6.2: Culture Struggles

First-Wave Feminism

Even as socialist parties were growing in size and strength, another political and cultural conflict raged: the emergence of feminism.  A helpful definition of feminism from the historians Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser’s A History of Their Own asserts that feminism consists of the claim that women are fully human, not secondary or inferior to men, that women have been oppressed throughout history, and that women must recognize their solidarity with other women in order to end that oppression and create a more just and equitable society.  Those claims go back centuries; perhaps the first distinctly feminist thinker in Western society was the Renaissance courtier Christine de Pizan (noted in the previous volume of this textbook), and later feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft explicitly linked the feminist demand for equality to the revolutionary promise of the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century.  It was not until the late nineteenth century, however, that a robust feminist movement emerged to champion women’s rights.

In the context of the Victorian era, most Europeans believed in the doctrine of gender relations known as “separate spheres.”  In separate spheres, it was argued that men and women each had useful and necessary roles to play in society, but those roles were distinct from one another.  The classic model of this concept was that the man’s job was to represent the family unit in public and make decisions that affected the family, while the woman’s job was to maintain order in the home and raise the children, albeit under the “veto” power of her husband.  The Code Napoleon, in Article 231, proclaimed that the husband owed his wife protection, and the wife owed her husband obedience.  Until the late nineteenth century, most legal systems officially classified women with children and the criminally insane in having no legal identity.

As of 1850, women across Europe could not vote, could not initiate divorce (in those countries in which divorce was even possible), could not control custody of children, could not pursue higher education, could not open bank accounts in their own name, could not maintain ownership of inherited property after marriage, could not initiate lawsuits or serve as legal witnesses, and could not maintain control of their own wages if working and married.  Everywhere, domestic violence against women (and children) was ubiquitous - it was taken for granted the the “man of the house” had the right to enforce his will with violence if he found it necessary, and the very concept of marital rape was nonexistent as well.  In sum, despite the claim by male socialists that the working class were the “wretched of the earth,” there is no question that male workers enjoyed vastly more legal rights than did women of any social class at the time.

What had changed since the dawn of the nineteenth century, however, was the growth of liberalism.  It was a short, logical step from making the claim that “all men are equal” to “all people are equal,” and indeed some women (like Wollstonecraft) had very vocally emphasized just that point in the early liberal movement in the era of the French Revolution.  By the late nineteenth century, liberal legal codes were present in some form in most of Europe, and after World War I all men won the vote in Britain, France, and Germany (along with most of the smaller countries in Central and Western Europe).  Thus, early feminists argued that their enfranchisement was simply the obvious, logical conclusion of the political evolution of their century.

Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century feminism is referred to by historians as “first-wave” feminism (there have been three “waves” so far).  Its defining characteristic was the battle against legally-mandated discrimination against women in terms of property laws, control over children within the family, and the right to vote.  Of all of the culture struggles and legal battles of the period, however, first-wave feminism faced the greatest opposition from those in power: men.  Biologists routinely claimed that women were simply physiologically less intelligent than men.  Women who, against the odds, had risen to positions of note were constantly attacked and belittled; one example is the inaugural address of a new female scientist at the University of Athens in the early 1900s, whose speech was interrupted by male students shouting “back to the kitchen!”  Queen Victoria herself once said that the demand for equal rights for women was “a mad, wicked folly…forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety.” 

In response, first-wave feminists argued that women were only “inferior” because of their inferior education.  If they were educated at the same level and to the same standards as men, they would be able to exercise their reason at the same level as well, and would hence deserve to be treated as full equals by the law.  As early as the French Revolution, some women had demanded equal rights for women as a logical outgrowth of the new, more just society under construction in the Revolution.  The most famous revolutionary feminist of French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges, was executed for daring to argue that things like "equality" and "liberty" obviously implied that men and women should be equals.  A century later, her vision remained unfulfilled.

One of first-wave feminism’s major goals was women’s suffrage: the right of women to vote.  In 1867 in Britain the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded.  Comparable movements spread across the continent over the next three decades.  The word “feminist” itself came about in 1890, after a French Suffrage activist, Hubertine Auclert, described herself as such (Auclert made a name for herself in part because she refused to pay taxes, arguing that since she was not represented politically, she had no obligation to contribute to the state).  Only in Finland and Norway, however, did women gain the vote before World War I.  In some cases, it took shockingly long for women to get the vote: France only granted it in 1944 as a concession to the allies who liberated the country from the Nazis, and it took Switzerland until 1971(!).

The struggle for the vote was closely aligned to other feminist campaigns.  In fact, it would be misleading to claim that first-wave feminism was primarily focused on suffrage, since suffrage itself was seen by feminists as only one component of what was needed to realize women’s equality.  An iconic example is the attitude of early feminists to marriage: for middle class women, marriage was a necessity, not a choice.  Working class women worked in terrible conditions just to survive, while the truly desperate were often driven to prostitution not because of a lack of morality on their part but because of brutal economic and legal conditions for unmarried poor women.  In turn, middle class women suffered the consequences when their husbands, succumbing to the temptation of prostitution, brought sexually transmitted diseases into the middle class home.  Women, feminists argued, needed economic independence, the ability to support themselves before marriage without loss of status or respectability, and the right to retain the property and earnings they brought to and accumulated during marriage.  Voting rights and the right to initiate divorce were thus “weapons of self defense” according to first wave feminists. 

After decades of campaigns by feminists, divorce became a possibility in countries like Britain and France in the late nineteenth century, but it remained difficult and expensive to secure.  For a woman to initiate divorce, she had to somehow have the means to hire a lawyer and navigate labyrinthine divorce laws; as a result, only the well-off could do so.  In other countries, like Russia, divorce remained illegal.  Much more common than legal separation was the practice of men simply abandoning their wives and families when they tired of them; this made the institutions of middle-class family life open to mockery by socialists, who, as did Marx and Engels, pointed out that marriage was nothing but a property contract that men could choose to abandon at will (the socialist attitude toward feminism, incidentally, was that gender divisions were byproducts of capitalism: once capitalism was eliminated, gender inequality would supposedly vanish as well).

Even as the feminist movement in Britain became focused on voting rights, feminists waged other battles as well.  In the 1870s and 1880s, British feminists led by Josephine Butler attacked the Contagious Diseases Act, which subjected prostitutes to mandatory gynecological inspections (but did not require the male clients of prostitutes to be examined), and drew the radical conclusion that prostitution was simply the most obvious example of a condition that applied to practically all women.  In marriage, after all, women exchanged sexual access to their bodies in return for their material existence.  Butler’s campaign weathered years of failure and scorn before finally triumphing: the Contagious Diseases Act was repealed and the age of consent for girls was raised from twelve(!) to sixteen.

The demand for the vote, however, was stymied by the fact that male politicians across the political spectrum refused to champion the issue, albeit for different reasons.  On the political right, the traditional view that women had no place in politics prevailed.  On the left, however, both liberal and socialist politicians were largely in support of women’s suffrage, at least in theory.  In practice, however, leftist politicians (falling prey to yet more sexist stereotypes) feared that women would vote for traditional conservatives because women “naturally” longed for the comfort and protection of tradition.  Thus, even nominally sympathetic male politicians repeatedly betrayed promises to push the issue forward in law.

While most feminists persisted in peaceful demands for reform, others were galvanized by these political betrayals and turned to militancy.  In Britain, the best known militant feminists were the Pankhursts: the mother Emmeline (1858 – 1928) and daughters Christabel and Sylvia, who formed a radical group known as the Suffragettes in 1903.  Much of the original membership came from the ranks of Lancashire textile workers before the group moved its headquarters to London in 1906.  The Pankhursts soon severed their links with the Labour Party and working class activists and began a campaign of direct action under the motto "deeds, not words".  By 1908 they had moved from heckling to stone-throwing and other forms of protest, including destroying paintings in museums and, on one occasion, attacking male politicians with horsewhips on a golf course.  In the meantime, both militant and non-militant feminists did succeed in making women’s suffrage a mainstream political issue: as many as 500,000 women and pro-feminist men gathered at one London rally in 1908.

Militant activists who staged public demonstrations were on several occasions treated brutally by police, and those who were arrested were subjected to coercive feeding when they went on hunger strikes.  That brutality led to more widespread public support for the Suffragettes, but there were still no legal changes forthcoming; even the British Liberal Party that had, on various occasions, claimed to support women’s suffrage always ended up putting it on the back-burner in parliament. In the most spectacular and tragic act of protest, a Suffragette named Emily Davison threw herself under the horse owned by the British king George V during the Derby (the hugely popular national horse race) of 1913 and was killed - in the aftermath it was discovered that she had stuffed her dress with pamphlets demanding the vote for women.

Somewhat ironically, given the importance of the suffrage movement, feminists secured other legal rights before they did the right to vote in the period before World War I.  By and large, women secured the right to enter universities by the early twentieth century and the first female academics secured teaching positions soon after - the first woman to hold a university post in France was the famous Marie Curie, whose work was instrumental in understanding radiation.  Women secured the right to initiate divorce in some countries even earlier, along with the right to control their own wages and property and to fight for the custody of children.  In short, thanks to feminist agitation, women had secured a legal identity and meaningful legal rights in at least some of the countries of Europe, and the United States, by the onset of World War I in 1914, but as mentioned above, only in two Scandinavian countries could they yet vote.

Modern antisemitism

The great irony of feminism - or, rather, the need for feminism - was that women were not a “minority” but nevertheless faced prejudice, violence, and legal restrictions.  European Jews, on the other hand, were a minority everywhere they lived.  Furthermore, because of their long, difficult, and often violent history facing persecution from the Christian majority, Jews faced a particularly virulent and deep-seated form of hatred from their non-Jewish neighbors.  That hatred, referred to as antisemitism (also spelled antisemitism), took on new characteristics in the modern era that, if anything, made it even more dangerous

Jews had been part of European society since the Roman Empire.  In the Middle Ages, Jews were frequently persecuted, expelled, or even massacred by the Christian majority around them.  Jews were accused of responsibility for the death of Christ, were blamed for plagues and famines, and were even thought to practice black magic.  In most regions, Jews were unable to own land, to marry Christians, or to practice trades besides sharecropping, peddling goods, and lending money (since Christians were banned from lending money at interest until the late Middle Ages, the stereotypes of Jewish greed originated with the fact that money-lending was one of the only trades Jews could perform).  Starting with the late period of the Enlightenment, however, some Jews were grudgingly "emancipated" legally, being allowed to move to Christian cities, own land, and practice professions they had been banned from in the past.

That legal emancipation was complete almost everywhere in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, although the most conservative states like Russia still maintained antisemitic restrictions.  Anti-Jewish hatred, however, did not vanish.  Instead, in the modern era, Jews were vilified for representing everything that was wrong with modernity itself.  Jews were blamed for urbanization, for the death of traditional industries, for the evils of modern capitalism, but also for the threat of modern socialism, for being anti-union and for being pro-union, for both assimilating to the point that “regular” Germans and Frenchmen and Czechs could no longer tell who was Jewish, and for failing to assimilate to the point that they were “really” the same as everyone else.  To modern antisemites, Jews were the scapegoat for all of the problems of the modern world itself.

At the same time, modern antisemitism was bound up with modern racial theories, including Darwinian evolutionary theory, its perverse offspring Social Darwinism, and the Eugenics movement which sought to purify the racial gene pool of Europe (and America).  Many theorists came to believe that Jews were not just a group of people who traced their ancestry back to the ancient kingdom of Judah, but were in fact a “race,” a group defined first and foremost by their blood, their genes, and by supposedly inexorable and inherent characteristics and traits.

Between vilification for the ills of modernity and the newfound obsession with race that swept across European and American societies in the late nineteenth century, there was ample fuel for the rise of antisemitic politics.  The term antisemitism itself was invented and popularized by German and Austrian politicians in the late nineteenth century – an antisemitic League emerged in Germany in the 1870s under the leadership of a politician named Wilhelm Marr.  Marr claimed that Jews had “without striking a blow” “become the socio-political dictator of Germany.”  In fact, Jews were about 1% of the German population and, while well-represented in business and academia, they had negligible political influence.  Following Marr’s efforts, other parties emerged over the course of the 1880s.

Parties whose major platform was antisemitism itself, however, faded from prominence in the 1890s.  The largest single victory won by antisemitic political parties in the German Empire was in 1893, consisting of only 2.9% of the vote.  Subsequently, however, mainstream right-wing parties adopted antisemitism as part of their platform.  Thus, even though parties that defined themselves solely by antisemitism diminished, anti-republican, militaristic, and strongly Christian-identified parties on the political right in France, Austria, and Germany soon started using antisemitic language as part of their overall rhetoric.

Along with the new, racist, version of antisemitism, the modern conspiracy theory of global Jewish influence was a distinctly modern phenomenon.  A Prussian pulp novelist named Hermann Goedsche published a novel in 1868 that included a completely fictional meeting of a shadowy conspiracy of Rabbis who vowed to seize global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through Jewish control of world banking.  That “Rabbi's Speech” was soon republished in various languages as if it had actually happened.  Better known was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document claiming to be the minutes from a meeting of international Jewish leaders that copied whole sections of Goedsche's “Speech” and combined them with various equally spurious accounts of Jewish political machinations.  The Protocols were first published in 1903 by the Russian secret police as justification for continued antisemitic restrictions in the Russian Empire, and they subsequently became important after World War I when they were used as “proof” that the Jews had caused the war in order to disrupt the international political order.

Another iconic moment in the history of antisemitism occurred in France in the 1890s, when a French Jewish military officer named Alfred Dreyfus was framed for espionage, stripped of his rank, and imprisoned.  An enormous public debate broke out in French society over Dreyfus's guilt or innocence which revolved around his identity as a French Jew.  “Anti-Dreyfusards” argued that no Jew could truly be a Frenchman and that Dreyfus, as a Jew, was inherently predisposed to lie and cheat, while “Dreyfusards” argued that anyone could be a true, legitimate French citizen, Jews included.  

In the end, the “Dreyfus Affair” culminated in Dreyfus’s exoneration and release, but not before antisemitism was elevated to one of the defining characteristics of anti-liberal, authoritarian right-wing politics in France.  Some educated European Jews concluded that the pursuit of not just legal equality, but cultural acceptance was doomed given the strength and virulence of antisemitism in European culture, and they started a new political movement to establish a Jewish homeland in the historical region of ancient Israel.  That movement, Zionism, saw a slow but growing migration of European Jews settling in the Levant, at the time still part of the Ottoman Empire.  Decades later, it culminated in the emergence of the modern state of Israel in 1948.