From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume IV

Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century

Marilyn French

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781558615847
• eBook ISBN: 9781558616288
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The conclusion of the "remarkable" four-volume history by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Women's Room ( Publishers Weekly).
 
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.

PART ONE

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY–REVOLUTION

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, EVERYTHING EXPLODED. The workers’ struggle reached proportions that frightened the elite into severe repression and, finally, world war. The subtext of two world wars and a host of smaller ones was conflict over rights between the privileged and the underprivileged. Although this study is written in sympathy with the underprivileged (women as a caste were the first humans to be denied rights, regardless of the women of the elite, who might have some privileges but no rights), the fight was also a struggle between fascists and communists in which neither side was blameless or pure. But the entire century was ripped by this struggle, whether as war or conflict, in one part of the globe or another. The underprivileged won some battles, but the privileged have won the war—so far. The “new” global economy is a triumph of the elite, in the form of corporations, which now surpass nation-states in wealth and power.

The twenty-first-century elite may not be descended in blood from the nineteenth-century elite (although surely some members are), but it is just as privileged, despite the existence of many “democracies.” The communist dream of the withering away of the state was really a dream of a vanishing elite, and the first act of communist leaders was always to fortify themselves as an elite. The dream of African revolutionaries focused on African leaders who would not exploit the people, but, with few exceptions, the new leaders not only exploited the people but robbed them blind. Democracy is supposed to be a guard against elitism, but it grew in elitist soil. It must constantly fight against its own foundation—patriarchy—which is an assertion of the most basic elitism, men over women.

The aggressive expansion of European states after the sixteenth century succeeded at a huge cost to life and well-being for humans and animals alike. It enriched and empowered a white male elite. Exploiting its colonies, the West (Western Europe and the United States) spread its culture across the globe and drained formerly self-sufficient societies. By the late nineteenth century, ancient “Third World” societies were prostrate before Western ships, guns, and ideas. Britain dominated most of the globe. The men who controlled technology and the wealth it reaped ruled not only their own countries but distant colonies as well—literally, the world. This new class, descendants of men who seized power in earlier insurgencies, joined by men who got rich in industry, exploited their subjects impartially. Most humans lacked rights.

Imperialist powers, aware of their colonies’ resentment, relied on force to maintain a supremacy that was often the main reward for their effort—the costs of colonization could exceed its profits. Domination always destroys the dominator. Revolt begins at the moment of victory: however helpless and inferior dominated people may feel, they hate and wait (like Catherine de Medici), simmering with resentment and rebelliousness until they can expel the dominator. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Third World colonized peoples and First World working classes rose up en masse. Most wars of this period were uprisings by nations or groups demanding rights or independence.

The twentieth century was convulsed by revolutions, genocides, and civil wars unparalleled in ferocity and scale. Technological developments—airplanes, submarines, rockets, tanks, and nuclear weapons—made the wars of this century more murderous than earlier conflicts, wider and more indiscriminate. Its two major wars, the First and Second World Wars, were not revolutions. No one has satisfactorily explained the first, and the second is seen as a war to halt German expansion, yet both were desperate attempts to divert and refocus the class and sex struggle.¹ Most uprisings of the century were won by the rebels, through war, passive resistance, or negotiation, yet change proved elusive.

No war succeeded in ending oppression. Former colonizers retain their power under new guises, and most indigenous governments have become oppressive kleptocratic cliques or have been forced by external pressure into attenuated war (as Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Uganda were for many years). The stirring rhetoric of revolution disguises the fact that war is always a struggle for power and that the moral change always expected to follow victory cannot occur in a culture concerned primarily with power. Moral revolution, which changes values, cannot be violent, yet it is hard to achieve peacefully. The enduring changes won in the past century resulted mostly from peaceful movements by unions, black civil rights workers, and feminists. These changes modified the status quo and did not revolutionize society. Third World revolutions won independence for some states, but the economic hardship and power struggles among classes, peoples, and sexes still continue.

Women, at the bottom of every class, oppressed and discriminated against under the old system, remain so in the new. No revolutionary struggle, no matter how vocal its commitment to sexual equality, actually achieved it; no matter how strongly revolutionary leaders advocated women’s rights before or during armed conflict, none accepted women as equals once it was won. Women’s experience in struggle had local particularities, but men’s treatment of women as a caste after the struggle is over is strikingly similar from nation to nation. Part One examines women’s experience in three kinds of revolution—socialist, fascist, and nationalist.

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.¹

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 1914.² 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.³ 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.⁴

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: The Twentieth Century—Revolution
• Part Two: The Twenty-First Century—Dawn
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index