forms were also subject to a conservative backlash that painted them as immoral and destructive for women as well as society as a whole. When foreign observers wrote about the turbulence in Hungary, even in cases where women’s lives and experiences were or could be the primary subject of representation, gender relations tended to be subsumed under the class politics of the nation state – to the struggle between communists, socialists, liberals and authoritarian conservatives. The case studies in this chapter demonstrate how representations of and by women contributed to and influenced broader international and cross-border flows of information, helping to construct progressive and reactionary discourses about gender at both the political and cultural levels.

Notes The authors would like to acknowledge the following individuals and institutions: Thanks to Zsolt Mészáros (PhD Candidate, University ELTE, Budapest) for his thorough assistance with archival research and the review of journal articles in the issues of Jus and The Woman (1918–23). Thanks also to Heather Olaveson for her meticulous editorial work and to Graham Knight for his generous input. We are grateful for the support of

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the ‘Small Incubator’ Programme of the Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences which generously funded a scholarly visit and working schedule which made an earlier phase of this chapter possible in April 2015 in Budapest. Finally, we would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support. 1 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 2. 2 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 44. 3 IWSA News Service Monthly Press Notice, February 1921, collection of correspondance of the Feminist Association with foreign organizations, Hungarian National Archive. P999 12.d. 12.t./579. 4 Balázs Sipos, ‘Adattár (Statistics)’, in L. Varga (ed.), A magyar szociáldemokrácia kézikönyve (Handbook of Hungarian Social Democracy) (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 1999), p. 510. 5 Katherine Bompass, ‘To the Women of the Americas’, International Woman Suffrage News, April 1922, p. 94. 6 The July 1920 issue of Jus reported that the Geneva Congress opened with a ‘roll call’ of the twenty-one countries which had enfranchised its women since 1913. 7 See, for instance, Bosch, Rupp, Whittick and the International Alliance of Women centenary edition of Jus Suffragii. Mineke Bosch with Annemarie Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902-1942 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Arnold Whittick, Woman into Citizen (London: Athenaeum with Frederick Muller, 1979); International Alliance of Women, Jus Suffragii, centenary edition (2004), http://womenalliance.org/old/ pdf/IAWCentenaryEdition19042004webversion.pdf (accessed 8 June 2015). Also Chapter 2 in this book. 8 Leila J. Rupp, ‘Transnational Women’s Movements’, EGO: European History Online (16 June 2011), par. 26: http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/transnational-movementsand-organisations/international-social-movements/leila-j-rupp-transnationalwomens-movements (accessed 8 June 2015). 9 Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 22. 10 Crystal Macmillan, ‘The Future of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance’, Jus Suffragii, February 1920, p. 66. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 147. 13 Carrie Chapman Catt, ‘Mrs. Chapman Catt’s Presidential Address’, International Woman Suffrage News, July 1920, p. 147.

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14 See ‘Title of “Jus Suffragii”’, International Woman Suffrage News, January 1917, p. 50. The title changed again in February 1930 to The International Women’s News. In each case, it retained the Jus Suffragii. For this reason we will refer to it in its shortened name, Jus, for the purposes of this book. 15 This attention is largely due to the facsimile edition of Jus Suffragii from 1913 to 1920, edited by Sybil Oldfield, International Woman Suffrage (London: Routledge, 2003). 16 Angela K. Smith, Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 52. 17 Emilie Gourd, ‘International Appreciation of Miss. Sheepshanks’, International Woman Suffrage News, October 1919, p. 14. 18 Smith, Suffrage Discourse in Britain, p. 53. 19 The December 1920 issue notes offers made to the WYWCA, the International Abolitionist Federation, the International Congress of Working Women and the International Federation of University Women to publish supplements in Jus as long as this would not add to the budget. ‘Jus Suffragii’, International Woman Suffrage News, December 1920, p. 37. 20 ‘Business Transacted’, Jus Suffragii, July 1913, p. 4. 21 ‘International List of Feminist Papers’, International Woman Suffrage News, February 1922, p. 79. 22 A brief notice in December 1920 urged auxiliaries to send copies of Jus to the press of their countries and that short summaries be sent to each national equivalent of the Review of Reviews – see ‘Jus Suffragii’, International Woman Suffrage News, December 1920, p. 37. 23 One example is the criticism of the IWSA’s decision to refuse the application of the National Woman’s Party of America at the Paris Congress of 1926. This is mentioned in Jus as part of a brief notice about new members in the July 1926 issue devoted to the Congress. However, Time and Tide ran a leader about the incident, as well as a letter from Lady Rhondda, president of the Six Point Group, outlining why she withdrew her group’s application in protest at the treatment of the Woman’s Party. The article ‘Feminists and Social Reformers’ (pp. 520–1) and Rhondda’s reprinted speech (pp. 528–9) are highly critical of the IWSA and point to a more complex backstory (11 June 1926). 24 Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888-1945’, American Historical Review, 99/5 (1994), p. 1577. 25 The use of such terms is pronounced in Mrs Chapman Catt’s inaugural address in 1923 in which she speculates about what the women of the ‘North lands’ can do to aid those in the ‘South lands’. See International Woman Suffrage News, July 1923, p. 158. 26 Ibid., p. 1587.

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27 The phrase ‘thin gold link’ comes from one of the tributes to the paper in December 1918: ‘What has been the abiding bow of promise on four years of cloud and storm? Not creed, not art, not science, not Socialism – all these have failed. But the thin gold link of our International Suffrage Press has held us all together in one high sisterhood – British, Germans, French, Hungarians, Latins, Slavs, and Teutons.’ Harriet C. Newcomb, ‘The International Woman Suffrage News’ (Letter to the Editor), International Woman Suffrage News, December 1918, p. 27. 28 ‘Women and International Politics’, Woman’s Leader, 27 February 1920, p. 77. 29 Ibid., p. 77. 30 Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer (1877–1948) was a well-known Hungarian feminist activist. Her name appear in several forms in the literature. She herself used the form Rózsa Schwimmer, abandoning the family name of her husband (Bédy) with whom she was married for a short time. The English literature often uses the form ‘Rosika’, most probably because this was the way many of her close friends in the movement addressed her (for instance in her correspondence). 31 Research on the Feminist Association has intensified in Hungary since 1990. For example, see Judit Acsády, ‘A magyarországi feminizmus a századelőn’, in L. Püski, L. Tímár and T. Valuch (eds), Politika, gazdaság és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben (Debrecen: KLTE Történelmi Intézet, 1999), pp. 295–311; Orsolya Kereszty, ‘A Great Endeavour: The Creation of the Hungarian Feminist Journal A Nő és Társadalom (Woman in Society) and its Role in the Movement 1907-1913’, Aspasia 7 (2013), pp. 92–108; Claudia Papp, ‘Die Kraft der weiblichen Seele’: Feminismus in Ungarn, 1918-1941 (Münster: LIT, 2004); Andrea Pető, Nőhistóriák: A politizáló magyar nők történetéből (Budapest: Seneca, 1998); Susan Zimmermann, Die bessere Halfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1915 (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 1999); F. T. Zsupán, ‘The Reception of the Hungarian Feminist Movement 1904-1914’, in R. Pynsent (ed.), Decadence and Innovation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989), pp. 61–5. 32 István Bárczy, the mayor of Budapest at the time, was an open-minded liberal politician and he personally supported the IWSA Congress in Budapest in many ways. He also organized a reception for the participants at Fisherman’s Bastion in the Buda Castle where he personally greeted the delegates with an opening speech. 33 Mihály Szécsényi, ‘Nőkongresszus Budapesten’ (Women’s Congress in Budapest), Budapest 10 (2013), pp. 1–4. 34 Judit Acsády, ‘In a Different Voice: Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War’, in Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 114. 35 Ibid., p. 110.

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36 Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp, ‘Introduction: The Women’s Movement and the First World War’, in Fell and Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime, pp. 1–17 (here pp. 6 and 12). 37 Judit Acsády, ‘Interetnikai párbeszéd – női kezdeményezések, nőmozgalmak – nemzetközi kontextus’, Nőképek kisebbségben: Tanulmányok a kisebbségben (is) élő nőkről (Pozsony/Bratislava: Phoenix Könyvkiadó, 2014), pp. 15–18. 38 Letter to E. G. Balch from the Budapest office of the Feminist Association, 23 March 1921, Hungarian National Archive. P999.17.d/4777. 39 Her personal archive (correspondence, notes, photographs, etc.) is in the New York Public Library (Schwimmer-Lloyd collection) and is a rich source of information about her activism and personal connections. 40 See, for example, Schwimmer’s correspondence with Aletta Jacobs during these years, many letters of which are published in Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship. 41 Dagmar Wernitznig, ‘Between Frontlines: The Militant Pacifist Rosika Schwimmer (1877-1948) and Her Total Peace Effort’, Colloque international ‘Les défenseurs de la paix 1899-1917: Approches actuelles, nouveaux regards’, 15–17 January 2014. See also Dagmar Wernitznig, ‘Out of her time? Rosika Schwimmer’s (1877–1948) Transnational Activism after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017); and Chapter 1 in this book. 42 In 1948 the newly elected communist authorities banned the Association along with thousands of other civil organizations. 43 This was evident in Melanie Vámbéry’s annual reports of the general meetings. See Papp, ‘Die Kraft der weiblichen Seele’, p. 145. 44 In a letter of 1921, Carrie Chapman Catt informs Eugénia Mellerné Miskolczy, head of the Budapest office at that time, that she is sending 300 dollars to support ‘your suffrage work’. Catt was acting here on behalf of the Leslie woman suffrage commission. Source: Hungarian National Archive, P999, 12.d 12.t./582. 45 See Brian Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group in Modern Britain’, in Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), pp. 261–96. 46 ‘Levél a francia szüfrazsettektől (French Suffragettes’ Letter)’, A Nő, 2/2 (February 1915), p. 26. Cited also in Acsády, ‘In a Different Voice’, p. 112. 47 The issues published between 1918 and 1923 include twelve in 1918; four in 1919; ten in 1920; one in 1921; one in 1922; and two in 1923. 48 ‘Egyesületi hírek (News of the Association)’, A Nő, 10/2 (December 1923), p. 15. 49 See some details of the history of censorship in Hungary in Acsády, ‘In a Different Voice’, p. 110.

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50 Carrie Chapman Catt to Vilma Glüklich, 14 June 1921, Hungarian National Archive. P999 17.d./211. 51 ‘Latest suffrage map of America’, International Woman Suffrage News, 12/3 (December 1917), p. 33. 52 ‘A nők választójogának térképe’, A Nő, 5/3 (March 1918), pp. 40–1. 53 Eline Hansen, ‘A dán választások’, A Nő, 5/6–7 (June/July 1918), p. 92; Eline Hansen and Th. Daugaard, ‘Denmark’, International Woman Suffrage News, 12/10 (July 1918), pp. 151–2. 54 In The Woman a short untitled report was published in January 1919 at the bottom of the page in large bold letters, saying: ‘34 women were elected to the German Parliament according to the dailies.’ A Nő, 6/1 (January 1919), p. 2; ‘Germany’, International Woman Suffrage News, 13/5 (February 1919), p. 62; Marie Stritt, ‘Germany’, International Woman Suffrage News, 13/6 (March 1919), pp. 76–7. 55 ‘Az első nő az angol parlamentben (First woman in British Parliament)’, a short report explaining that Lady Astor replaces the Irish Countess Markiewicz who had been elected in December 1918 but did not take up her seat. A Nő, 6/4 (December 1919), p. 6; ‘Late News: Lady Astor Elected’, International Woman Suffrage News, 14/3 (December 1919), p. 24. 56 ‘Sweden: First Woman MP Elected’, International Woman Suffrage News, 16/1 (October 1921), p. 13; ‘The First Five: Swedish Women’s Victory at the Polls’, International Woman Suffrage News, 16/2 (November 1921), p. 1; Gulli Petrini, ‘Az első öt nőképviselő Svédországban (The first five women MPs in Sweden)’, A Nő, 8/1 (December 1921), pp. 4–5. 57 See note 54 above. 58 F. A. Underwood, ‘Women’s Freedom League’, International Woman Suffrage News, 13/3 (December 1918), p. 32. 59 ‘Választási propaganda Angliában’, A Nő, 6/1 (January 1919), p. 10. 60 For example in 1921 and in 1922, when only one issue of The Woman came out each year. 61 In the 1920s the Horthy administration prolonged the regulation of the press as in wartime. Nothing was allowed to be published that was defined as being against the country’s interest. The activities of the feminists were earlier considered useful by the authorities prior to and during the First World War, mostly because of their charity and social initiatives. By the 1920s however, the political climate became more conservative and less open. Feminists were viewed with suspicion and very much seen as enemies by the leading conservative women’s organization, MANSZ, which has close ties to the government who strongly opposed many aspects of women’s emancipation. The growing influence of these conservative forces might have had an impact on the gradual silencing of the feminist voice.

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62 Hertha, ‘Swedish Women and Peace’, International Woman Suffrage News, 13/3 (December 1918), p. 35. The same news in Hungarian: ‘Svéd nők felhívása az amerikai asszonyokhoz (Swedish women’s appeal to American women)’, A Nő, 6./1 (January 1919), p. 5. 63 Mrs Philip Snowden, ‘Two International Conferences at Berne’, International Woman Suffrage News, 13/6 (March 1919), pp. 73–4; Marguerite Gobat, ‘Nők nemzetközi békekonfernciája Bernben’ (Women’s international peace conference in Berne), A Nő, 6/2 (February 1919), pp. 18–9; ‘A berni nőkonferencia határozatai’ (Decisions of Berne Congress), A Nő, 6/2 (February 1919), pp. 19–20. 64 The reason for this neglect could be that by that time WILPF had its own newsletter and IWSN did not intend to duplicate the news. Yet, in Hungary there was no other periodical beyond The Woman to publish news of women’s international peace movements. 65 ‘Hírek a nagyvilágból’ (News from the world), A Nő, 5/3 (March 1918), p. 45. 66 For the Hungarian Section of the Alliance, see ‘Hungary: A Story of Suffering’, International Woman Suffrage News, 14/8 (May–June 1920), p. 120. 67 Middle culture or the ‘midcult’ is an ‘intermediate form’ between mass culture and high culture. It ‘has the essential qualities of Masscult … but it decently covers them with a cultural fig leaf. … It pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.’ Dwight Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult’, in Against the American Grain (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983), p. 37. 68 Albert Berzeviczy, ‘Néhány szó a magyar nők hivatásáról’ (A few words about the Hungarian women’s vocation), A Magyar Asszony, 2/7–8 (1922), pp. 1–3; ‘Asszonyok munkája az országban’ (Lady’s job in the country), A Magyar Asszony, 2/3 (1922), pp. 28 and 29. 69 Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances’, in Kevin Thompson and Lester E. Embree (eds), The Phenomenology of the Political (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000), pp. 179–80. 70 Sándor Raffay, ‘A magyar nő nemzeti hivatása’ (National vocation of the Hungarian woman), A Magyar Asszony, 3/9 (1922), pp. 2–3. 71 Bulletin of Ministry of Home Affairs (Belügyi Közlöny), 27/24 (1922), p. 1105. 72 Géza Kenedy, ‘The First Swallow (Az első fecske)’, Új Idők, 26/10 (1920), pp. 192–3. The title refers to the phrase ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’, and Kenedy identifies the first female MP as ‘the first swallow’. 73 Mrs Ferenc Mók, ‘Az amerikai nőkről’ (About the American women), Új Idők, 26/12 (1920), pp. 242–4. 74 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 11–12. 75 Antal Szerb, Magyar irodalomtörténet (The History of Hungarian Literature) [1934] (Budapest: Magvető, 1992), pp. 483–5. 76 r. r., ‘Anna Szederkényi’s new novels (Szederkényi Anna új regényei)’, Budapest Review (Budapesti Szemle), 483/3 (1917), pp. 476–80.

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77 Béla Szira, ‘Anna Szederkényi: Until a Woman Goes That Far (Szederényi Anna: Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig)’, Hungarian Culture (Magyar Kultúra), 4/12 (1916), pp. 569–70. 78 On the reception of this novel in France see Christine Bard, ‘A Bitter-Sweet Victory: Feminisms in France (1918–1923)’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 199–220 (here esp. pp. 211–13). 79 Sándor Eckhardt, ‘Három francia könyv magyarul’ (Three French books in Hungarian), Napkelet (Orient), 1/6 (1923), p. 554; Balázs Sipos, ‘Modern amerikai lány, új nő és magyar asszony a Horthy-korban. Egy nőtörténeti szempontú médiatörténeti vizsgálat’ (Modern American girl, new woman and Hungarian lady in the Horthy era: A media historical analysis from the perspective of Women’s History), Századok, 148/1 (2014), p. 28. 80 ‘Lerbier kisasszony legényélete’ (Ms Lerbier’s bachelor life), Színházi Élet, 12/10 (1923), p. 45; Andor Váró, ‘A párizsi vörös malom. Filmbemutató hat ember előtt’ (The red windmill in Paris: Film premiere in front of six people), Színházi Élet, 13/7 (1924), p. 36. 81 ‘Erdős Reneé Lelki útmutatója. Levelek a ma problémáiról’ (Renée Erdős’s behavioural guide: Letters about the problems of the present time), Színházi Élet, 13/25 (22 June 1924), p. 17. 82 ‘!Az amerikai Lerbier kisasszony Pesten! Rádió, jazz és repülőgép mint főszereplők’ (The American Ms Lerbier in Pest! Radio, jazz and airplane as protagonists), Színházi Élet, 14/1 (1925), p. 61. 83 Antal Szerb, ‘Amerikai könyvek tanulsága’ (The moral of American books), Hungarian Review (Magyar Szemle), 2/10 (1928), p. 287. 84 Jenő Pálmai, ‘Pesti nő, párizsi nő, német nő, szláv nő’ (Budapest Woman, Parisian Woman, German Woman, Slavic Woman), in Lajos Mikes (ed.), Az Est hármaskönyve, 1930. I. k. A férfi könyve (Triplicate Books of The Evening Newspapers, 1930. Vol. I. Men’s Book) (Budapest: Az Est, 1930), p. 125. See also Alys Eve Weinbaum et al. (eds), The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press), 2008. 85 The Half-Century-Old Development of Budapest, 1873-1923 (Budapest félszázados fejlődése 1873-1923) (Budapest: Budapest Statistical Office, 1925), p. 130. 86 László Lakatos, ‘Miss Dollar’, Színházi Élet, 21/32 (1931), pp. 56–7. 87 ‘Egy amerikai újságíró cikke a Somogyi Munkásban’, Népszava, 47/91 (1919), p. 9; ‘Összeült a nemzetgyűlés’, Pesti Napló, 71/41 (1920), p. 2; ‘Amerikai újságíró tanulmányútja Magyarországon’, Budapesti Hírlap, 41/123 (1921), p. 5; ‘Bethlen Hódmezővásárhelyt’, Budapesti Hírlap, 42/71 (1922), p. 1. 88 Linda Lumsden, ‘“You’re a Tough Guy, Mary – and a First-Rate Newspaperman”: Gender and Women Journalists in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 72/4 (1995), pp. 913–21 (here p. 915).

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89 Tibor Frank, Ethnicity, Propaganda, Myth-Making: Studies in Hungarian Connections to Britain and America 1848-1945 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1999), p. 233. 90 For a broader discussion of Egan’s 1919 European tour see David Hudson, ‘“Having Seen Enough”: Eleanor Franklin Egan and the Journalism of Great War Displacement’, in Sharp and Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War, pp. 375–94. 91 The readership of the Saturday Evening Post was considerable. In 1908, with a circulation of one million, it is estimated to have reached one out of nine literate Americans. By 1919 its circulation surpassed two million. See Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), pp. 5, 165. 92 Eleanor Franklin Egan, ‘Armistice Days in Vienna’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 May 1919, p. 8. 93 Cohn, Creating America, pp. 135–64. 94 Letter of passage signed ‘Herbert Hoover, United States Food Administration’, 14 January 1919, Martin Egan Papers, Morgan Library, ARC 1222, Box 18. 95 Paul Rich (ed.), Introduction, Iraq and Eleanor Egan’s The War in the Cradle of the World (Lanham, MD: Lexington-Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); David Hudson, ‘Writing “Mesopot”: Eleanor Franklin Egan on the River to Baghdad, 1917’, Philological Papers 51 (2006), pp. 52–60. 96 Eleanor Franklin Egan, ‘“Nem! Nem! Soha!”: The Hungarian War Cry and Claims’, Saturday Evening Post, 2 August 1919, p. 84. 97 Ibid., p. 17. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., p. 90. 100 Ibid. 101 Notes from a speech to an unidentified audience, delivered 11 January 1922, Martin Egan Papers, Morgan Library, ARC 1222, Box 87, p. 31. 102 Ibid., p. 25. 103 Letter to Alice Riggs Hunt from Anne Lewis Pierce, 3 February 1919, Alice Riggs Hunt Collection, University of Waterloo Library. 104 Letter to Alice Riggs Hunt from C. McD. Puckette, 29 January 1919, Alice Riggs Hunt Collection, University of Waterloo Library. 105 Alice Riggs Hunt, ‘Women Farmers’, New York Evening Post, 1 April 1919, p. 8; Alice Riggs Hunt, ‘German Women in Politics’, New York Evening Post, 23 April 1919, p. 11. 106 Alice Riggs Hunt, ‘Three Phases of “Professional Housekeeping” in Paris’, New York Tribune, 1 June 1919, sec. VIII, p. 3. 107 Alice Riggs Hunt, ‘Little Girl Victims of War’, New York Tribune, 4 May 1919, sec. VIII, p. 4.

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1 08 Alice Riggs Hunt, Notes for unpublished autobiography. 109 Alice Riggs Hunt, Facts About Communist Hungary (London: Workers Socialist Federation, 1919), p. 3. 110 Ibid., p. 4. 111 Ibid. 112 Hunt, Facts About Communist Hungary, pp. 23–9; Alice Riggs Hunt, ‘Hungary Under Bela Kun’, Socialist Review (February 1920), pp. 145–50; Alice Riggs Hunt, ‘Women’s Work in Hungary and Italy’, International Woman’s Suffrage News, September 1919, pp. 168–9. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., p. 26. 115 Ibid., p. 29. 116 Ibid., p. 23. 117 Letter to Carrie Chapman Catt from Alice Riggs Hunt, 2 April 1919, in Alice Riggs Hunt Collection, University of Waterloo Library. 118 Letter to Alice Riggs Hunt from Carrie Chapman Catt, 22 April 1919, in ibid.

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Women’s Movements, War and the Body Alison S. Fell and Susan R. Grayzel*

The body lies at the centre of the war story. That this has been true of every recorded war does not diminish the impact of this insight for understanding the first truly modern, total war. One innovation of the First World War was the new visibility given to women qua women’s relationship to the bodies of the dead, sick and wounded, both of combatants and non-combatants. Among the images that have shaped the legacy of this war are those of the injured and mutilated bodies of women and children from Allied propaganda, whether due to traditional modes of war-making such as invasion and occupation or to modern modes like the use of submarines and aircraft. Alongside those depictions, we can add the grieving mothers who lined the streets of Poplar in London’s East End in the summer of 1917 lamenting their young children killed in an air raid or those who figured on war memorials commemorating their dead sons, sacrificed to the nation, in France and Germany and elsewhere.1 In addition to these public displays, we can find women working out their relationship to the wounded, moribund or dead body as the personal writings of medical women during and after this war reveal. Given the increased mobilization, the First World War brought many people across gender, class and generational lines into contact with wounded bodies and corpses on an unprecedented scale. Nurse memoirs often comment on the way in which the wounds caused by the weapons of industrialized warfare on the Western Front could transform young healthy men’s bodies into an unrecognizable jumble of body parts. Often cited is the description of the uncanny effects experienced by medical women when witnessing the damage wrought to bodies given in

* Alison S. Fell, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, UK; Susan R. Grayzel, Arch Dalrymple III Department of History, University of Mississippi, USA.

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Figure 17  Funeral for the children of the Upper North Street School, Poplar, East London, killed during a raid by German Gotha aircraft, June 1917. Photograph by William Whiffin. Reproduced courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London, P08254.

American Mary Borden’s 1920s modernist memoir of nursing at a base hospital in France, The Forbidden Zone: There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once were fastened. There are eyes – eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of faces – the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men; so how could I be a woman here and not die of it?2

If the injuries wrought by artillery fire blurred the lines between man/woman, or between human/inhuman, other wounds and illnesses challenged nurses’ understandings of the passage from life to death. For instance, a diary entry of a mature bourgeois French woman, Claudine Bourcier, who worked as a voluntary nurse in various hospitals in Biarritz and at the front, recounts vividly the death of a patient suffering from advanced gangrene: ‘Finally, around 3 o’clock, he died. I went to find the matron and we laid him out. This poor man was in such a state of decomposition that we dared not remove his bandaging; there was nothing but pus. We put him in a sheet after having washed his feet, hands and face. We

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arranged him as best we could.’3 Here, the soldier’s dying body, decomposing when alive, continues to disturb the nurse’s emotions when dead, as well as moving her to pity. Caring for the dead and dying – conventionally women’s role  – is challenged by this confrontation with what were often traumatizing new conditions. Such descriptions suggest the extent to which dealing with the destruction of bodies in war could lead medical women in the First World War to question their own sense of self. Passages dealing with moribund bodies in nurse memoirs tend to focus relentlessly on the dehumanizing aspect of the injuries suffered. Jane Marcus and Margaret Higonnet have argued that these kinds of descriptions in nurse memoirs bear the hallmarks of psychological trauma. They insist that the graphic nature of the images, the concentration on obscene details are suggestive of a type of ‘hypersensitivity’, and contend that the extent to which such images are evoked again and again can be compared with Freud’s observation when treating shell-shocked soldiers that his patients were marked by a ‘compulsion to repeat’ their nightmarish experiences in the trenches, and were thus stuck in a psychological impasse.4 In other words, the blurring of the usual boundaries (such as dead/alive; inside/outside; and male/female) through which individuals make sense of the bodies they encounter led some nurses to experience psychological shock as they attempted to come to terms with the wounds they were treating, especially the volunteer nurses who had not been trained to take the emotional distance necessary to deal with medical trauma.5 Often these voices remain overlooked; in the politically and culturally dominant perceptions of the First World War that developed in the years that followed the armistice, some war stories came to matter more than others. There is a moral economy of suffering associated with this conflict that privileges the brutalized body of the combatant and thus renders the dead soldier the witness par excellence to the horrors of this war. It is via their relationship to this tragically ubiquitous figure, staggering in terms of sheer numbers and revealing of the kinds of damage that modern weaponry could inflict on human flesh, that some women are able to insert themselves into the war story. They include the nurse who held his hand while he died, the mother devastated by grief over his loss and the wife left to raise his children alone and under financial duress. All these female figures ‘count’ in the stories that shaped postwar accounts, because they circulated close to that central figure – the dead or injured solider – in what is understood as the ‘real’ war story. Yet, as we observe above, women and children were also the victims of the First World  War: in

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bombing raids, in disease epidemics such as typhoid and cholera as well as influenza at the end of the war, or in the killing or starvation of civilians. Recognizing that women (and children) figured among the war dead, and more significantly, politicizing this realization helps make sense of a key strand of post-war feminist politics.6 There are multiple ways to explore and interpret the relationship of individual women and of the women’s movement to the millions of dead and injured bodies produced by this conflict. In this chapter, we highlight two of the ways in which women both separately and together articulated new relationships to bodies – both combatant and non-combatant – as a result of the war. The women we focus on were moved to different forms of post-war activism as a result of their wartime encounters with the impact of war on bodies. We argue that such developments characterize an overlooked and vitally important way in which to understand the legacy of the First World War in its aftermath. The first of the ways in which women during, and particularly in the immediate aftermath of, the war staked a new position vis-à-vis the nation came with the articulation of their claims to the bodies of combatant relatives, especially their sons. While policy about the exhumation and transportation of combatant corpses differed among participant states, the activities of the British and French women discussed in this chapter sheds light on a crucial element of the post-war politics of bereavement – namely who had a greater claim to the body of the dead: the family (represented largely by mothers) or the state? While the women involved in these campaigns were generally not feminist in the sense of being involved in suffragist or civil rights activism, they can be understood as activists in the sense that they appealed to the state as female citizens deserving of rights in relation to their dead family members. Bereaved mothers in particular turned to the dominant way in which women’s contribution to their nations was understood and celebrated – as mothers producing male children through which a nation could prosper and defend itself – in order to attack what they saw as the breaking of the ‘social contract’ between combatants, their families and the state. The second way in which female activists articulated a new relationship to the body after the war responded to a shift in both the manner of injuring and killing (air power and chemical weapons) and the bodies of those affected (women and children). Modern technology made possible an expansion of the active war zone into the capital cities of London and Paris, both of which experienced substantive air raids over the course of the conflict, where the

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dead and injured cut across lines of gender, age and class. In addition, German U-boats attacked commercial shipping as well as military targets, and the notorious sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 highlighted the vulnerability of women and children to this new means of waging war. While other innovative weapons such as chemical arms did not target civilians directly, civilians near their deployment found themselves being given gas masks by the French army, and British women at a greater remove produced some of the first respirators.7 The possibility that women and their children of all ages and both sexes could be subjected to new modes of modern war animated the women’s movement during the war and especially in its aftermath, and led many female activists to devote themselves to anti-militarism. This was truly an international effort as the material examined in this chapter reveals. Such anti-militarist campaigns were not always strictly pacifist, but the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and some of its members reveals a concerted effort on behalf of all women to curb the ‘scientific warfare’ which now threatened the lives and livelihoods of everyone, irrespective of gender or state boundaries. Both of these examples illustrate the extent to which wartime casualty rates, which led not only to mass mourning but to the visible presence of thousands and thousands of injured bodies, shook wartime societies. However, it should equally be noted that another key way in which individual women and national organizations worked to make sense of these losses was by focusing on how a healthy, reproductive female body could restore the body of the nation. A good deal of scholarship on the women’s movement in the aftermath of the First World War has thus drawn our attention to their relationship to the rise of the welfare state. In this way, the aftermath of the war represented a pivotal moment for feminist activism that coalesced in the rise of state-sanctioned aid for women and families. Certainly various national campaigns, often led by women, decided to use state interest in the birth rate and public health to their advantage.8 In some states, for example, women linked pronatalism with a more open discussion of sexuality and sexually transmitted disease. However, the post-war welfare state arose in conjunction with a warfare state that accepted that the bodies of women and children, young and old, and not merely those of fit adult men, would lie at the centre of any future conflict. Contested discussions over the changed stakes of what or whose bodies war now involved and who had a greater claim on them emerge clearly in the aftermath of the First World War, as the case studies that follow powerfully demonstrate. We will turn now to a more detailed discussion of our chosen two strands of women’s post-war

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activism before developing further our discussion of the shift from a warfare to a welfare state.

Women and the politics of the exhumation of bodies in France and Britain In his cultural history of the cult of the fallen soldier, George Mosse argues that from the French Revolution onwards death in war became increasingly ‘nationalized’; bodies no longer exclusively ‘belonged’ to the Church and the community or family, but to the nation.9 However, the First World War marked another shift in the treatment of the war dead. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, belligerent societies after the armistice were weighed down by the extent of their losses, and struggled to deal with the sheer numbers of the dead in both logistical and psychological terms.10 The erection of monuments, both nationally and locally, alongside the establishment of other forms of commemorative practice, attempted to address the psychological consequences of mass mourning. This was especially the case for the many families who were not able to go through the rite de passage of the usual mourning process. Thousands of families could not attend a funeral, for example, or even visit a grave, given both the distance between families and some of the battlefronts where their relatives had perished, and the numbers of the ‘missing’ whose remains could not be identified.11 Britain and France erected tombs to the ‘Unknown Warrior’ or ‘Soldat Inconnu’, enacting in their 1920 unveiling ceremonies a kind of collective secular funeral mass for bereaved families. Thousands of men, women and children in mourning attended these ceremonies, as they did the unveilings of the thousands of local war memorials.12 This might give an impression of nations united by grief, understood by some as a great social leveller, bringing different sections of the community together. For example, a women-only section was reserved in Westminster Abbey for the 1920 repatriation ceremony of the Unknown Warrior. This was filled via ballot according to strict criteria: top priority was given to women who had lost a husband and sons or an only son, followed by mothers who had lost all or only sons, and then by widows.13 The Memorial Committee emphasized the supposed levelling of class distinctions in this categorization envisaged by the planners, interpreting the fact that ‘a duchess would sit down with the char woman’ during the abbey ceremony as being a contribution to the healing of social rifts.14 However, the burial, exhumation and commemoration of the dead

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also caused a great deal of social division and unrest between different sectors of the belligerent societies and the state, and bereaved women were often at the centre of these debates.15 Decisions made by the state in relation to the treatment of men’s bodies after the war were sometimes met by protest and defiance. This section will consider the ways in which female activists engaged with – and sometimes challenged – the state in a battle over the ownership of their male relatives’ bodies in two of the belligerent nations: France and Britain. It will argue that at the heart of these interactions between women and the state were the twin concepts of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘social contract’: whereas the state argued that the best way to honour dead combatants was to include them in state-sanctioned ‘national shrines’ that emphasized the collective sacrifice of mobilized men for the nation, the women argued that their own sacrifice as widows and bereaved mothers or sisters should be honoured by returning the men’s bodies to their homes and families, thereby ‘demobilizing’ them in death as they would have been had they survived. In France, a law was passed on 19 November 1914 that prohibited the exhumation of the dead by their next of kin. However, many families refused to accept this law, and there were a series of clandestine exhumations by individuals and groups keen to recuperate the bodies of their loved ones, aided by people who were branded ‘mercantis de la mort’ (death merchants), freelancers who would help individuals exhume and transport the bodies for a fee. After the armistice, French politicians disagreed over the appropriate response to these relatively frequent infractions of the law, and there were heated exchanges in both houses. For example, Paul Doumer, who had lost three sons in the war, argued for keeping the dead French soldiers where they were, at the front: ‘Our children should stay where they are sleeping now. … They lived together, they fought together, they saved our country; they should remain united in death as they were in life.’ Louis Barthou, however, argued instead that families should have the right to bury their own dead relatives, and uses his own bereavement to make his point: I don’t see which principle of equality should mean that there be an absolute rule with regards to families. My son was killed in 1914 …; his mother and I are waiting for his body, and because other bodies are yet to be found, are you going to tell me that I’m not permitted to take my son’s body and bury him in PèreLachaise [cemetery]? Well I tell you that you haven’t got the right to do that.16

Elite women were also able to exert influence in the debate, and suggest ways in which the state could intervene in order to help bereaved families come to terms

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with their loss. For example, the aristocratic Princesse de Polignac, herself a war widow, was co-president of the Association of Ossuaries, and was a prominent voice in the scheme to build an ossuary at Douaumont, near Verdun, stating that families might find comfort in imagining they were mourning ‘a small part’ of their dead relative’s body in visiting the ossuary: ‘The missing soldier is no longer entirely missing. Between him and his survivors there is a more intimate communion, and thus consolation arises.’17 Eventually, after eighteen months of debate and continuing illegal exhumations, the French government passed the law of 31 July 1920, which allowed families to claim the remains of their dead relatives, whose bodies would then be exhumed, transported and reburied at the state’s expense. Between 1921 and 1923, around 30 per cent of the identified French combatant dead, or around 240,000 bodies, were ‘demobilized’ in this way and returned to their families.18 Individual women were often at the forefront of the clandestine attempts to exhume the dead before the passing of the 1920 law. Thierry Hardier and JeanFrançois Jagielski, for example, cite the description of one anonymous bereaved mother by the mayor of Coeuvres (Aisnes): ‘I will never forget the appearance of one elderly woman, with her wrinkled face, who came from Bryas in the Pas-deCalais, to look for the body of her youngest son. … She was accompanied by one of her daughters. Before telling me the reason for her visit, she opened the basket she was carrying and took out an enormous cheese – a present for the mayor – which, despite my protestations, I was forced to accept; then she declared that she had come to take her “lad” home. She had brought a brand new sheet in which to take home his remains, and a little shovel to dig him up herself.’19 In his work on narratives of female mourning, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau uses as one of his case studies the writer and former war nurse Jane Catulle-Mendès, who published a post-war account of her desperate attempts to recuperate the body of her nineteen-year-old dead son, Primice, during the war.20 She is defiant in the face of official prohibition: ‘It seems as if someone is blocking my path. But I’ll go anyway. Sitting in front of Primice’s portrait I ask his forgiveness for all of these obstacles. But I promise him that I’ll go on.’21 In her published account she not only expresses her sense that she has the right, as his mother, to recuperate his body, but she equally suggests that it is only the exhumation and re-interment of his body that will enable her to cope psychologically with her bereavement and begin the mourning process. However, it was not only individual bereaved women who defied the French state in their insistence that they bring home the bodies of their dead male relatives. Women also contributed collectively to the debate. In 1919, for

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example, a ‘group of mothers and widows’ asked the minister of the interior to return the bodies of their male relatives ‘with the briefest possible delay’.22 One of the most influential collective female voices in the aftermath of the war was that of war widows, who organized, alongside veterans, in order to lobby for improved pensions and other rights. In the journal of one of the widows’ associations, the importance of the treatment of the bodies of the dead, even after the passing of the 1920 law, remained a prominent theme well into the interwar years. For example in the June 1927 edition of the Journal des Veuves et des Orphelins [Journal of War Widows and Orphans], the editors angrily protest against the subcontracting of the clearance of battlefields, including the remains of unidentified French soldiers, to private firms: ‘Nothing in the penal code authorises the State to undertake such dreadful mercantile practices.’23 Similarly, a front-page article in the February 1925 issue entitled ‘The Dead Must be Respected’, also discussing the ongoing exhumation of the dead from the Verdun battlefield, declares: ‘The Minister of Pensions should give orders that the exhumations of dead combatants be done with the utmost and most pious attention. … It is essential to remind civil servants of the great respect that should be given to those bereaved by the war.’24 By the mid-1920s, then, the widows’ associations were adopting the same political tactic as the veterans’ associations in assuming the right to speak on behalf of the war dead, as well as demanding rights for those they left behind. They claimed that their personal sacrifice, as widows, gave them the right to be heard by the state, and should take political precedence in the treatment of the dead. The assumption was that the state could not claim ownership of the bodies of combatants; the authorities should adhere first to the wishes of the wives and mothers who had ‘sacrificed’ their relatives during the war. While France eventually allowed the exhumation and reburial of the identified war dead by next of kin in its 1920 law, thereby agreeing in principle with the families’ claims to ‘ownership’ of the men’s bodies, Britain did not. Early in the war, a handful of dead officers were repatriated with the permission of the British War Office, at the expense of their wealthy families.25 However, this practice was quickly stopped and repatriation was prohibited, with the symbolic exception of the Unknown Warrior in 1920. For thousands of bereaved families, then, the care and treatment of the dead of the British Empire took place overseas, and was entrusted to others. The identification, burial and commemoration of the dead was recognized as an issue requiring special attention from the British authorities from the beginning of the war. Fabian Ware, a former editor of the Morning Post, was charged in September 1914 with searching for the missing, and his unit,

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the Graves Registration Commission, was formed in April 1915, attached to the British Army. In May 1917, this became the Imperial War Graves Commission, instituted by Royal Charter, and was later renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).26 The commission acted as a point of liaison between the state and the bereaved, the majority of which were unable to travel to visit the grave of a dead combatant (if indeed there were a grave to visit). The Commission sometimes acted as a proxy for the bereaved next of kin in relation to the burial and mourning rituals, for example for sending photographs of graves and arranging wreaths to be laid. The possessions of the dead who had been identified were also sent back to the next of kin by the British Army. This could be traumatic as well as comforting, however, as powerfully illustrated in Vera Brittain’s description of her experience of seeing her dead fiancé’s effects in her 1933 memoir Testament of Youth: I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary to return such relics … the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it was not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time.27

After the war, the commission immediately received requests from families demanding the exhumation and repatriation of bodies. The government was consulted and it was decided that the dead should remain in the battlefields where they were buried, and new war cemeteries constructed. An announcement was made in The Times on 29 November 1918 to this effect, with the headline ‘Comradeship in Death: Soldiers’ Bodies not to be Brought Home’.28 The government’s views on the treatment of the war dead were further disseminated via a pamphlet, The Graves of the Fallen, written by Rudyard Kipling, whose son was killed in the war, and who worked for the commission after the war.29 One of Kipling’s war stories, ‘The Gardener’, published in 1925, features a bereaved woman, Helen Turrell, who loses a nephew whom she had raised as her own. Kipling reveals his sympathies for the emotional impact of the transferral of what for the majority would have previously been private, family-led rituals regarding the burial of the dead into state hands in his description of Helen Turrell’s response to her nephew’s death: Once, on one of Michael’s leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. It struck her at the time that the wretched thing was never left alone for

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a single second; ‘I’m being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin,’ she told herself, as she prepared her documents.30

Here, the administrative systems set up to deal with the dead and the missing are compared to the efficient and impersonal industrial systems by which arms were manufactured. Death has become bureaucratized; the processing of the dead and the bereaved an extension of the mobilization of the nation’s government and industries for the war effort. The decisions made by the commission and the British government precipitated widespread public debate in the pages of the press around the questions of ownership and sacrifice: Did the dead bodies belong to families or to the British state? How would their sacrifice be best honoured? Should families not have the right to choose how their loved ones were commemorated? Objections from both individuals and groups also poured in to the commission in the form of letters. They tended to focus on three aspects of the commission’s decisions: the design of the headstone and its inscription, the principle of uniformity and the ban on repatriation. Women were often at the forefront of this opposition. However, it is notable that in Britain it tended to be bereaved mothers whose voices dominated. Unlike in France, there were no large widows’ organizations who lobbied the government for their rights.31 This mirrors differences in the veteran movement more broadly, which was larger, more organized and more politically influential in France than in Britain. Although the British Legion inaugurated a women’s section for the female relatives of veterans in the early 1920s, its aims were social rather than political.32 It was, therefore, left to bereaved mothers to attempt to intervene in the debates around the burial of dead British servicemen. Lady Florence Cecil, for example, the wife of the bishop of Exeter, who had lost three sons in the war, led a campaign to add a cross to the headstones, and wrote to the prince of Wales, president of the commission, ‘in the name of thousands of heartbroken parents, wives, brothers and sisters’: ‘It is only through the hope of the cross that most of us are able to carry on the life from which all the sunshine seems to have gone, and to deny us the emblem of that strength and hope adds heavily to the burden of our sorrow.’33 Her letter was appended by 8,000 signatures supporting her view. Other women played central roles in demands made for the repatriation of their sons’ and husbands’ bodies. One notable example is the British War Graves Association, founded and led by Sarah Ann Smith.34 She was a Yorkshire woman whose only son, Frederick Ernest Smith, died of wounds in 1918, and was buried

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at Grevellers near Arras. She wrote an initial letter to the Yorkshire Evening News in 1919, attacking the government’s refusal to allow repatriation of the dead, comparing it to the recent repatriation of Edith Cavell’s remains: ‘I think the feeling is very strong against the attitude of this government, who claimed our boys when living, and now they have sacrificed their lives we are to be robbed of their dear remains, which belong to us and are ours alone.’35 Signed ‘Mother’, Smith claimed to speak for other bereaved women, and her letter triggered a debate in the letters pages of local newspapers on the issue of the repatriation of the bodies which revolved around the question of the ownership of the dead, and the appropriate way to honour their sacrifice and that of their families. As a result of these exchanges, Smith founded the British War Graves Association, which by 1922 had a membership of over 3,000.36 She canvassed politicians and members of the Royal Family in an attempt to reverse the policy, and these letters remain in the archives of the CWGC. In one letter, addressed to Queen Mary in November 1920, Smith again claimed to speak for bereaved women as a whole rather than just as an individual bereaved mother: ‘Many thousands of mothers and wives are slowly dying for the want of the grave of their loved ones, to visit and tend themselves, and we feel deeply hurt that the right granted to other countries is denied us.’37 A letter from Fabian Ware to a colleague in December 1922 expresses his surprise at the continuing existence of the Association, long after the decision had been taken: ‘It is evident from the press cuttings that [this Association] shows a certain vitality and I am surprised it has not expired earlier.’ He justifies the decision to prohibit repatriation on the grounds of fairness to all, and the sheer scale of the task, dismissing the claims of Smith and her co-signatories as minority voices.38 Sarah Ann Smith was forced to accept the ruling and devoted the rest of her years to fundraising and organizing trips for bereaved wives and mothers to visit graves in France. She visited every year except one until her death in 1936, after which a letter of condolence from the commission was sent to her family upon the instructions of Fabian Ware.39 In one of Sarah Ann Smith’s letters, addressed to Lady Maud Selborne, who also campaigned for the repatriation of bodies, she states: ‘All we can do is to try and give help and comfort and band ourselves together.’40 Groups of bereaved women organized after the First World War, whether as widows as was the case with the ‘Assocation des veuves’ in France, or as bereaved mothers in the War Graves Association in Britain, in order to attempt to make a claim as next of kin to their male relatives’ bodies. Making use of women’s traditional role as

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the symbolic representatives of a nation in mourning, these groups of women challenged the state in its post-war claim to the men’s bodies. When the dead were buried in official war cemeteries, this effectively situated their identities squarely within the framework of military, state-led commemoration. This ‘nationalization’ of the war dead allowed little space for differentiation – between faiths, between social classes, regional identities, or ethnicities. Servicemen’s identities were literally set in stone as combatants, forever ‘mobilized’ for their nation. These women demanded an alternative way of commemorating their dead, one which saw the primary identities of the bodies as familial ones – as beloved sons and husbands – rather than uniquely as members of a collective of combatants who had fought and died together. Even if their campaigns were largely unsuccessful, such women can be understood as activists, in that they used their post-war identities as ‘bereaved next of kin’ as a means of giving themselves political voices in the years after 1918, not only demanding the right to be heard, but defying the state’s interpretation of the ‘social contract’ that existed between mobilized men, their families, and the belligerent nations. In a move that foreshadowed the emphasis in the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s that the ‘personal is political’, these women, speaking individually or in a collective voice as bereaved mothers or widows, made the intimacy of private, family grief a public, political issue. The second case study we focus on in this chapter highlights another group of women who were at the forefront of political campaigns in the interwar period that were focused on the impact of modern wars on bodies, but this time the emphasis was not on the combatant dead, but on the threat to civilians posed by new weaponry in future, imagined wars.

Modern attacks on the bodies of women and children: The feminist response Technological advancements extended the reach of the battlefield during the First World War. The innovative use of submarine warfare targeted regular shipping, and notorious attacks such as the May 1915 sinking of the Lusitania drew public outrage precisely because women and children featured among the victims and became centrepieces of Allied propaganda. Aerial bombardment also came into its own during this war, killing and injuring non-combatants in zones far removed from traditional front lines. Bombing raids produced visions

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of civilian bodies, generally figured as women and children, as the potential victims of imagined future wars. As a result, in the First World War’s aftermath, an important shift occurred in the thinking of the organized women’s movement around issues of warfare and disarmament. In particular, the notion that war would now attack women and children directly, that there was no safe space in the age of air power, prompted a variety of feminist activists to make protecting all civilian bodies, including their own, a mainstay of their post-war campaigns. This often overlooked aftermath of the war helps explain why disarmament and the placing of limits on the forms of waging war became a vibrant post-war feminist issue. Air raids began with the war’s outbreak, but it was during the spring of 1915 that several events triggered a recalibration in thinking about war’s present and future. During the night of 20–21 March, Zeppelin raids on Paris and its environs dropped the largest number of bombs to date. Among the more celebrated victims was eight-year-old Suzanne Maindrot, whose frail, bandaged image emphasized the innocence of those bodies under attack.41 Almost exactly a month later, Germany unleashed chlorine gas during the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April, marking the introduction of lethal chemical weapons into this conflict. Within a week, women at home in Britain were spontaneously making respirators for troops out of ordinary household materials.42 7 May 1915 marked the sinking of the Lusitania, a loss that quickly found its way into propaganda such as Fred Spear’s poster ‘Enlist’, where dark red letters stood out starkly against an ethereal, drowning woman in white. War waged by U-boats and aircraft and that used poisonous gas suggested a new sense of war without limits. Given the nature of the victims of air and sea power during that spring, assumptions that a future war would likely be waged against women and children began to resonate. However it was during the summer of 1917, when London experienced the most devastating air raids of the First World War, that a feminist perspective on the new stakes of modern war was clearly articulated. The raids of June utilized large German planes (Gothas) and unleashed a barrage that directly hit a school in London’s East End. That these harrowing raids overshadowed the celebration of Britain’s first ever National Baby Week prompted Ida O’Malley to write an editorial for the feminist newspaper The Common Cause, entitled ‘Babies and Bombs and Reconstruction’. In it, O’Malley opines that in such circumstances, the ‘things which used to be separate … have been violently thrown together … things which used to be thought of as only interesting to men, such as military

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Figure 18  Fred Spear’s ‘Enlist’ poster, produced by the Boston Committee of Public Safety, June 1915. Reproduced courtesy of Alamy Images, BB065A. Contributor: Paris Pierce.

defences, are now perforce of immediate interest to women’.43 Given this insight, and given that women and children were exposed to shocking new methods of warfare, it is not surprising that campaigns against such weaponry would come to preoccupy wartime and post-war activists. Moreover, many states in the aftermath of the war would seek to involve women as mothers in safeguarding their infants in a war to come. In France, the first legislation to create what became known as défense passive began in 1922. As its original proposal for ‘provisional instructions regarding individual protection against aerial bombardments’ notes, while it might be premature to say what form a future air war might take, ‘one can predict that, in the aerial

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bombardments of the future, [gas bombs] will constitute an extremely formidable danger for the home front’. And since the only security lay in denying access to hostile aircraft (acknowledged as impossible), aerial attacks of the future were a ‘grave and permanent danger’ to everyone.44 The post-war French nation thus began to invest in measures designed to safeguard the bodies of women and children. In Britain, secret meetings to develop ‘air raids precautions’ began in 1924 with a comparable recognition of the dangers posed to every man, woman and child. Similar activities developed across Europe. By the 1930s, measures to safeguard men, women and children from a war that would inevitably target them included individualized anti-gas protection. In France and Britain, before final plans developed one model for such protection, scientists tested a variety of devices, many of which transformed domestic objects – a pram or a bath – into a wartime shelter, an instrument to withstand war. As early as the 1920s, the developing warfare state’s reach intruded dramatically into the realm of the domestic, the home and the family. When wartime and post-war feminist anti-militarists faced the changed, technologically enhanced stakes of the First World War, they had to confront these new developments. In the aftermath of the First World War, a number of women came to stake political claims vis-à-vis war not as reproducers, giving life to the instrument of war (i.e. soldiers), but as active participants.45 The domestic sphere of women and children had become integrated into the battle zone; wars no longer solely involved needing men (re/produced by women) to defend women and children, for invasion from the air offered the prospect of boundless war in the future, fully incorporating women and children. However, feminist activists did not advocate for mere disarmament in the abstract. It was ‘scientific warfare’ – the war ‘of the air and the laboratory’ as British novelist and feminist Cicely Hamilton put it in 1922 – which became the focal point of these feminist efforts.46 This was precisely because war had now (and could now) come home. It could attack women and children in their bedrooms and kitchens and hearths, and the state had taken notice. For many of those interested in prohibiting the use of air power and chemical arms in the future also had some first-hand knowledge of the effects of, at least, air power and a fairly accurate sense of what chemical weapons delivered by air might do. Thus did WILPF take up the prevention of future conflict for particularly feminist reasons as one of its main tasks in the immediate aftermath of the war. This was the case from the moment of its wartime inception in 1915. As Jane Addams, the American activist who would become the first head of this new

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organization phrased it, while different views towards the war could be found among women: Quite as an artist in an artillery corps commanded to fire upon a beautiful building … would be deterred by a compunction unknown to the man who had never given himself to creating beauty and did not know the intimate cost of it, so women, who have brought men into the world and nurtured them until they reach the age for fighting, must experience a peculiar revulsion when they see them destroyed, irrespective of the country in which these men may have been born.47

At the moment of the founding of an international body to lobby against war on behalf of all women, the leading figure described the bond tying women together as based on the ‘peculiar revulsion’ of mothers, who, having brought ‘men into the world’, know something unique about their loss. The post-war actions of groups such as WILPF magnified this ‘peculiar revulsion’ because the bodies destroyed now belonged to women and children, including infants, in zones far beyond the battlefield. The commitment of the international feminist community to such actions was evident throughout the post-war meetings of WILPF. At its first post-war Congress in Zurich in May 1919, this collective body of feminists confirmed its commitment to world disarmament, again highlighting in the well-known words of Jane Addams’s presidential address that ‘women only benefit in a world based on justice not force’.48 Tellingly, that justice involved asking the League of Nations to take actions that encompassed both air disarmament and the endowment of motherhood.49 Thus post-war feminists engaged with what the warfare state might bring and in so doing linked this to an expanding welfare state that aimed to safeguard women and children from more conventional dangers like hunger, homelessness and poverty. At the July 1921 meeting of WILPF in Vienna, Addams again pointed out the underlying logic of feminist anti-militarism: war destroyed all that mothers value. And this had changed since 1914: ‘This world war mobilized not only armies but entire populations, the world has seen, as never before, what war means in the lives of little children in every country to the world.’50 Without specifying what war now meant, one could extrapolate its endangering of their lives by new mechanisms to wage war and by ongoing traumas like dislocation and hunger. Beyond these abstract ideas came a particular focus on attacking ‘scientific warfare’. This evolved from initial campaigns targeting chemical weapons at the 1924 Fourth International Congress of Women held in Washington DC. Here

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two members, Dr Gertrud Woker (of Switzerland) and Dr Naima Sahlbom (of Sweden) formed an ‘International Committee Against Chemical Warfare’. Later that year, this committee met for the first time in October in Berlin. As a WILPF newsletter reported, it determined ‘not to restrict the work of the Committee to the fight against Chemical Warfare, but to direct it against all scientific methods of destruction’. It therefore changed its name to the ‘Committee against Scientific Warfare’. Members set the first main goal as soliciting scientific experts to help meld a popular appeal and then distributing leaflets against such methods of warfare to ‘working people’, thus enlisting others to join them in the fight to prevent not merely war, but especially this type of warfare.51 The work of this committee continued into 1925, when, again under the auspices of WILPF, the Committee against Scientific Warfare met in May in Geneva to discuss their work and how it might have an impact on the League of Nations’ Disarmament Efforts. They had some success in obtaining support for a declaration against chemical weapons penned by eminent French scientist Paul Langevin. They then agreed that a good future strategy would be to solicit similar statements from other international scientific figures – including American Dr Alice Hamilton – or have such individuals sign Langevin’s declaration. In the meantime, Woker herself was publishing work emphasizing the dangers that chemical weapons posed to women and children. A hundred thousand copies of her pamphlet A Hell of Poison and Fire, which appeared in 1924 with illustrations by Käthe Kollwitz, were distributed by the middle of the twenties. And in 1925 the German section of WILPF published Woker’s The Coming War of Poison Gas – a volume that went into nine editions by 1932 (and would later be banned and burnt by the Nazi Party).52 The 1927 English translation of the German text, The Next War: A War of Poison Gas eloquently laid out the stakes for women (as mothers) in such a war: There can scarcely be a greater contradiction than that between the far-reaching protection which the state guarantees its citizens in their civil rights and the brutality with which the same state exposes the same citizens to absolute annihilation. … Moreover, the modern so-called civilized state has many advantages over a savage tribe in methods of killing. It kills in a wholesale manner … the whole people, whose only crime lies in the fact that they were born beyond the boundaries of the attacking country.53

If everyone ‘born’ in the wrong place – born of women – is now vulnerable to the terrible effects of poison gas, then ‘agonizing question(s)’ lie before every citizen: ‘Will this terrible possibility become a fact? … Shall humanity … destroy itself

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by the most cruel death imaginable? … Why should we thus sacrifice ourselves, we who are bound to this wonderful earth by the thousand ties of happiness and joy?’54 When WILPF organized an International Conference on ‘Modern Methods of Warfare and the Protection of the Civil Population’ in January 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, it focused precisely on this point that the next war was a war without limits: ‘The horrors of war have never threatened the world in a more terrifying way. … A new war would be above all a war … without distinction of age or sex. … With the unlimited means of destruction provided by modern science, and the extension of the risks of war to civil populations, a new war would be a war involving the simultaneous extermination of the peoples.’ Woker was one of the featured speakers and emphasized that ‘the worst of the past gives little idea of what would be the horrible reality of a future war’, one where ‘the civil population … will be massacred by gas bombs from thousands of aeroplanes, and peace will only be concluded over the dead bodies of the enemy nation. In comparison even Dante’s hell pales into insignificance.’55 It should not then surprise us that by the late 1920s, as states began to prepare measures to protect the entire civilian population including women and children from such weapons, images of mothers and babies in gas masks would become attached to appeals to halt the spread of scientific warfare. The declaration of Paul Langevin against all such weapons – solicited by a subcommittee of WILPF – is but one example of such an appeal. And all of this makes evident how military defences had become ‘perforce of interest to women’ in the emerging warfare state. While WILPF as an international organization promoted the marshalling of an argument directed at shaping international law – seeing the League of Nations as the vehicle for disarmament – one additional feature of the work done by this international federation of women activists is noteworthy. At its 1925 meeting, WILPF suggested that its nationally based sections follow the lead of the American one in comparing the military budget with that spent on securing ‘life enhancing’ activities – cultural, social and economic – that aided women and children. National sections of the League had often furthered WILPF’s larger mission by lobbying their respective governments about the organized women’s movement’s larger aims, and the work done by the US section of WILPF along economic lines is worth highlighting. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of the war, feminist activists within WILPF lobbied vociferously for the American government to dismantle the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) of the US military.

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On behalf of WILPF, disarmament activist Harriet Connor Brown testified before the US Congress in 1921 and 1922, urging that funding for the CWS be eliminated from the appropriations for military expenditures. Connor Brown pointed out that for every dollar that ‘the average family’ spent, ‘68 cents are spent for the expenses of past wars, 20 cents for those of future wars, leaving only 12 cents for agriculture, commerce, public works, public health, science, research, education, and all the pursuits of peace’. She continued that ‘what we women want’ is the abolition of expenditure on all future wars, ‘especially one thing we wish to cut out entirely, the Chemical Warfare Service. … We women will not willingly endure for one minute a service which aims to perfect poison gases and poison germs destructive of innocent non-combatants.’56 That women’s protests such as Harriet Connor Brown’s did little to halt the development of chemical weapons should not overshadow their significance. They point to a thread of feminist activism that can be found throughout the twentieth century, an argument that stresses that since the technology used in modern, total wars attacks the bodies of women and children, it is vital that women protest against the development and deployment of such weaponry. In other words, whether by lobbying within their nation states or in more international ways, members of feminist anti-militarist organizations such as WILPF made a case for why women as women should take every measure necessary to halt the development of technology that would continue to transform future wars. In doing so, they were arguing against the emerging warfare state. They recognized that the technology with which future wars would be waged would attack women and children in their homes. Thus activists crafted a rationale against war that advanced pre-war anti-militarist arguments about war’s impact on women through their relationships to men as warriors, above all through giving birth to the bodies of sons laid waste in battle. Instead, they emphasized the new reality of war that technology made possible – that everybody and every place could be annihilated. This post-war focus on chemical bombs delivered by air and targeting civil populations reveals a new understanding of the stakes of modern war. It can be found on the part of both the state (in its attempts to provide civil defence) and on the part of feminists (in their attempts to secure disarmament by pointing to the dangers of scientific warfare). While pacifist women organized to attack the development of chemical and other weapons in the wake of the war, it remains important to recognize that technology became a double-edged sword for women. The interwar period in general saw the rise of women who found in automobiles and airplanes new freedoms and ways to shatter gender norms. For a number of celebrated women,

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the interwar period’s great age of flight was also theirs. The 1920s and 1930s provided opportunities for women as pilots, as embracers of this emblem of modernity. Among the major transnationally celebrated women of this era were pilots like Americans Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman, a cadre of pioneering French women from Adrienne Bolland, the first woman to fly solo across the Andes in 1921, to Hélène Boucher (who captured several speed records for women) to Andrée Dupeyron, Britain’s Amy Johnson and Germany’s Elly Beinhorn. There were clearly constraints on women’s ability to participate in flight  – including some of those that applied to men – such as their class status, generation and educational level. Yet a small number of women persevered against the gender-specific obstacles of not being allowed to fly as commercial pilots or as members of a military. Instead, these women set records for speed,

Figure 19  Amelia Earhart posing for the cover of Sphere magazine just after her transatlantic flight, June 1928. Reproduced courtesy of Alamy Images, F14FWD. Contributor: ClassicStock.

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height and distance, and competed with one another to claim titles as the ‘first women to fly’ a particular route or distance. Nonetheless, the role of women in pioneering interwar aviation, as historians like Sîan Reynolds, Karen Petrone, Anna Krylova and Evelyn Zegenhagen have shown in differing ways, reflected larger political concerns. These often had implicit military aims. Moreover, the existence of an African-American woman like Bessie Coleman obtaining her licence in interwar France in a climate that celebrated French women pilots as national heroines did not mean that women ceased to be on the fringes of French aviation. In interwar Germany, women flyers helped to soften the return of ‘German air authority in the world’, even if their visible training as sports pilots masked the fact that the majority of those acquiring these skills were men who could in turn put them readily to military purposes. And in the Soviet Union, piloting was seen as decisive and crucial to any future war, and women joined in training for this alongside men.57 The rise of women as flyers also animated a kind of anguished feminist response dating back to the war years themselves. In the aftermath of a series of devastating air raids on London in May 1918, Virginia Woolf wrote about rumours that her husband Leonard had heard about them: ‘L[eonard] was told the other day that the raids are carried out by women. Women’s bodies were found in the wrecked aeroplanes. They are smaller & lighter, & thus leave more room for bombs. Perhaps it is sentimental, but the thought seems to me to add a particular touch of horror.’58 Although this rumour proved false, it was a horror that lingered on for decades. At the end of the interwar period, British feminist and internationalist activist Helena Swanwick was adamant about the continued dangers that air power posed to women. As she asserts in her 1937 Roots of Peace, bombers can destroy homes and the lives therein ‘with no more concern than they would kick over an ant-hill’.59 Given changes in the nature of war-making, Swanwick also feared the following nightmare would become real: ‘Women in the near future turning themselves into bombers, as they turned themselves into munition workers. … They can fly as well as men, they are as brave as men, and it would not take them long to learn the art of releasing bombs. That would release them from the hideous passivity of waiting until men had decided that enough women and children and homes had been destroyed to warrant calling off the devil of war.’60 What would prevent this horrifying spectacle was a belief that resonated with post-war feminists protesting war and urging disarmament, that for women, as Swanwick puts it, the rewards of war could only be ‘few and fleeting … [while]

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their sufferings … [would be] unspeakable and enduring’.61 For interwar pacifist feminists, who espoused a belief in women’s innate opposition to the destruction of war on the grounds of their role as creators and nurturers of life, the image of women pilots as perpetrators of aerial bombardments was a highly disturbing prospect. The promise of freedom through flight could not erase the imagined images of burnt and poisoned mothers and infants.

Conclusion While some pioneering women were becoming potential perpetrators of aerial bombardment as they made inroads into the male-dominated world of flight, the majority of the women we discussed in this chapter did not depart from traditional interpretations of women’s relationships to the dead, sick and wounded bodies left in the wake of the war. They presented themselves as reproducers, highlighting their maternity or potential maternity, particularly in the case of pacifist feminists, as a driver for their anti-war or anti-weaponry activism. Maternalism was thus often at the core of female activism in the immediate post-war years as it had been before the war. What was different, however, was the extent of the devastation wrought by the war on all bodies by the new industrialized machinery of warfare. The difficulties involving the identification of the dead, due both to their sheer numbers, and the destructive power of the weapons used to kill them, led grieving relatives such as the French and British women discussed earlier to demand their rights as the bereaved of the combatant dead, claiming ownership of the bodies of their loved ones. The thousands of missing persons led to women engaging in alternative means of coming to terms with their losses, such as the French creation of ossuaries, an initiative in which women played a leading role. Further, the civilians killed by aerial bombardments, and the prospect of further civilian deaths given future technological innovations, particularly the development of poison gas, placed women and children under risk in ways akin to combatant males. Feminists described images of the victims of this new kind of warfare in their eloquent campaigns against the dangers of airpower as part of their anti-war activism. Rather than transforming women’s relationship to the body, then, in the cases of female activists, we find it is more accurate to state that the war extended and politicized women’s traditional relationships to the body – as mothers, as healers and as carers.

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That said, it remains the case that for thousands of women, a particular confrontation with the bodies damaged or destroyed by war was a primary driver in their post-war activism. They were often motivated to fight for change as a direct result of experiencing first hand the destruction caused by war. Volunteer French nurse Germaine Malaterre Sellier, for example, writes in an article published in 1921 that it was in part her experience of caring for dying German soldiers that motivated her post-war pacifist feminist activism. She appeals to other nurses on these grounds: ‘Nurses of France, who in hospitals on the home front, and in casualty clearing stations at the front, cared for the bleeding and bruised bodies of our country’s enemy, didn’t you feel, when you were battling death, who was stalking them at their bedside, a surge of human fraternity?’62 British Quaker charity worker Ruth Fry also recounts the impact of helping to care for women’s and children’s bodies damaged by war on her politics and activism, but this time in relation to the suffering of refugees and civilians in the immediate post-war years. She is evidently haunted, for example, by the sight of a starving Austrian family, and uses this case, alongside many others in her 1926 memoir A Quaker Adventure, to condemn both the consequences of war on civilian bodies, and the Allied governments’ post-war failure to intervene: Franz, who is 2 … was a queer bluish white: and whimpered, whimpered, whimpered. … It seemed he could not cry. … I looked down at that white unhappy baby – who had played no part in wars except starvation, and knew no land of Foe except suffering – I wondered then if we dared to hope that America and England would come to challenge those awful words of Noyes: ‘A murdered child, ten miles away, would hardly stir your peace.’63

Although the early interwar years positioned women primarily as wives and mothers, particularly in the establishment of the welfare state, in many of the former belligerent nations, it is important to recognize that the particular developments of the First World War in relation to bodies led to new forms of post-war activism for women. Whereas the majority of scholarship has focused on the women engaged in state-sanctioned activity, working in, for example, public health or in family welfare,64 we have highlighted other women who, individually or collectively, challenged the state in relation to the changed understandings of bodies brought about by the war. Bodies became highly politicized objects of contestation in the aftermath of the First World War and, as our case studies demonstrate, female activists were frequently at the heart of these debates.

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Notes 1 Pearl James, World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Nicoletta Gullace, ‘Allied Propaganda and World War I: Interwar Legacies, Media Studies, and the Politics of War Guilt’, History Compass, 9/9 (2011), pp. 686–700; Annette Becker, Les Monuments aux morts: patrimoine et la grande guerre (Paris: Editions Errance, 1988); Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Claudia Siebrecht, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 2 Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (London: Heinemann, 1929), p. 60. 3 Claudine Bourcier, Nos chers blessés: Une infirmière dans la Grande Guerre (Saint Cyr sur Loire: Alan Sutton, 2002), p. 113. This and all further translations are by Alison S. Fell. 4 Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘Introduction’, in Margaret R. Higonnet (ed.), Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of War (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001); Jane Marcus, ‘Afterword: Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’, in Helen Zenna Smith [Evadne Price] (ed.), Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War (New York: Feminist Press, 1989), pp. 241–300. 5 Christine Hallett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Christine Hallett, ‘Emotional Nursing? Involvement, Engagement and Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs’, in Alison S. Fell and Christine Hallett (eds), First World War Nursing: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 87–102. 6 See also Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Men and Women at Home’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol 3: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 96–120. 7 See ‘Instruction pour la population civile en cas d’attaque par les gaz’, March 1916, French Sixth Army, in Service Historique de la Défense (henceforth SHD), 16 N 839. Also the discussion of the production of gas masks by women in Britain in Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Defence Against the Indefensible: The Gas Mask, the State and British Culture during and after the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 25/3 (2014), pp. 418–34. 8 See, for example, Peter Davies, ‘Transforming Utopia: The “League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform” in the First World War’, in Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International

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9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

Women Activists between War and Peace Perspectives 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 211–26. Also Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chaps. 5–6. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Grazyel, Women’s Identities; Sherman, The Reconstruction of Memory; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Pat Jalland, Death in War and Peace: A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Cinq deuils de guerre 19141918 (Paris: Agnes Vienot, 2001). For a discussion of the notion of ‘rite de passage’ and Freud’s essay on Mourning and Melancholia in relation to First World War mourning, see Winter, Sites of Memory. Similar tombs were erected in Italy and the United States. For a summation of the meanings of the unknown soldier memorial, see Laura Wittman, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). The Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1920. Lloyd George papers, quoted in Grayzel, Women’s Identities, p. 229. See, for example, Nikolai Vukov, ‘The Aftermaths of Defeat: The Fallen, the Catastrophe, and the Public Response of Women to the End of the First World War in Bulgaria’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 29–47. Commission nationale des sépultres militaires, Chambre de députés, 31 May 1919. See also Sherman, The Construction of Memory. Sherman, The Construction of Memory, p. 92. Jean-Yves Le Naour, Le Soldat Inconnu: La Guerre, La Mort, La Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 15. Cited in Thierry Hardier and Jean-François Jagielski, Combattre et mourir pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Imago, 2001), p. 324. Jane Catulle-Mendès, La prière sur l’enfant mort (Paris: Lemerre, 1921). See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘Corps perdus, corps retrouvés. Trois exemples des deuils de guerre’, Annales, 55/1 (2000), pp. 47–71. The file for her Légion d’honneur is consultable on the Leonore database: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/ public/mistral/leonore_fr?ACTION=CHERCHER&FIELD_98=REF&VALUE_9 8=L0450030 (accessed 10 April 2015). Catulle-Mendès, La prière sur l’enfant mort, p. 121. Grayzel, Women’s Identities, p. 239. Anon, ‘Le respect des morts sans sépultre’, Journal des veuves et des orphelins (June 1927), p. 6. Noël Garnier, ‘Il faut respecter les morts’, Journal des veuves (February 1925), p. 1.

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25 Richard Van Emden, The Quick and the Dead: Fallen Soldiers and their Families in the Great War (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 132–3. 26 See http://www.cwgc.org/about-us/history-of-cwgc.aspx. See also David Crane, Empires of the Dead (London: William Collins, 2014); Van Emden, The Quick and the Dead; Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: The History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (London: Leo Cooper, 2003). 27 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago, 1978 [1933]), pp. 251–2. 28 Van Emden, The Quick and the Dead, p. 252. 29 David Bradshaw, ‘Kipling and War’, in Howard Booth (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 91. 30 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Gardener’ (1925). Available online at http://www.greatwar. nl/books/gardener/gardener.html (accessed 8 June 2016). 31 See Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 32 See Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics and Society 192139 (London: Praeger, 2005). 33 Quoted in Longworth, The Unending Vigil, p. 47. 34 I would like to thank Noel Reeve, Sarah Ann Smith’s grandson, for giving me access to her private papers [A.F.]. 35 Yorkshire Evening News, 12 May 1919. 36 Rothwell Courier and Times, 13 May 1922. 37 CWGC Archives, CCF06082013-00010. 38 Letter from Fabian War to Hudson, 13 December 1922, CWGC archives, CCF06082013-00017. 39 Private papers in the possession of Noel Reeve. 40 Letter, June 1924, CWGC archives, CCF06082013-00010. 41 See the image from L’Illustration reproduced in Jules Poirier, Les bombardements de Paris (1914-18) (Paris: 1930) and the discussion in Susan R. Grayzel, ‘“The Souls of Soldiers”: Civilians Under Fire in First World War France’, Journal of Modern History, 78/3 (2006), pp. 588–622. 42 Grayzel, ‘Defence Against the Indefensible’. 43 See the discussion of this editorial in Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–19. 44 ‘Instruction Provisoire: Concernant La Protection Individuelle contre les Bombardements Aeriens de populations des villes …’ ‘Effets asphyiants’ pp. 4 and 7. File labelled ‘Top Secret’, Archives nationales, Paris, AN F/7/12949. 45 For more on this interpretation, see Susan R. Grayzel, ‘The Baby in the Gas Mask: Motherhood, Wartime Technology, and the Gendered Division between

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46

47

48 49 50 51

52

53 54 55

56

Women Activists between War and Peace the Fronts during and after the First World War’, in Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (eds), Gender and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 127–43. Cecily Hamilton, Lest Ye Die: A Story from the Past or of the Future (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), p. ix. This was the revised version of her 1922 novel Theodore Savage. For a further discussion of this text, see Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire. Jane Addams, ‘Women and Internationalism’ (1915) reprinted in Margaret R. Higonnet (ed.), Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (New York: Plume, 1999), pp. 39–40. Like many such statements, this attributed pacifism to women’s maternalism, regardless of the actual status of the female speaker as a mother. See Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War. Addams, ‘Presidential Address’, in Report of the International Congress of Women Zurich 1919 (Geneva 1919), p. 1. Report of the International Congress of Women Zurich 1919, pp. 69 and 85. Addams, ‘Presidential Address’, in Report the Third International Congress of Women Vienna 1921 (Geneva, 1921), p. 2 WILPF Newsletter, November 1924. Committee against Scientific Warfare, in Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Collection, IV-7-13, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, WILPF Papers, 1915-1978 (Microfilm, Reel 103, frames 1801–3). As cited in Allison Sobek, How Did the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Campaign against Chemical Warfare, 1915-1930? (Binghampton, NY: SUNY Binghampton, 2001), Doc. 8. Annette B. Vogt, ‘Gertrud Johanna Woker (1878-1968)’, in Jan Apotheker and Livia Simon Sarkadi (eds), European Women in Chemistry (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011). Gertrud Woker, The Next War, A War of Poison Gas (Washington, DC: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, n.d. [1927]). Ibid. Statement of Organizing Committee, Chemical Warfare: An Abridged Report of Papers Read at an International Conference at Frankfurt am Main (London: Williams & Norgate, 1930), p. 26, emphasis in the original. Interestingly enough the French version of the proceedings appeared under the original title of the conference: see Les méthodes modernes de guerre et la protection des populations civiles (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1930). Second quote from Getrud Woker, ‘The Effects of Chemical Warfare’, in Chemical Warfare, p. 45. Excerpts from ‘Statement of Mrs. Harriet Connor Brown, Representing the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’, in World Disarmament: Extract from Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, January 11, 1921 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,

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58 59 60 61 62

63

64

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1921). The Records of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, U.S. Section, 1919–59, Swarthmore College Peace Collection (Microfilm, reel 33, frames 649–57). As cited in Sobek, How Did, Doc. 17. Siân Reyolds, ‘High Flyers: Women Aviators in Pre-War France’, History Today 39 (1989), pp. 36–41; Evelyn Zegenhagen, ‘“The Holy Desire to Serve the Poor and Tortured Fatherland”: German Women Motor Pilots of the Inter-War Era and Their Political Mission’, German Studies Review, 30/3 (2007), pp. 579–96; Anna Krylova, ‘Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women-Fighters in 1930s Russia’, Gender and History, 16/3 (2004), pp. 626–53. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol I: 1915-1919, edited by Anne Oliver Bell (New York: Harvest, 1979), p. 153. Helena Swanwick, The Roots of Peace (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 181. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid. Germaine Malaterre Sellier, Untitled article, La Jeune République, 7 August 1921, quoted in Alison S. Fell, ‘Germaine Malaterre Sellier, la grande guerre, et le féminisme pacifiste de l’entre-deux-guerres’, in Christine Bard (ed.), Les Féministes de la première vague (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015), pp. 207–16. A. Ruth Fry, A Quaker Adventure: The Story of Nine Years’ Relief and Reconstruction (London: Nisbet & Co Ltd, 1926), p. 214. Relief work also became a concern of post-war feminists and the cornerstone of developments in what became humanitarian aid and activism. See Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism 1918-1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Michelle Tusan, ‘“Crimes Against Humanity”: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide’, American Historical Review, 119/1 (2014), pp. 47–87. Crucial works on this include Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s-1950s (London: Routledge, 1991); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History, Part III (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe.

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Further Reading General works and edited volumes of essays Allen, Ann Taylor, Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Bock, Gisela, Women in European History, translated by Allison Brown (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002) [2000]. Carden-Coyne, Ana (ed.), Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Cova, Anne (ed.), Comparative Women’s History: New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Social Sciences Monographs, 2006). Evans, Richard J., Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism and Pacifism in Europe, 1870-1945 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987). Fell, Alison S. and Sharp, Ingrid (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Gruber, Helmut and Graves, Pamela (eds), Women and Socialism – Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998). Hämmerle, Christa, Überegger, Oswald and Bader-Zaar, Birgitta (eds), Gender and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jenson, Jane, Michel, Sonya and Weitz, Margaret Collins (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Kramer, Alan, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Laqua, Daniel (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). Melman, Billie (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Offen, Karen M., European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Rupp, Leila J., Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Sharp, Ingrid and Stibbe, Matthew (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Sharp, Ingrid and Stibbe, Matthew (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017).

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Further Reading

Szapor, Judith, Pető, Andrea, Hametz, Maura and Calloni, Marina (eds), Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe 1860-2000: Twelve Biographical Essays (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012). Wingfield, Nancy M. and Bucur, Maria (eds), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Women’s movements, suffrage and nationalism Adams, Jad, Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Bader-Zaar, Birgitta, ‘Women’s Citizenship and the First World War: General Remarks and a Case Study of Women’s Enfranchisement in Austria and Germany’, Women’s History Review, 25/2 (2016), pp. 274–95. Daley, Caroline and Nolan, Melanie (eds), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Gottlieb, Julie V. (ed.), ‘Special Issue: Feminism and Feminists after Suffrage’, Women’s History Review, 23/3 (June 2014), pp. 325–499. Gottlieb, Julie V. and Toye, Richard (eds), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Gullace, Nicoletta, ‘The Blood of our Sons’: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Lintunen, Tiina, ‘Women at War’, in Aapo Roselius and Tuomas Tepora (eds), The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 201–29. Passmore, Kevin (ed.), Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Sulkunen, Irma, ‘Suffrage, Nation and Citizenship − The Finnish Case in an International Context’, in Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi and Pirjo Markkola (eds), Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 83–105. Szapor, Judith, ‘Who Represents Hungarian Women? The Demise of the Liberal Bourgeois Women’s Movement and the Rise of the Right-wing Women’s Movement in the Aftermath of World War I’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 245–64. Szapor, Judith, ‘The Women’s Debating Club of Countess Károlyi: Hungarian Women’s Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Activism in 1918/19’, L’Homme: European Journal of Feminist History, 25/2 (2014), pp. 63–71. Wernitznig, Dagmar, ‘Out of her Time? Rosika Schwimmer’s Transnational Activism after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue:

Further Reading

253

Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017).

Women’s movements, internationalism and pacifism Ablovatski, Eliza, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919’, in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Indiana, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 70–92. Acsády, Judit, ‘Diverse Constructions: Feminist and Conservative Movements and their Contribution to the (re-)construction of Gender Relations in Hungary after the First World War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 309–31. Addams, Jane, Balch, Emily G. and Hamilton, Alice, Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and its Results, introduced by Harriet Hyman Alonso (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Kuhlman, Erika, ‘The “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom” and Reconciliation After the Great War’, in Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 227–43. Kuhlman, Erika, ‘The Rhineland Horror Campaign and the Aftermath of War’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 89–109. Miller, Carol, ‘Geneva – the Key to Equality: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, 3/2 (1994), pp. 219–45. Oertzen, Christine von, Science, Gender and Internationalism: Women’s Academic Networks, 1917-1955 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Sandell, Marie, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism: Identity and Sisterhood between the World Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). Sharp, Ingrid, ‘An Unbroken Family’? Gertrud Bäumer and the German Women’s Movement’s Return to International Work in the 1920s’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), ‘Special Issue: Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919-1939’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming, 2017). Sluga, Glenda, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Vukov, Nikolai, ‘The Aftermaths of Defeat: The Fallen, the Catastrophe, and the Public Response of Women to the End of the First World War in Bulgaria’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 29–47.

254

Further Reading

Wilmers, Annika, Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung 19141920: Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext, 2008).

Women, socialism and revolution Canning, Kathleen, ‘“Sexual Crisis,” the Writing of Citizenship, and the States of Exception in Germany, 1914-1920’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), pp. 169–213. Craig Nation, R., War on War: Lenin the Zimmerwald Left and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009) [1989]. Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Grebing, Helga, Frauen in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19 (Heidelberg: Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte, 1994). Hauch, Garbriella, ‘Sisters and Comrades: Women’s Movements and the “Austrian Revolution.” Gender in Insurrection, the Räte Movement, Parties and Parliament’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 221–43. Helfert, Veronika, ‘Eine demokratische Bolschewikin: Ilona Ducynska Polanyi (1897-1978)’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 26/2 (2015), pp. 166–89. Keßler, Mario, Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895-1961) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013). McDermid, Jane and Hillyar, Anna, Midwives of Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (London: UCL Press, 1999). Shnyrova, Olga, ‘After the Vote was Won: The Fate of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Russia after the October Revolution’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 159–77. Sproat, Liberty P., ‘The Soviet Solution for Women in Clara Zetkin’s Journal Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale, 1921-1925’, Aspasia: International Year Book of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, 6/1 (2012), pp. 60–78. Weinhauer, Klaus, McElligott, Anthony and Heinsohn, Kirsten (eds), Germany, 19161923: A Revolution in Context (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015). Wheeler, Robert F., ‘German Women and the Communist International: The Case of the Independent Social Democrats’, Central European History, 8/2 (1975), pp. 113–39.

Further Reading

255

Women’s movements, journalism and the media Acsády, Judit, ‘In a Different Voice: Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War’, in Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 105–23. Delap, Lucy, DiCenzo, Maria and Ryan, Leila (eds), Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900-1918, 3 Vols (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). DiCenzo, Maria, ‘“Our Freedom and Its Results”: Measuring Progress in the Aftermath of Suffrage’, Women’s History Review, 23/3 (2014), pp. 421–40. DiCenzo, Maria, Ryan, Leila and Delap, Lucy, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Frank, Tibor, Ethnicity, Propaganda, Myth-Making: Studies on Hungarian Connections to Britain and America 1848-1945 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1999). Hudson, David, ‘“Having Seen Enough”: Eleanor Franklin Egan and the Journalism of Great War Displacement’, in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (eds), Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 375–94. Hunt, Alice Riggs, Facts About Communist Hungary (London: Workers Socialist Federation, 1919). Oldfield, Sybil (ed.), International Woman Suffrage: Ius Suffragii, 1913-1920 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Papp, Claudia, ‘Die Kraft der weiblichen Seele’: Feminismus in Ungarn, 1918-1941 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004). Smith, Angela K., Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Zimmermann, Susan, Die bessere Halfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1915 (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 1999).

Women’s movements, war and the body Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, Cinq deuils de guerre 1914-1918 (Paris: Agnes Vienot, 2001). Fell, Alison S. and Hallett, Christine E. (eds), First World War Nursing: New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). Grayzel, Susan R., Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

256

Further Reading

Grayzel, Susan R., At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Grayzel, Susan R., ‘Defence Against the Indefensible: The Gas Mask, the State and British Culture during and after the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 25/3 (2014), pp. 418–34. Grayzel, Susan R., ‘Men and Women at Home’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol 3: Civil Society (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 96–120. Grayzel, Susan R., ‘The Baby in the Gas Mask: Motherhood, Wartime Technology, and the Gendered Division between the Fronts during and after the First World War’, in Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (eds), Gender and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 127–43. Kuhlman, Erika, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Longworth, Philip, The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (London: Leo Cooper, 2003). Sherman, Daniel J., The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Siebrecht, Claudia, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Index Ablovatski, Eliza  74 n.101, 172 n.163 Acsády, Judit  16, 19, 70 n.62, 213 n.31, 214 n.49 Action Sociale de la Femme 15 Addams, Jane  110, 114 nn.7–8, 236, 237, 248 n.47 Adler, Friedrich  146 Adler, Katja  146 agency political 125 of women  158–60 Allen, Ann Taylor  249 n.64 All-Russian Central Executive Committee  129, 132 All-Russian Congress of Women Workers and Women Peasants  132, 133, 155 All-Russian Women’s Union  132 A Magyar Asszony (Hungarian Matron)  97, 110, 196–8 Anatolia 17 Anderson, Benedict  26 n.60 Anderson, Bonnie S.  170 n.125 Andrássy, Countess  48 Annola, Johanna  73 n.90 A Nő (journal)  97, 99, 102 Arbeiterzeitung (newspaper)  151 Arendsee, Martha  140, 166 n.67 Armand, Inessa  130, 133, 134, 145, 147 armistice  9, 19, 38, 48, 81, 85, 90, 92–3, 145, 202, 223, 226, 227 Ashby, Margaret Corbett  101, 106, 179 Ashton, Margaret  102 Asquith, Herbert  35, 38 Aster Revolution  176 Astor, Lady Nancy  32, 215 n.55 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane  228 Augspurg, Anita  91, 169 n.121 Australia  75 n.111 Austria  3, 5, 6, 9, 17, 18, 26 n.56, 47, 82, 84, 89, 103, 109, 125–6, 129, 142, 143, 146, 151, 152, 154, 158, 161, 165 n.58, 203

women’s representation in socialist revolution in  134–9 Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP)  134–8, 146, 151, 159 Austrian Social Democrats  135 Avondpost (journal)  194 Ayrton, Phyllis  40 Bader-Zaar, Birgitta  21 n.3 Balch, Emily G.  114 n.7 Bárczy, István  213 n.32 Bard, Christine  217 n.78 Barthou, Louis  227 Bäumer, Gertrud  91–4, 106, 166 n.70 Home Diary 92 Bavaria 17 Beard, Mary Ritter  63 Bebel, August  130, 131, 163 n.24 Beinhorn, Elly  241 Belarus  4, 17 Belgium  17, 81, 93, 95, 114 n.8 Berger, Stefan  75 n.113, 126, 158 Bergmann, Hermann  123 Berne manifesto  144–5 Bessel, Richard  125 Blom, Ida  75 n.113 Bloxham, Donald  170 n.127 Bock, Gisela  249 n.64 bodies exhumation politics, in France and Britain 226–33 modern attacks on  233–43 Bohemia  136, 186 Böhler, Jochen  152 Bolland, Adrienne  241 Bolsheviks/Bolshevism  11, 17, 46, 48, 50, 129–33, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150–1, 168 n.107, 203, 205–7 Bonar Law, Andrew  36 Borden, Mary The Forbidden Zone 222 Boucher, Hélène  241

258

Index

Bourcier, Claudine  222 ‘bourgeois’ parties/society  10, 11, 17, 57, 70 n.62, 72 n.85, 83, 86, 97, 126, 127, 130–2, 137, 139, 141, 142, 145, 149–53, 155–60, 166 n.70, 176, 207, 222 Bozhilova-Pateva, Zheni  87–8, 90 Braddstein, Therese  207 Braker, Regina  113 n.7 Breitenbach, Esther  75 n.111 Britain  4–6, 8, 62, 80, 98, 111, 121 n.124, 144, 178, 184–6, 192, 201, 206, 234, 235 bodies exhumation politics in  226–33 women’s suffrage and nationalism in  30, 31–42, 44–5 British Union of Fascists  39 British War Graves Association  231–2 Brittain, Vera Testament of Youth 230 Brorby, Malvin I.  201 Buck-Morss, Susan  170 n.127 Bulgaria  3, 6, 17, 80, 82–4, 89, 91, 104, 106, 112, 186 internationalism, pacifism and transnationalism in  84–90 Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) 116 n.21 Bulgarian Women’s Union (Bulgarski zhenski sayuz)  84, 86, 90, 104 Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (BRSDP)  115 n.21, 116 n.22 Burdett-Coutts, William  32 Burton, Antoinette  111 Bussey, Gertrud  113 n.7

Cecil, Robert  39 Chemical Warfare Service (CWS)  239 Chober, Maria  207 Christian Democrats  188–9 Christian Mission Society (Hungary)  51–2 Christian National Unity Party (Hungary) 52 Christian Party (Hungary)  50 Christian Socialist Party (Hungary)  51 Christian Social Party (CSP) (Austria) 135 Cohn, Jan  218 n.91 Coleman, Bessie  241, 242 Comintern (Third International)  11, 139, 140 Executive Committee  153 International Women’s Secretariat (IWS)  153, 154, 171 n.135 Third World Congress  156 Committee for the Development of the Constitution (Russia)  128 The Common Cause (newspaper)  234 Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) 230–2 Communist Party (Hungary)  49 Confortini, Catia Intelligent Compassion 111 Connor Brown, Harriet  240 Conservative Party (Britain)  41 Conway, Martin  170 n.127 Council of People’s Commissars  140–1 Courtney, Kathleen  102 Courtney, Miss  101 Crowdy, Rachel  107 cultural demobilization  26 n.60 Czechoslovakia  3, 18, 43, 89, 109, 186

Cabanes, Bruno  249 n.63 Cadet Party (Russia)  129 Campaign for World Government and World Citizenship (United States of America) 64 Canning, Kathleen  17, 158, 160, 166 n.73 Carlier, Julie  22 n.9 Catt, Carrie Chapman  62, 102, 103, 183, 191, 209, 212 n.25, 214 n.44 Catulle-Mendès, Jane  228 Cavell, Edith  232 Cecil, Lady Florence  231

Dacre Fox, Norah  39 Dagens Nyheter (journal)  194 défense passive legislation (France)  235 Denmark 192 de Polignac, Princesse  228 Derfert-Casper, Cläre  140, 148, 159, 166 n.67 Der Kampf (journal)  159 Deutsch-Österreich 18 DiCenzo, Maria  16 Die Arbeiterin (newspaper)  135, 154, 155 Die Frau (magazine)  92, 93

Index Die Gleichheit (journal)  141, 167 n.73 Die Kämpferin (journal)  141 Die Kommunistin (journal)  141, 150, 165 n.55 Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (periodical)  154, 156 Die Rote Fahne (newspaper) 137 Dolchstoßlegende 50 Donald, Moira  172 n.160 Doumer, Paul  227 Drummond, Flora  40 Dual Monarchy  47 Duczynska Polanyi, Ilona  146 Dupeyron, Andrée  241 Earhart, Amelia  241 Ebert, Friedrich  139, 149 Egan, Eleanor Franklin  16, 201–5, 218 n.90 Egan, Martin  203 Ehrenreich, Barbara  75 n.113 Eisler-Friedländer, Elfriede  134, 135, 137, 138, 150, 152–3, 159, 165 n.55, 170 n.131 Engelmann, Dieter  168 n.107, 169 n.122 Engels, Friedrich  131, 152, 163 n.25 Epstein, Catherine  161 n.2 Erdős, Renée  200 The Big Scream (A nagy sikoly) 199 Estonia 186 European encounter  42 Evening Post (newspaper)  202, 206, 209 Fawcett, Millicent  8 Federation of Women’s Organisations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF)  81, 91–4 Fell, Alison  15, 16 feminist press, at national level  185–6 Finland  5, 6, 12, 42, 73 n.90 women’s suffrage and nationalism in  30, 55–62, 66, 72 n.83 Finnish Labour Party  56 Firkatian, Mari A.  119 n.81 Fischer, Ruth. See Eisler-Friedländer, Elfriede Fitzpatrick, Sheila  24 n.25 Ford, Henry  63 Ford, Isabella  102

259

Ford Motor Company  63 Ford Peace Ship Expedition  63 Fowkes, Ben  162 n.11 France  4–6, 8, 9, 17, 80, 81, 96, 114 n.8, 144, 186, 206, 221, 235 body exhumation politics in  226–33 Frank, Tibor  202 Freud, Sigmund  246 n.11 Friedländer, Paul  134 Fry, Ruth  244, 249 n.63 A Quaker Adventure 244 Gatrell, Peter  24 nn.26, 28, 26 n.59, 128 Gelblum, Amira  169 n.121 Gellner, Ernest  75 n.113 gender and First World War  22 n.7 German Communist Party (KPD)  123, 137, 139–43, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 162 n.11 Germany  3, 5, 6, 8–10, 12, 17, 18, 23 n.24, 39, 61, 80–4, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 112, 114 n.8, 124–6, 129, 132, 137, 145, 151, 152, 154, 158, 160, 161, 192, 206, 221, 234, 242 internationalism, pacifism and transnationalism in  90–6 women’s representation in socialist revolution in  139–43, 148–9 Gerwarth, Robert  170 n.127 Geyer, Michael  23 n.25 girlisation, process of  200 Globig, Martha (Marthel)  123, 124, 159 Glücklich, Vilma  45, 62, 96, 186, 187, 191 Goldman, Wendy Z.  163 n.22 Gosthonyi, Maria  207 Gottlieb, Julie V.  6, 44, 45, 75 n.111 Gourd, Emilie  181 Graves Registration Commission. See Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Grayzel, Susan  5, 15, 16, 21 n.2, 24 n.28, 247 nn.41, 43, 45, 248 nn.46–7 Grün, Anna  135, 137 Gullace, Nicolletta  31 Hagemann, Karen  75 n.113 Hagman, Lucina  56

260

Index

Hagner, Minna  72 n.87 Hall, Catherine  75 n.113 Hamburger Fremdenblatt (journal)  194 Hamilton, Alice  114 n.7, 238 Hamilton, Cicely  41, 236, 248 n.46 Hardier, Thierry  228 Hauch, Gabriella  125, 126 Hautmann, Hans  164 n.37 Heilmann, Fritz  124 Heinsohn, Kirsten  23 n.24 Helfert, Veronika  11, 90, 170 n.127 Helm, Sarah  165 n.58 Het Volk (journal)  194 Heymann, Lida Gustava  91, 95–6, 106, 169 n.121 Higonnet, Margaret R.  21 n.2, 223 Hild-Berg, Anette  169 n.122 Hilson, Mary  32 Hobsbawm, Eric (E. J.)  3, 75 n.113 Hoffrogge, Ralf  166 n.67 Hoover, Herbert  203 Horne, John  26 n.60 Horthy, Miklós  19, 49, 52, 82, 96, 97, 177, 187, 195, 215 n.61 Hóry, András  53 House of Commons (Britain)  33, 38 Hudson, David  16, 218 n.90 Hungarian Communist Party  176 Hungarian Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete, FE)  13, 45, 51, 62, 64, 80, 96–100, 173, 186–9, 194, 198, 213 n.31 Hungarian National Council of Women 98 Hungary  3, 4, 6–7, 12, 13, 17–19, 42, 61, 62, 64, 70 n.62, 71 n.69, 80, 82–3, 89, 106, 112, 114 n.8, 119 n.87, 125, 129, 137, 146, 173, 175–7, 186, 216 n.64 American women reporting from 201–9 feminist journals and periodicals in 186–95 internationalism, pacifism and transnationalism in  96–101 media representations of femininity and gender relations in post-war  195–201 suffrage and nationalism in  30

women’s suffrage and nationalism in 42–55 Hunt, Alice Riggs  201, 202, 206–9 imagined community  16, 78, 111 idea of  26 n.60 restoration of  80, 81 Imperial War Graves Commission. See Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) (Germany)  83, 91, 139–43, 149, 149, 151, 160 Innala, Aune Suomen naisen alkutaival lainsäätäjänä 1907-1917  72 n.83 International Abolitionist Federation 212 n.19 International Committee Against Chemical Warfare 238 International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP). See Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) International Congress of Women (The Hague, 1915)  8, 9, 14, 18, 62, 74, 79, 88, 97, 113 n.7, 144, 237 International Congress of Working Women  212 n.19 International Council of Women (ICW)  72 n.87, 77, 81, 83, 84, 92, 93, 96, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112, 177, 178 International Federation of University Women  109, 212 n.19 international feminist activism in First World War aftermath, and women’s press role  177–8 internationalism. See also individual entries barriers, in the aftermath of war 81–4 definition of  4 ‘The International Manifesto of Women’ 8 International Socialist Women’s Conference 140 International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA)  8–9, 18, 19, 45, 62, 79, 81, 84, 93, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107,

Index 109, 112, 115 n.13, 173, 177, 186, 187, 189, 194, 212 n.23 Biennial Congress  77 Budapest Congress (1913)  77, 182, 213 n.32 after First World War  178–84 Geneva Congress (1920)  179, 182, 184, 194, 211 n.6 Paris Congress (1926)  212 n.23 Rome Congress (1923)  106, 179, 183 Italy  3, 5, 9, 109, 144, 201, 246 n.12 Ivanova, Dimitrana  87 Jacobs, Aletta  102, 214 n.40 Jagielski, Jean-François  228 Jallinoja, Riitta Suomalaisen naisasialiikkeen taistelukaudet  72 n.83 Japan 55 Jensen, Kimberly  22 n.9, 23 n.19 Johnson, Amy  241 Joint Standing Committee of Women’s International Organisations  108 Jonsson, Pernilla  22 n.9 Journal des Veuves et des Orphelins (Journal of War Widows and Orphans) 229 Juchacz, Marie  139 Jus Suffragii (journal)  8, 48, 62, 97, 100–3, 177–8, 180–4, 191, 207, 209, 211 n.6, 212 nn.14–15, 22–3 comparison with The Woman 192–4 Kandeva, Rayna  116 n.23 Kapp Putsch  149 Karavelova, Ekaterina  83, 87, 88–90, 116 nn.27, 33 Karhinen, Hanna  59, 60, 74 n.99 Károlyi, Mihály  48, 63, 65, 96, 97, 176, 203, 205, 207 Kautsky, Karl  149, 168 n.107 Kenedy, Géza  197, 216 n.72 Kent, Susan Kingsley  31 A Keresztény Nő (Christian Woman) 198 Kereszty, Orsolya  213 n.31 Kerteva, Vassilka  87 Keßler, Mario  164 n.37, 171 n.131 Kéthly, Anna  51 Key, Ellen  73 n.90

261

Kvinnopsykologi och kvinnlig logic 73 n.90 Missbrukad kvinnokraft och naturenliga arbetsområden för kvinnan 73 n.90 Kipling, Rudyard ‘The Gardener’  230 The Graves of the Fallen 230 Knight, Graham  210 n.1 Kollontai, Alexandra  129–34, 146, 156–8 ‘Who Needs War?’  146–7 Kollwitz, Käthe  238 Kommunistka (The Woman Communist) (journal) 147 Komsomol 147 KPÖ (Russia)  137, 138, 164 n.37 Central Committee  134 Kramer, Alan  26 n.58 Krassimira, Daskalova  115 n.20 Krylova, Anna  242 Kuhlbrodt, Peter  167 n.74 Kuhlman, Erika  22 n.9, 24 n.28 Kun, Béla  19, 82, 96, 97, 146, 176, 207, 209 Kuźma-Markowska, Sylwia  25 n.50 Labour and Socialist International  193 Lähteenmäki, Maria  74 n.104 Laine, Hilma  60 Lange, Helene  78, 91–3 Langevin, Paul  238, 239 Lászlóné, Gróf Széchenyi  110 Latvia  4, 17, 186 La Verité (journal)  194 League of Finnish Feminists (Unioni Naisasialiitto)  56, 57, 61 League of Nations  14, 89, 94, 100, 105–9, 120 n.110, 121 n.124, 144, 185, 237–9 League of Nations Union  39 Lenin, Vladimir Illyich  127, 146, 153–4 Lequis, Arnold (General)  148, 149 Lewald, Theodor  160 Lewis, Jill  165 n.58 Liberals (Hungary)  47 Liebknecht, Karl  124 Lintunen, Tiina  6, 75 n.109 Lipták, Pál  71 n.70 Lithuania  3, 4, 17, 186

262 Lloyd George, David  35, 36 Lloyd, Lola Maverick  64 Loreburn, Lord  33 Lorenz, Chris  75 n.113 Lorimer, George Horace  203 Lumsden, Linda  202 Luxemburg, Rosa  140, 146, 172 n.163 ‘Junius pamphlet’  146 McCarthy, Helen  119 n.81, 121 n.124 Macdonald, Dwight  216 n.67 Macedonia 89 McElligott, Anthony  23 n.24 Macmillan, Crystal  179 Macmillan, Margaret  3 Maderthaner, Wolfgang  125 Magyar Nő (Hungarian Woman) 198 Maindrot, Suzanne  234 Majority Social Democratic Party ((M) SPD) (Germany)  90, 139, 141, 142, 146. See also Social Democratic Party (SPD) Marcosson, J. F.  201 Marcus, Jane  223 Margueritte, Victor La Garçonne 199–200 Marie, Jean-Jacques  171 n.135 Markham, Violet  38 Markiewicz, Constance (Irish Countess)  215 n.55 Marshall, Catherine  33, 99 Martyn, How  39 Masaryk, Tomáš  109 Masarykova, Alice  109 Maslov, Arkadi  153 Materna, Ingo  166 nn.67–8 Medical Women’s International Association 109 Melin, Jeanne  95–6 Mellerné Miskolczy, Eugénia  188, 191, 214 n.44 Mensheviks  129, 131 Mészáros, Zsolt  210 n.1 Metal Workers’ Union  140 Mexico 183 middlebrow culture  195, 197, 199 middle culture  216 n.67 Midgley, Clare  22 n.9

Index Midwifery Reform Law (1922) (Prussia) 156 Migazzi, Ambrózy  53 Miller, Carol  108, 120 n.110, 122 n.145 Moderwell, Hiram K.  201 Mók, Ferenc  197 Moldova 4 Morning Post (newspaper)  229 Moses, A. Dirk  170 n.127 Moyn, Samuel The Last Utopia 110 Murray, Eunice G.  39 Mussolini, Benito  183 National American Woman Suffrage Association 62 National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ)  13, 44, 50, 97–9, 110, 196, 197, 215 n.61 Committee for Foreign Affairs  97–8 National Democratic Civic Party (Hungary) 51 national self-determination  4 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC)  185 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)  38 National Woman’s Party of America 212 n.23 Naumann, Horst  168 n.107, 169 n.122 Nazarska, Zhorzheta  115 n.20 Netherlands  63, 114 n.8, 144 Neue Zürcher Zeitung (journal)  194 Neunsinger, Silke  22 n.9 Newcomb, Harriet C.  213 n.27 New Economic Policy (NEP), Russia  156, 171 n.145 New Times (ÚjIdők) 197 New York Socialist Party  202 New York Tribune (newspaper)  202, 206, 209 New York Tribune Institute 206 New Zealand  75 n.111 Nicholas II, Tsar  55 Norway  88, 104, 130 Offen, Karen  6, 65, 83, 249 n.64

Index Olaveson, Heather  210 n.1 Oldfield, Sybil  212 n.15 O’Malley, Ida  234 pacifism  7–8, 13–14, 18, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 62–6, 77, 79–81, 83, 101–2, 127, 150–2, 178, 181, 187–8, 193, 207, 240, 243–4, 248 n.47 and internationalism and transnationalism in Bulgaria 84–90 Germany 90–6 Hungary 96–101 radical  9, 19, 144, 169 n.121 Schwimmer and  101–2 Palasik, Mária  47 Panina, Sophia  129 Pankhurst, Christabel  39, 40 Pankhurst, Emmeline  34, 40, 146 Papp, Claudia  213 n.31, 214 n.43 Pärssinen, Hilja  59, 60, 74 n.99 Pasteur, Paul  135 Pax International 181 Pedersen, Susan  120 n.110, 249 n.64 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline  39 Pető, Andrea  213 n.31 Petrograd City Conference (1917)  147 Petrone, Karen  242 Phipps, Emily  39 Pick-Leichter, Käthe  138, 146, 165 n.58 Poale Zion (Austria)  138 Pogyani, Paula  207 Poirier, Jules  247 n.41 Poland  3, 4, 12, 17, 18, 25 n.50, 89, 144, 186 Pollak, Marianne  170 n.125 Poor Peasant Committees (Russia)  133 Popp, Adelheid  138 post-Second World War Women’s Liberation Movement  31 Pravda (newspaper)  147 Press Subcommittee of Military Control (1914) (Hungary)  187 Prost, Antoine  172 n.160 Rabotnitsa (journal)  131 Ráday, Countess  53 Raffay, Sándor  196 Rätebewegung 141

263

Rathbone, Eleanor  40 Rathenau, Walther  18, 151 Red Army  147 Finland 58–60 Germany 149 Hungary 82 Russia  150, 156 Red Front Fighters’ League (Roter Frontkämpferbund, RFKB)  154 Reeve, Noel  247 n.34 Reform Bill (Britain) (1918)  31, 34 Reich Conference of German-Austrian Workers’ Councils (Reichskonferenz der deutschösterreichischen Arbeiterräte) 138 Reich Conference of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils 142 Reich constitution (1919)  160 Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 154 Reichsverband für Frauenstimmrecht (Reich Association for Female Suffrage) 93 Renner, Karl  135 Representation of the People’s Act (Britain) (1918)  32, 34, 38 Republic of Councils (Hungary)  48, 50 Republikanischer Schutzbund 154 Reynolds, Sîan  242 Rhondda, Lady  212 n.23 Ring of Nationalist Women (Ring Nationaler Frauen) 94 rite de passage  246 n.11 Roland-Holst, Henriette  150 Romania  4, 18, 43, 89, 176, 186 Royden, Maude  102 Rubens, Franziska  123–4, 159 Rubens, Joseph  123 Ruhr crisis  151, 153 Rupp, Leila J.  104–6, 108, 111, 113 n.7, 179, 184 Russia  5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 26 n.59, 48, 50, 55, 58, 60, 123, 124, 126, 132, 135, 139, 143, 144, 150, 186, 242 women’s representation in socialist revolution in  127–34, 147–8, 154–7 Russian League for Women’s Equality (RLWE)  128, 132

264

Index

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 145 Russian Women’s Mutual Aid Society (RWMAS)  128, 132 Ryback, Timothy W.  169 n.110 Sahlbom, Naima  238 Samoilova, Concordia  130, 132, 133 Sangster, Joan  22 n.9 Saturday Evening Post (newspaper)  16, 201–3, 218 n.91 Scheidemann, Philipp  139 Schiavon, Emma  24 n.37 Schlachta, Margit  51–2 Schlesinger, Therese  146, 159 Schreckenbach, Hans-Joachim  166 nn.67–8 Schreiber, Adele  139 Schwager, Irma  164 n.38 Schwimmer, Rosika  18, 19, 27 n.68, 29, 45, 48, 66, 74 nn.107–8, 96, 104, 114 n.8, 120 n.99, 169 n.121, 186, 187, 213 n.30, 214 n.40 pacifism, internationalism and transnationalism and  101–2 suffrage and war aftermath and  62–6 science and medicine, women in  23 n.19 Second International  10, 11 Second International Conference of Socialist Women  145 Selborne, Lady Maud  232 Sellier, Germaine Malaterre  244 Sender, Toni  142–3, 149, 151 Serbia  81, 186 Sewall, May Wright  92 Sharp, Ingrid  19 Aftermaths of War 2 Sheepshanks, Mary  8, 181 Shishkina-Yavein, Poliksena  128 Shishmanova, Lidiya  87 Shnyrova, Olga  11, 17, 90, 164 n.31 Sipos, Balázs  16 Slachta, Margit  197, 198 Sluga, Glenda  4, 26 n.60, 174, 211 n.1 Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism 78 Smallholders Party (Hungary)  49 Smith, Angela K.  181, 182 Smith, Frederick Ernest  231

Smith, Sarah Ann  231–2 Sobek, Allison  248 n.51 Social Democratic Party. See also Majority Social Democrats ((M)SPD) Bulgaria  115 n.21 Finland 60 Germany  83, 139, 145, 148 Hungary  49, 51, 71 n.69, 176 social democratic women, significance of 12 Social Democrats Finland 61 Hungary  47, 48 Socialist Women’s Association (Bulgaria)  85, 86 socialist women’s revolution  123–6 Austria 134–9 and communism, in vision and reality 152–7 Germany 139–43 and international anti-war activism and violence attitudes  144–52 and representation in  127 Russia 127–34 social motherhood (samhällsmoderlighet)  73 n.90 Soviet Union. See Russia Spady, Adel  207 Spear, Fred  234, 235 Spiridonova, Maria  129 Stal, Ludmila  130, 132 Stambolijski, Alexander  86, 88, 119 n.81 Stancioff, Dimitar  119 n.81 Stancioff, Nadejda  119 n.81 Stibbe, Matthew  11, 90, 117 n.39, 168 n.107 Aftermaths of War 2 Streubel, Christiane  94, 99, 167 n.82 Stritt, Marie  93, 215 n.54 Strö[h]mer, Anna  134, 135, 146, 164 n.38 suffrage  5, 6, 9, 178, 181–2, 202. See also individual entries Britain  30, 31–42, 44–5 Finland 55–62 Hungary 42–55 and nationalism, in comparative perspective 29–31 Sulkunen, Irma  72 n.83 Sverdlov, Yakov  132

Index Swanwick, Helena  102 Roots of Peace 242 Sweden  73 n.90, 192 Swiss Branch of the Women’s Committee for Permanent Peace  193 Switzerland  10, 11, 19, 63, 88, 97, 145, 146 Szapor, Judith  6, 70 n.62, 100 Szederkényi, Anna  198, 199 Szegvári, Katalin N.  119 n.83 Szerb, Antal  200 The History of Hungarian Literature 199 Színházi Élet (Theatre Life) (magazine)  200 Szira, Béla  199 Szirmai, Oszkárné  188 Szterényi, József  51 Tanácsköztársaság (Hungarian Soviet Republic) 19 Tarrow, Sidney  175 Thane, Pat  75 n.111, 249 n.64 Third International. See Comintern (Third International) Thönnessen, Werner  163 n.26 Time and Tide (periodical)  185, 212 n.23 The Times  37, 230 Tims, Margaret  113 n.7 Tisza, István  146 Tormay, Cécile  13, 52–3 An Outlaw’s Diary 52 Toye, Richard  75 n.111 transnational turn, in women’s history 22 n.9 Treaty of Neuilly (1919)  82, 87, 90, 91, 119 n.81 Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye (1919) 82 Treaty of Trianon (1920)  13, 18, 43, 82, 96, 119 n.87, 190, 196, 200 Treaty of Versailles (1919)  81–2, 91, 93, 106 Turrell, Helen  230 Tusan, Michelle  249 n.63 Twells, Alison  22 n.9 Tyrkova, Ariadna  129 Ukraine  4, 17, 89, 186 unicameral parliament, Finland  55–6

265

Union Nationale pour le Vote des Femmes 15 United German Communist Party  150 United States  62, 63, 80, 98, 111, 178, 186, 197, 201, 246 n.12 United States Food Administration (USFA)  203, 204 Vámbéry, Melanie  188, 214 n.43 Vázsonyi, Vilmos  51, 194 Vellacott, Jo  106, 110, 121 n.117 von Oertzen, Christine  23 n.19 von Stürgkh, Karl  146 Vorwärts (newspaper)  149 Vukov, Nikolai  19 Ward, Humphrey  32 Ware, Fabian  229, 232 Waring, P. A.  201 wartime violence, against civilians 26 n.58 Waters, Elizabeth  156 Weinhauer, Klaus  23 n.24, 170 n.127 Wernitznig, Dagmar  6, 27 n.68, 120 n.99, 188 White Terror  49, 86 Wilmers, Annika  93, 95, 113 n.7, 114 n.8 Wilson, Woodrow  3, 87, 204 Wiltsher, Anne  113 n.7 Winter, Jay  246 n.11 Wittman, Laura  246 n.12 Woker, Gertrud  238, 248 n.55 The Coming War of Poison Gas 238 A Hell of Poison and Fire 238 The Next War: A War of Poison Gas 238 Wollenberg, Erich  169 n.110 The Woman (A Nő) (periodical)  189–91, 215 nn.54, 60, 216 n.64 international news in  191–4 Woman’s Leader (periodical)  185 Woman’s Party (Britain)  38–40 Woman’s Peace Party (United States of America) 62 Woman Worker 207 Women’s Citizens Association (WCA) 38–40

266 Women’s Freedom League (WFL)  185, 192 Women’s International League (WIL) 38 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)  9, 14, 18, 19, 26 n.59, 80, 81, 86, 88–9, 94–5, 100, 103–7, 110–12, 114 n.9, 115 n.13, 116 n.33, 121 n.117, 144, 151, 177, 181, 188, 189, 216 n.64, 225, 236–40 International Conference on ‘Modern Methods of Warfare and the Protection of the Civil Population’ (1929) 239 Vienna Congress (1921)  14, 151 Zurich Congress (1919)  16, 106, 107, 115 n.13, 237 Women’s Journal (Nők Lapja) 189 Women’s Peace Society (Bulgaria)  88 Women’s Progressive Party (WPP)  128 Women’s Social Democratic Association (Finland) 58 Women’s Society of Finland  56 Woolf, Leonard  242 Woolf, Virginia  242

Index Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (Räte) (Germany) 90 World’s Young Women’s Christian Association (WYWCA)  108, 182, 212 n.19 World Center for Women’s Archives (United States of America)  63 Wurm, Emanuel  146 Wurm, Mathilde  146 Yorkshire Evening News (newspaper)  232 Yugoslavia  3, 18, 104, 186 Zegenhagen, Evelyn  242 Zetkin, Clara  10, 11, 131, 140–2, 146, 150, 153, 154, 156, 158, 163 n.26 Zhenotdels (women’s section) (Russia)  133–4, 147, 156 Ziemann, Benjamin  117 n.39, 125, 126, 143, 150, 171 n.137 Zietz, Luise  139–41, 146, 149, 166 n.68, 168 n.107 Zimmermann, Susan  213 n.31 Zimmerwald Peace Conference (Switzerland) 145 Zsupán, F. T.  213 n.31