Despite its title this book covers the history of German feminism from its organisational beginnings in 1865 to its eventual suppression by the Nazis in 1933. The 19th century in Germany was a period of social and political upheaval and Evans is careful to set his history against this background.
After the defeat of the 1848 bourgeois revolution, Prussia slowly came to dominate Germany. This enforced unification brought not Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, but the repressive regime of the Junkers (landowners) who ruled through the bureaucracy, army and church. Within this society, women were denied the right to vote, to own property, to go to university or even to attend political meetings, let alone join parties.
Evans, quite correctly, roots the development of German feminism in the fight of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women to gain these rights. Their ideologues were the bourgeois radicals, in particular John Stuart Mill, who demanded equality for women as the final step in the creation of a perfect laissez-faire society. In 1865, the feminists founded the General German Women’s Association with Louise Otto-Peters, a staunch Liberal, as President. This organisation, rather than agitating for full and equal rights, restricted itself to petitioning the Reichstag and doing charitable and welfare work.
It is in dealing with the latter part of the century, particularly the last two decades, that the major weakness of Evans’ work becomes glaringly apparent. What is missing is any comparison between the politics and programmes of the feminist movement and those of the rapidly growing working class women’s movement. The latter, the core of which was the female membership of the German Social Democracy (SPD), fought, often against the bitter opposition of their ‘enemy sisters’, for a programme for working class women. Central to this were the demands for women’s right to work, equal pay and protective legislation for women.
Unlike the feminists, Clara Zetkin and her comrades (a high proportion of whom were to split from the SPD after its traitorous support for the First World War) clearly understood that the emancipation of women was inextricably bound up with the fight for the socialist revolution. It was this position which had led them into direct opposition to the ‘all-class’ German women’s movement.
The question of protective legislation was one of the key differences between the two movements in the early 1890s. The socialists recognised that women were the weakest and most exploited section of the working class and called for protective legislation whose standards could then be applied to all workers. For socialists to oppose this would have been to accept the additional exploitation of women in the name of so-called ‘equality’. It was also a key demand with which to confront the capitalists and to win over the male working class to women’s demands. The feminists, however, rejected it since it threatened their feminist demands for full equality with men. Their ideology would not permit any admission that women were weaker than men. In addition they were not prepared to support the struggles of working class women with whom they were often in competition for certain white-collar jobs. Finally the bulk of the feminist movement was not prepared to enter into direct confrontation with capital. For the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women of the feminist movement, the exploitation of working class women ranked in much the same order of importance as the beating of a dog. In 1908, for example, the paper Women’s Suffrage proclaimed itself opposed to, ‘the exploitation of the economically and physically weak, it takes pity on children and tormented animals, it makes laws against cruelty to animals and the exploitation of their working strength to exhaustion’.
Taking up the struggle for the vote, the feminist movement formed the Suffrage Union and launched into the political arena. In the 1903 elections they were solidly behind the Liberal Party, although this party did not support their right to vote. Only the SPD took up this demand and launched a massive electoral campaign around it. This feminist support for the Liberals was not, however, the straightforward expression of class interest it seems. As the left wing of liberal bourgeois revolution they were limited to struggling for the advances that the lost bourgeois revolution should have given them. Subsequently, with the repeal of the repressive Law of Association, which forbade women to enter politics, feminists flocked into the Liberal Party.
The left wing of the feminist movement also expressed itself in the ‘New Morality’. This movement, taking as its basic ideology the free expression of the individual self, campaigned for the extension of contraception and abortion and for marriage based on sexual love. One wing of this current turned to the glorification of motherhood, founding homes for unmarried mothers, but with heavy racialist undertones. For example, they thought of setting up communes of unmarried mothers which would only let ‘healthy’ women participate. Gradually the feminist movement moved further and further to the right. During the First World War all feminist support inside Germany ceased, with only a small group abroad arguing pacifist ideas. From then on the movement shrunk until its final suppression in 1933.
Evans’ book, despite its limitations, is useful if read in conjunction with Werner Thonnessen’s book ‘The Emancipation of Women — The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German Social Democracy‘, Pluto Press 1975. The latter deals solely with the socialist women’s movement. If the two books are read together a fairly clear picture of the early years of the women’s movement and its relation to the working class emerges. A picture that has many relevant lessons for us today. Neither book, however, deals with the work of Zetkin and others in continuing to develop a strategy for communist work amongst women within the KPD and the Third International prior to its degeneration with the triumph of Stalinism. A history of this has still to be written. It is badly needed.
