Rosika Schwimmer: A Feminist with Many Facets

European Diary, 3.8.2021: 73 years ago today, Rosika Schwimmer died in New York

by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

Today, the term “feminism” can no longer be explained in one sentence, let alone translated with a single term. Feminism today means a complex pool of currents of socio-political concerns and agendas. Thus, the current discourse speaks of feminisms, not feminism – and the respective interpretations and functions of contemporary feminisms are shaped by questions about the respective socially conditioned specific dimensions of natural or constructed, social and ethnic gender.

Rosika Schwimmer, born into a Jewish family in Budapest on September 11, 1877, could hardly have imagined such a differentiation, even as one of the most prominent women’s rights activists of her time. But she was a surprisingly modern feminist. She was not only concerned with women’s rights, but with the rights of all. She vehemently opposed child labor and fought for world peace.

Rosika Schwimmer did not conform to the norm of a woman of her time. After a year of marriage, she divorced. Most likely she was lesbian, but disciplined her sexuality with morphine. She was stubborn, opinionated, dominant, dynamic – a fighter. In 1897 she founded the Association of Female Office Workers, in 1903 the first Hungarian Women Workers’ Association, and finally in 1904 the Association of Hungarian Feminists. Rosika Schwimmer also did not conform to the female ideal of beauty, nor did she follow the dress code of her time. She tended to be corpulent, wore a bun, pince-nez and – no corset. By the standards of the time, she did not act in a “typically feminine” way, but rather in a “typically masculine” way. As a campaigner for economic, social and political equality, she earned a reputation as a leading advocate of women’s rights in Hungary.

When Schwimmer first arrived in the United States in 1914, she was welcomed with open arms. The Jewish press gushed with euphoria over “Hungary’s great Jewess, darling of women’s rights activists in Europe and America.” Fifteen years later, the right-wing press overflowed with hatred against her. Sometimes she was accused of being a spy for the Germans, sometimes of being one for the Bolsheviks, but above all, “far more dangerous,” of being an “agent of the political-economic movement of Jewry.” By this time, she no longer had any support in the American Jewish community.

For Rosika Schwimmer’s “Peace Ship Expedition” in 1915 had made her even better known internationally as a pacifist than she already was as a feminist. Together with Louis Lochner, she persuaded automobile tycoon Henry Ford to send an amateur diplomatic mission to Europe to broker an end to the First World War. But the mission, widely derided by the press, was unsurprisingly unsuccessful. In this context, American Jews distanced themselves from Schwimmer, accusing her of fomenting Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign during the short-lived, yet highly publicized Peace Ship Expedition. The campaign was no slip; Ford repeatedly engaged in anti-Semitic publicity. During the Nuremberg trial, the Reichsjugendführer of the NSDAP, the Viennese Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter Baldur von Schirach was to declare: “The decisive anti-Semitic book that I read at that time and the book that influenced my comrades […] was the book by Henry Ford The International Jew. I read it and became an anti-Semite.” No wonder, then, that many co-religionists considered her a traitor. In 1919, Schwimmer briefly became Hungarian ambassador to Switzerland, but soon after she had to flee Budapest to Vienna to escape the White Terror and emigrated to the United States, where the consistent pacifist was denied naturalization.

From today’s perspective, Rosika Schwimmer operated on the left fringe of the pacifist and feminist movements. In the service of the good cause she was not very squeamish and instrumentalized whom she could instrumentalize. Her uncompromising attitude made her a challenged outsider in a war-driven world of isms and anti-isms where racism, chauvinism, anti-communism, anti-feminism, and anti-Semitism were commonplace.

But she experienced satisfaction: shortly before Schwimmer died stateless in New York in 1948, she had been chosen as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. She could not have known that, basically only 20 years later, her feminist activism would be taken up again in the West and that the new women’s movement would stand up stronger than ever to the asymmetrical gender relations in family, society, politics and religion.

Louise Weiss: Chairwoman by seniority

European Diary, 26.5.2021: Today, the main building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg is named after her. 38 years ago today, Louise Weiss died in Paris.
Born in Arras in 1893, her parents – her mother Jewish, her father Protestant – came from Alsace. Already during the First World War, which was fought between France and the German Reich not least symbolically over Alsace-Lorraine, Louise Weiss – working as a war nurse – began to write under a pseudonym. Many more novels, plays and political writings were to follow, for example about the newly founded Czechoslovakia, to which Weiss was also particularly attached in private relationships. After 1945 she also became known for her documentary films and literary accounts of her travels to Japan, China, India and Vietnam, Kenya and Madagascar, Alaska and the Middle East. Her art and ethnographic collection is now housed in the Chateau de Rohan in Saverne, Alsace.
In 1918, at just 25 years of age, she already founded the magazine L’Europe Nouvelle, in which she promoted Franco-German understanding and the unification of Europe. Its authors included Thomas Mann, Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann and Rudolf Breitscheid. In 1930, she founded the École de la Paix, a private institute for international relations – whose dreams were for the time being dashed in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power in Germany. In 1934, Louise Weiss therefore concentrated on another social struggle, the fight for women’s suffrage. Together with Cécile Brunsvig, she founded the association La femme nouvelle; their campaigns caused a public sensation, not only when they chained themselves to a lamppost in Paris with other suffragettes. Their complaint to the French Council of State, the Conseil d’Etat, was unsuccessful. It would be another ten years before women’s suffrage was introduced in France. At this time, Louise Weiss was active in the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers and the French Vichy regime. In 1945, she founded an institute for war and conflict research in London with Gaston Bouthoul. She was denied admission to the Académie Francaise as late as 1975. It was not until 1980 that Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman to be admitted to this elite circle, which had previously been reserved for men.

In 1979, Louise Weiss was elected as a French MEP for the Gaullists in the first direct elections to the European Parliament. And she was its first “chairwoman by seniority” until her death in 1983. Strangely enough, she does not appear in the many celebrations of the “founding fathers” of Europe. But then, she was not a “father”.

Escape the Corset!

Installation Escape the Corset!. Photo: Dietmar Walser

While in the wake of the French Revolution, equality for male citizens was met in Europe with acceptance, the emancipation of women had not been among the goals of those championing liberty, equality, and fraternity. Only around 1900, an international feminist movement began to emerge.

< Stamp on the occasion of the 1913 Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, © Jewish Museum Hohenems > Promotion of Orbán’s “family protection action plan,” 2019, © Gábor Ligeti

In 1912, Schwimmer wrote: “Although as wife, the Hungarian woman is in a much more advantageous position than the German, English, Dutch, etc., the mother in Hungary is subjected to the same laws of illogic, injustice, and cruelty that govern almost all of human society. Poetry and prose exalt motherhood, depict her as a type of earth mother. Yet, outside of these lofty regions, the mother, married or unmarried, is the carrier of the crown of thorns.” More than one hundred years later, her analysis is once again applicable. Following revolution and counterrevolution, Hungary is once more characterized by emigration and sealing-off against anything “alien” as well as by the dismantlement of democracy. In the spring of 2019, Viktor Orbán initiated a new family policy to combat the low birthrate: young Hungarian married women with several children would receive generous financial support. “Family policy” is intended to ward off the supposedly impending Überfremdung (excessive influx of foreigners). However, in the course of the campaign, the government had committed an embarrassing blunder: already long before this family-planning campaign, the “couple” depicted on an agency’s stock photograph had been circulating the internet in other versions under the slogan “distracted boyfriend” as a so-called “meme” to illustrate infidelity.

Andrea Petö (Vienna) about women’s rights, gender studies and Corona: