From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume IV: Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century
496
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume IV: Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century
496eBook
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Overview
In the twentieth century, women became a force for change, in part through suffrage, and in part through mass organizing. This final volume of Marilyn French’s wide-ranging survey offers a vibrant history of multiple political revolutions as well as the century’s horrors—including genocides and the atom bomb. It ends with a thoughtful investigation into the various indigenous feminist movements throughout the world and asks what these peaceful revolutions might augur for the future.
Eschewing easy answers, French suggests that the defining moral moments of the twenty-first century should, and will, build from a global human rights agenda.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558616288 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2019 |
| Series: | Origins , #4 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Sales rank: | 638,984 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Marilyn French was a novelist and feminist. Her books include The Women’s Room, which has been translated into twenty languages; From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World; A Season in Hell; Her Mother’s Daughter; Our Father; My Summer with George; and The Bleeding Heart. She died in 2009.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SOCIALISM IN EUROPE
The first enduring socialist groups were formed in the 1860s and 1870s by the International Workingman's Association or the First International (1864–76). They were initially dominated by conservative artisans hostile to women's independence through paid work or political rights, men who wanted to return to the traditional households or guilds they controlled. More regressive than progressive, their socialism was less a vision of exploitation and community than an awareness that industrialization was making them obsolete. They wanted to stop factory owners from simplifying and dividing tasks so they could be performed by unskilled workers paid minimal wages. But industrialization could not be stopped and, as it spread, unskilled workers and landless farmers were drawn to Marx's vision of collective struggle. Abandoning nostalgia for the past, most of them took Marxist positions and accepted the idea of female equality promoted by Marxist intellectuals. Soon they and Marx dominated the movement.
The triumph of Marxist thinking in socialist parties in the latter nineteenth century gave women's rights issues theoretical legitimacy, but by the time conservative socialists were defeated, the socialist project had already been defined. Marx envisioned capitalism as a dynamic system allowing social change so radical that the powerless could become the authors of history. But his ideas triumphed after women had been defeated in the socialist movement, after organized labor had re-established patriarchal priorities. Despite some strong efforts to emancipate women, socialism failed women in the end.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw women as human and as oppressed, and they advocated their political rights and economic independence. But while Marx was aware of the importance of reproduction, he never thought about how women were to go on taking sole responsibility for it and still be productive citizens. Neither Marx nor Engels seemed aware of the work and time required to rear children and maintain families, the crushing difficulty of combining these tasks with paid work; neither seemed to notice what wives, daughters, and other servants actually did all day. Their failure to address the hardship of reproduction and family maintenance set a precedent for later socialists to dismiss them as nonwork.
Marx concentrated on the "masculine" — capitalist power and strategies for overthrowing capitalism. His focus validated that of later socialists, who were already drenched in disdain for "feminine" aspects of life. Their contempt extended beyond women to all human life, because scorn for women means scorn for the essential, the "necessary." From its inception, socialism was penetrated by disdain for the areas of life associated with the feminine.
The socialist dream failed partly because of male indifference to the necessary, the realm to which women are consigned. Socialist men avowed principles of equality, yet denigrated feminism and treated sexual equality as secondary. To attract men, they were willing to sacrifice women. Yet socialist parties that ignored women failed, and separate women's groups were not formed until the Second International, from 1889 to 1914. Repressive laws forced the German party to create a separate women's organization. The men had no premonition that this group would help it become the largest and most radical socialist party in the world.
Nationalism, not democracy, spurred the 1848 revolutions. Foreigners ruled middle-European and Italian states; Germany was a set of small confederated states with a common language until 1871, when Bismarck unified it under Prussian rule. Most German states, especially Prussia, had authoritarian political and moral systems lacking any conception of rights. In such a climate, women faced even greater obstacles than in England and the United States. When the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) was founded in 1875, it advocated the vote for all citizens. Some thought this phrase included women, but when August Bebel proposed adding "citizens of both sexes" (women were not citizens in all German states), the party voted it down. In 1878 Germany passed antisocialist laws, forcing the party underground until 1890.
In 1889 Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) addressed the founding congress of the Second International in Paris. Her speech set the standard for socialists' attitudes toward women. Building on Engels' and Bebel's analyses, Zetkin assumed that socialists must support feminist struggles. Since working-class women were slaves to both capitalists and working-class men, she rejected collaborating with bourgeois feminists, who shared capitalist men's class interests. Rather, she insisted that work which permitted economic independence was the necessary basis of full emancipation for socialist women. When the party was legalized in 1890, its make-up changed. Industrial growth had created a larger proletariat open to socialist ideas. Unions grew, and by 1911 over a quarter of a million German women bakers, butchers, glaziers, woodworkers, leather workers, lithographers, metalworkers, and saddlers, among others, had joined unions. Bebel and Engels were widely read; Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Karl Kautsky (followers of Marx and Engels) were its new leaders, and Zetkin was prominent. The 1891 SPD Congress at Erfurt voted for universal adult suffrage and for the abolition of sexually discriminatory laws. The "Erfurt Program" became a key text for socialists everywhere.
Zetkin demanded separate groups as necessary for women; the SPD wanted women in its ranks, mainly to keep them from undermining men. Since the law in many German provinces barred women from political activity, limiting them to "nonpolitical" groups, the party ruled in 1890 that women could elect their own delegates to party conferences at special women's meetings. Circumvention of the law, rather than commitment to women or brilliant strategic insight, led the SPD to create a separate women's organization — the key to success for the German socialist women's movement. In their own group, women could speak and act publicly, without fearing male disapproval or mockery. Ottilie Baader (1847–1925), the "central Spokesperson" for "women comrades," headed 407 spokeswomen in the party hierarchy in 1908. By 1914 the SPD had 174,751 female members (twice the total membership of the French Socialist Party); 112,000 subscribed to the party women's paper, Die Gleichheit (Equality), edited by Zetkin. The German socialist women's movement was the largest political women's group in Europe between 1890 and 1914, and the standard for others.
By 1896 Zetkin had changed her mind about "bourgeois" feminism. Deciding it was "completely justified," she stopped criticizing it, but still insisted that suffrage was only a first step in the emancipation of working-class women. When Germany repealed laws barring women from joining political parties in 1908, the SPD dissolved its separate women's hierarchy. Zetkin objected so strenuously that the male leaders compromised, keeping the women's bureau but making it subordinate to the national party executive. Bypassing Zetkin and Baader, they appointed the younger, less-known Luise Zietz as the women's representative on the executive, perhaps imagining she would be more deferential to their authority on women's issues.
Legalization legitimated women's participation: within a year, women's party membership doubled to over 62,000, nearly 10 percent of the SPD. Among themselves, women were able to develop political skills, and they formed a nucleus to embrace the hosts of new recruits who were now joining legally. At Zetkin's suggestion, the 1910 International Socialist Congress designated March 8 as International Women's Day; after 1911, German and Austrian women mounted major demonstrations on that day, giving visibility to the socialist women's movement. When the First World War erupted in 1914, 16.1 percent of registered party members were women. Zetkin opposed the war as a capitalist struggle pitting working-class men against each other and wrote an essay exhorting socialist women to fight for peace: "When the men kill, it is up to us women to fight for the preservation of life. When the men are silent, it is our duty to raise our voices on behalf of our ideals." Early in 1915 Louise Saumoneau of France and socialist women in other countries clandestinely distributed Zetkin's essay. But the main opponent of war, the figure who towers over all others in this period of German history, was neither German nor a feminist: Rosa Luxemburg.
Poland and Rosa Luxemburg
She was born Rozalia Luksenburg in 1870 in Zamosc, Poland. At five, Rosa was diagnosed as having a tubercular hip, put into a cast, and kept in bed for a year. Afterward, one leg was shorter than the other; years of painful treatments left her with a severe limp, unable to run or jump, and scorned by other children. She started school at ten, an ungainly Jew craving assimilation in a school system that took Jews by quota and persecuted them in countless ways. She protected herself by adopting an arrogant, assured facade. When she was twelve, a pogrom erupted in Warsaw. A mob marched from the Church of the Holy Cross to Jewish neighborhoods, including the Luksenburgs', smashing windows, hurling stones, breaking into houses, and looting. Terror of mobs never left her, and she retreated into literature, mainly the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish idealist who urged the destruction of a decayed world and the creation of one that would ease human suffering.
Most Polish girls were not educated: the daughters of aristocrats, rich landowners, and the intelligentsia went to expensive private girls' schools that were closed to Jews. Only boys attending Russian state gymnasia were exempted from the draft and eligible for university. In 1879, teaching in Polish was outlawed and it was declared a foreign language. Poles taught their literature and history underground, and repression backfired as young students receptive to patriotic fervor became rebels with their teachers' and their families' blessing.
Luxemburg did well academically and learned to control her limp and facial expressions; her mother designed her clothes to conceal her physical disproportion (her upper body was larger than her lower). By sixteen, she had found others in underground circles who were inspired by Mickiewicz and by social and economic works smuggled into Poland, often from Russia. She experienced the joy of political argument about the Catholic Church, Darwin, materialism and idealism, revolution and socialism. After graduating from the gymnasium at seventeen, she joined an illegal socialist group dedicated to building a workers' party and became a governess. No institutions of higher learning in Poland accepted women, so she applied for a passport and headed for further schooling in Switzerland — a country that swarmed with radical Polish students and offered political freedom.
Luxemburg was raised on a diet of revolution. She was eleven in 1881 when Sofia Perovskaia and Alexander Zheljabov were hanged for assassinating the tsar, and thirteen when Aleksandra Jentys was imprisoned with Ludwik Warynski, who had founded the first Polish workers' party, the Proletariat. This pair inspired all young rebels: the beautiful, intelligent, elegant, cultivated Jentys had taught by day in the exclusive Institute for Girls of Noble Birth and plotted at night with her married lover, Warynski. From 1883 to 1885 they were held in the notorious Tenth Pavilion in the Warsaw Citadel, then exiled to Russia. When Luxemburg was fifteen, Maria Bohuszewicz and Rosalia Felsenhard were jailed in the same place. A Polish aristocrat, Bohuszewicz was head of the Proletariat's Central Committee at nineteen. Felsenhard, the daughter of a Jewish doctor and Bohuszewicz's friend and collaborator, courageously saved thirty pupils from a fanatical mob invading her classroom during an 1881 pogrom. Luxemburg was seventeen when both died en route to Siberian exile, still in their early twenties.
With many of their men in prison or Siberian exile or killed in insurrections, elite Polish women often managed landed estates as well as their children's education. Women's equality with men was a fact of daily life, in conspiracies, on the battlefield, and at home. Polish Jewish women had been liberated even earlier, ironically by their marginality. Polish culture exalted Christian women; Jewish culture ignored women, who escaped the constrictions of patriarchal families because no one paid attention to them. After the seventeenth century, they owned businesses and taverns, traded in liquor and fabrics, and acted as matchmakers and go-betweens. In the 1830s they worked as bankers and merchants in Warsaw. They lacked prestige, regarded merely as rich Jews.
Luxemburg recoiled from identification with unassimilated Jews, scorning their dress, language (Yiddish), and ignorance, and associating them with Jewishness itself. Like a gentile anti-Semite, she slurred practicing Jews. She had deep connections with women, but shrank from identification with women like her mother — agreeable housewives. She wanted to escape being stereotyped; she wanted love, a home, a child, respect, acceptance as a Pole, and work for a cause. But no woman escapes her sex: Luxemburg was sexually slandered and belittled, like all women in the public eye. Her world saw her as a Jew with no roots, no tradition, no country.
Luxemburg joined a large Polish contingent in Zurich in early 1889. Polish men could not attend Russian universities unless they were politically acquiescent, and women were not accepted at all, so the entire Polish intelligentsia flocked to Zurich, where they formed a Union of Polish Students and a Polish National Museum. German and Austrian socialists also developed their theories in this safe haven — Liebknecht, Eduard Bernstein, Bebel, and Kautsky planned the SDP in Zurich. The German socialist club Eintracht had a good library, reading room, and lecture hall.
Rosa knew she was starting a new life: when she registered with the authorities, she spelled her name Luxemburg for the first time (and ever after). Through her German exile landlord, she met members of the German Social Democratic press and learned about political journalism. Enrolled in zoology courses, still unsure of her future career, she met Leo Jogiches in the fall of 1890. Jogiches had been born in 1867 in Lithuania, a land isolated from Europe by thick forests, moors, and swamps. When Poland was partitioned in the 1790s, Lithuania became part of Russia, which suppressed its language and culture. An underground movement arose, centered in the university at Wilno (where Mickiewicz had founded a secret student society). In 1847 Lithuanian Jews opened a rabbinical seminary in Wilno, and the city became the most important seat of Jewish learning in the world (it was annihilated by the Nazis). Russia focused Russification on Jews, because of their vulnerability, leading Christian Lithuanians to condemn them as double traitors — to Christ and also to Poland.
Despite pogroms, at the end of the nineteenth century Jews made up over 40 percent of Wilno's population. Jogiches, the youngest son in a rich, cultivated, assimilated Wilno Jewish family, was sullen and withdrawn, deeply connected to his musician mother. Considering money-making exploitation, he left school, apprenticed himself to a locksmith, and agitated among Jewish workers. Like Luxemburg, he did not consider himself Jewish and scorned unassimilated Jews and their Yiddish. He dealt almost entirely with Jewish workers not because of any feeling of kinship but because most workers were Jewish. Despite his contempt for Yiddish, he learned it so he could communicate with workers who spoke nothing else.
When Luxemburg met him, Jogiches was famous for his dedication and organizational skill, and infamous for his tyrannical behavior. He impressed her with his knowledge of political reality — she had been exposed only to theory and discussion — and she changed her field of study to economics, law, and philosophy. He began to study evolutionary theory, for Darwin's ideas were transforming European thought. They became secret lovers and remained connected, living together or in contact by mail, for the rest of her life. They planned a political platform: Luxemburg had long wanted to form an antinationalist Polish socialist party (she never comprehended the force of Polish nationalism) and, in 1893, they founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) and a journal, Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers' Cause). In her first public speech at the Congress of the Second International, Luxemburg asked recognition for the SDKP, impressing members with her brilliance and vitality — a noteworthy socialist at twenty-three.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume 4"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Marilyn French.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Margaret Atwood,
Introduction,
Part One: The Twentieth Century — Revolution,
Chapter 1: Socialism in Europe,
Chapter 2: Revolution in Russia,
Chapter 3: Revolution in China,
Chapter 4: Fascist Revolution in Germany and Italy,
Chapter 5: Anti-Imperial Revolution in Latin America,
Chapter 6: Anti-Imperial Revolution in India,
Chapter 7: Anti-Imperial Revolution in Algeria,
Chapter 8: Anti-Imperial Revolution In Africa,
Chapter 9: Women and Development,
Part Two: The Twenty-First Century — Dawn,
Chapter 10: The History of Feminism,
Chapter 11: The Political Is Personal, the Personal Is Political,
Chapter 12: The Future of Feminism,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Maps:,
Possessions of European Powers in Africa,
Map of the World: Peters Projection,