DISAPPOINTED REVOLUTIONARIES
‘Be patient, women’s rights are not important now. The most important problem is the success of the revolution.’30 In the midst of the 1848 revolution in the German lands, Kathinka Zitz-Halein (b.
1801), writer, democratic activist and president of the Humania Association for Patriotic Interests in Mainz, wrote these words to Sophie von Hatzfeldt, aristocrat and liberal supporter of the revolution in Dusseldorf. By contrast, Louise Dittmar (1807—84), radical liberal and ‘feminist’ was more outspoken in her advocacy of women’s rights and regarded the German revolution as an opportunity for women to claim equality. Both women were to be disappointed. Neither the gradualist optimism of Zitz-Halein or the more impatient stance of Dittmar was rewarded. The liberal revolution in the German lands failed; the liberals were defeated. And when the German lands were unified in 1871, it was under a constitutional monarchy which, although embodying some liberal and democratic principles, excluded women. Across revolutionary Europe it looked as if the French revolutionary experience was being repeated. Women’s participation in revolutionary movements was accepted, even welcomed in some quarters, but this did not signify a shift in attitudes towards the place of women in the political and civil spheres. In France the declaration of universal suffrage in 1848 explicitly excluded women. Moreover, the repression of women’s public political activity was even harsher than in 1793.Not only were women's clubs closed, but in France and Prussia their freedom of association and of speech was restricted. By 1851 the victory of the forces of counter-revolution appeared to be complete.
Yet, despite the disappointing outcome of the 1848 revolutions for liberal women, this period of political upheaval is seen by many as the starting point of the women’s movement in Europe.
In Italy and France, Germany and the lands of the Habsburg Empire, the combination ofwomen’s political awakening and their participation in the public sphere culminated in a realisation that only women themselves could articulate changes in society since liberal, democratic men were unlikely to do it on their behalf. AsJoan Scott has argued, ‘feminists dramatized their conviction that their place was in the public sphere by entering it.’31 Once more, women were acting like citizens without citizenship, but this time they were more politically adept and ideologically informed.The tactics and the positions adopted by women revolutionaries in 1848 were determined by the specific political and economic circumstances that had fuelled the revolutions in each state. In Italy and in the Habsburg Empire, a combination of foreign domination and conservative rule meant that nationalist sentiment influenced political debate. In the German lands, liberals and radicals combined a commitment to democratic government with a desire for national unification. For women, the struggle for national self-determination and liberal reform presented opportunities for both engagement with political debate and participation in a patriotic resurgence. Domestic tasks harnessed to the national struggle, such as knitting clothing for the revolutionary soldiers, became as important as writing political pamphlets and demonstrating on the streets. During 1848, women could become ‘patriotic mothers’, political activists or feminist writers. The opportunities for consciousness-raising were great. For women activists like Louise Otto- Peters in Germany and Jeanne Deroin (1805—94) in France, who later described herself as an ‘impulsive and reckless’ pioneer, the establishment of a new, representative political system was a chance not to be missed.
The 1848 revolutions were precipitated by urban unrest in response to harvest failure and food shortages, but the popular energy released by poverty and unemployment was soon harnessed by those demanding political reform.
In many respects, 1848 resembles a rerun of 1789, only on a wider European canvass. Women were prominent amongst the street protesters during the early days of political and economic unrest. In Stuttgart in 1847 the uprising started out as a protest against the city’s bakers who, it was alleged, were profiting from speculating on the rising price of bread. What started out as an attack with sticks and stones on the bakers' houses, ended as a full-blown political uprising as barricades were erected in response to the authorities' intervention on behalf of those under siege. Echoing women's stridency in France some decades earlier, the women of Stuttgart are said to have urged on their menfolk and harangued the soldiers, calling them cowards and Hosenscheiβer3 In Italy, hunger brought women on to the streets, but food protests soon turned into attacks on the representatives of the old regime and the foreign oppressors, with women unabashed about engaging in physical attacks on soldiers and joining the barricades. Women assumed they had a public, political role to play in the revolutionary uprisings. They attended political meetings, they formed their own political clubs and they began to reconceptualise their own position in the context of the new political conditions, establishing associations to promote women's education for instance and calling for women to be admitted to appropriate fields of employment. In France, a group of former Saint-Simonian women (followers of the social thinker Henri de Saint-Simon) formed the Club de l'Emancipation des Femmes (Club for the Emancipation of Women) in 1848 and published the first women's newspaper, La Voix des Femmes (Women’s Voice). In Germany, women in sympathy with the liberal revolutionaries such as Louise Otto-Peters, Malwida von Meysenburg (1816—1903) and Mathilde Franziska Anneke, began to use the Frauenχeiting (Women’s Journal} to discuss the relationship between the political events of the time and the position of women. After the defeat of the revolutionaries in Germany, women formed associations to support those in prison and in exile. These, like the Humania Association in Mainz, were not merely philanthropic welfare organisations. Whilst Kathinka Zitz-Halein, its founder, acknowledged this was an appropriate sphere for women's activity, at the same time she emphasised that, We must cease being just women and become entirely citizens and patriots.'33What was different about women's participation in the 1848 revolutions in contrast to France in 1789 was the nature of their demands and the maturity of their thought following several decades of political activity. In Italy, women had been involved in secret societies and salons; in the German states, religious organisations attached to the dissenting churches had given lay women a voice, along with newspapers and journals which published articles on the woman question. In France, alongside a revolutionary tradition which to some extent legitimised or at least familiarised women's public political action, there now existed a language of feminism which had emerged from the utopian socialist movement of the 1830s, the Saint-Simonians. The women associated with this movement including Pauline Roland (1805—52), Jeanne Deroin and Eugenie Niboyet (1800—83) and, to a lesser extent, Flora Tristan, published their own newspaper, La Femme Libre (The Free Woman), and went on to develop theories of women's emancipation which saw women's rights as part of a wider struggle for the rights of workers in general. Thus the woman question became part of the social question, instead of being bound to men's struggle for political rights. Women were not slow to realise that political upheaval and, specifically, the new republican and democratic impulses, offered them an opportunity to stake a claim to participation in political affairs. Whilst some, notably in France, demanded immediate enfranchisement, others adopted a more gradualist approach which built upon the identification of women as citizen-mothers.34
Supporters of women's rights adopted different strategies.
The direct and impulsive tactics of Deroin contrasted with the more evolutionary approach of the novelist George Sand. Sand (a pseudonym for Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant) was the most famous female writer of her day, a controversial figure known as much for her unconventional personal life (a separation from her husband, a series of affairs and a preference for male dress) as for her passionate and radical novels. As a republican and a socialist, she was a stalwart supporter of the Second French Republic, but the stability of the regime and its ability to deliver a new social order was, to Sand, the best guarantee of civil rights for women in the long term. ‘Should women participate in politics some day?' she asked, answering, ‘Yes, some day... but is this day near? No, I think not, and in order for women's condition to be transformed, society must be radically transformed.'35 In her opinion the new republic's priorities were the condition of working women, jobs and wages, education and marriage rather than political rights. For Sand, political equality was the culmination of women's progress, not the starting point. Intervening in what she called ‘male politics' was not the way ahead according to the French writer Marie d'Agoult (1805—76) who, like Sand, took a male pen name (Daniel Stern):Instead of... addressing simply and modestly the questions regarding the education of women of all classes, the careers that could be opened to women, the wages of working-class women, the authority of the mother in the family, the dignity of the wife... instead of progressing step by step with prudence as public opinion becomes more favourable, [feminists] acted very impoliticly; they noisily started political clubs that quickly became laughable.36
The year 1848, then, marks something of a turning point in the history of women's struggle for political and civil rights. More than fifty years after the first emancipatory claims made by Olympe de Gouge and Mary Wollstonecraft, the woman question had been reconfigured.
The majority of revolutionary women based their arguments for women's political rights on the belief in difference. In France in 1848, legislators made duty the prerequisite for citizenship and within this discourse women fulfilled their duty to the state as workers and as mothers. Maternity was considered by Jeanne Deroin and others as productive work, social labour. By moving away from the notion of the citizen as an abstract individual, legislators allowed the concept of the citizen to become socially differentiated to include proletarians and even women. In the words of Jeanne Deroin, ‘It is especially the holy function of motherhood, said to be incompatible with the rights of the citizen, that imposes on the woman the duty to watch over the future of her children and gives her the right to intervene, not only in all acts of civil life, but also in all acts of political life.'37 Deroin's position was that ‘childbearers were rights-bearers'.38 Hereafter, the idea that fulfilment of duties to the state entitled the individual to citizenship rights, informed the campaigns of those who argued for women's rights.The broadening of the discourse on citizenship in revolutionary Europe, prompted those who addressed the woman question to consider more than just political representation. Women's emancipation encompassed wider issues, such as the right to work, the value of women's reproductive and productive labour, women's economic independence, the condition of marriage. For the privileged Malwide von Meysenbug, the German revolution made her realise ‘the necessity for a woman to win economic independence through her own force'. Education was the key to providing an alternative to the ‘almost inevitable marriage'.39 In France the republican writer Marie d'Agoult proposed changes in women's legal status: ‘I want competent mothers, assiduous and thrifty homemakers — in short, strong women capable of policing the small state that they rule.' Legal equality, in d'Agoult's view, would result in marriages based on equality and harmony and better education would form better wives, mothers and housekeepers and better selves. ‘The time has come', she wrote, ‘for all those authorities in the life of a woman (father, husband, confessor, lover) who pass from one to the other their despotic sceptre, to be replaced by the only legitimate authority — that of reason.'40 Thus we see women beginning to argue for improvements in women's condition using the liberal republican discourse of duty. This involved a rejection of separate spheres in the Rousseauian mould, and later articulated by the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809—65) who equated sexual difference with different public functions, and ludicrously compared a female legislator with a male wet nurse. Feminists like Jeanne Deroin, Louise Otto-Peters, Louise Dittmar, and later, Hedwig Dohm (1831—1919), did not deny that men and women were different, but they argued that difference was a consequence of social conditioning and organisation. Separate spheres implied a hierarchy of the sexes and their social functions; the alter native was predicated upon equal value and women's functions and duties were pre-requisites for citizenship just as men's were. In a ripost to Proudhon's comment on male wet nurses, Hedwig Dohm rejected biological difference as the basis for discrimination in her typically forthright style: ‘Because women bear children they are to have no political rights, and if I say, because men do not bear children they shall have no political rights, I see no reason why the one remark should not be considered as profound as the other.'41
From a conventional political perspective of left versus right, the 1848 revolutions failed — conservative governments reasserted themselves — and it would seem at first sight that the revolutions failed women too. In France and in Germany, women's political activities were suppressed and in several German states new laws of association prohibited women from forming or even joining political organisations. Yet, from the perspective of women's history it is clear that the revolutionary circumstances presented women with a space in which to articulate their conviction that they should be included in the new democracies. Even in the dark days of the reaction, feminists maintained their commitment. In 1851, Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland appealed to the women of America from their Paris prison, where they were detained following their arrest for contravening the law banning women's political association. Their tone is defiant, their message unchanged:
Sisters of America! your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of the right of woman to civil and political equality. We have, moreover, the profound conviction that only by the power of association based on solidarity — by the union of the working classes of both sexes to organise labour — can be acquired, completely and pacifically, the civil and political equality of woman, and the social right for all.42