Conclusion: Inside and Outside the Contact Zones of Transnational Women’s Movements of the West

Abstract

This concluding chapter uses a short text by Rosika Schwimmer, reflecting on the question of languages in transnational activism on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the IWSA, as a starting point to provide insights into the way Käthe Schirmacher ended her practices of translating and transferring between women’s movements shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Following on from this, the chapter revisits the various forms of transnational mediation discussed in this book and formulates some concluding arguments on their dynamics and relevance. The chapter ends with brief methodological remarks on the question of language in the context of a history of transnational social movements.

In May 1914, on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), its journal Jus Suffragii published a jubilee issue with reminiscences of founder members. Hungarian suffrage activist Rosika Schwimmer (1877–1948) recalled the 1904 conference in Berlin:

I remember how we were sitting the whole day and disturbing each other by asking continually: ‘What did she say?’ when the highly envied few linguists among us showed by signs of appreciation or opposition that they knew what was going on.¹

Her recollection, written in English, conveys both the excitement about the beginnings of transnational suffrage activism and the challenges of negotiating a common issue without a common language. Among the contributions to the jubilee issue, it stands out for its reflective perspective on the issue of transnational communication. However, while Schwimmer points to the importance of translation at the founding meeting, she does not mention the conference’s officially appointed interpreter Käthe Schirmacher (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1

The International Women’s Congress in Berlin 1904. Käthe Schirmacher in the second row on the far right, with hat (University Library Rostock, Käthe Schirmacher Papers)

Written in a time of crisis, Schwimmer’s article, entitled ‘Our Alliance as a Teacher of Languages’, reflects the language difficulties at the first official IWSA meeting and intriguingly highlights the various forms in which an understanding across national and language borders was, nonetheless, created. A closer look at this text offers several starting points to revisit the practices of translation and transfer between women’s movements discussed in this book, but also gives some clues as to how and why Käthe Schirmacher cut all ties with the transnational women’s movement around the same time. In this closing chapter, I first outline the ideas and contexts of Schwimmer’s article and how it relates to the way Schirmacher ended her work as a translator and transnational mediator, and then recapitulate some of the arguments and theoretical and methodological considerations developed in this book.

‘Our Alliance as a Teacher of Languages’

In her article, Rosika Schwimmer recalls a warm embrace by senior American suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), who had travelled across the Atlantic to attend the 1904 founding meeting. She thus emphasises the building of emotional bonds that can only take place in the contact zones of personal encounters. Although she claims that she did not understand anything Anthony said to her apart from the words ‘young girl’, Schwimmer calls the experience of that cherished hug the ‘foundation-stone’ of her ‘knowledge of English’.² More, by emphasising the way Anthony addressed her, she asserts that the highly respected leader of the movement recognised her as a torchbearer for the younger generation and thus added significance to her only seemingly straightforward narrative of the event.³

The dedicated peace activist Schwimmer draws attention to the importance and the limitations of translation and cultural mediation in a time of rising nationalism, when in the same text she also describes the paradox that delegates who are perfectly capable of participating in complicated debates in several languages at a conference still make silly mistakes in everyday communication. She thus emphasises the various levels at which translation takes place and also points to the need for translation and mediation between different social contexts. Jokingly, she concludes by saying that she hopes members will soon win the vote ‘all round the world’, as they will then finally have time to perfect their language skills. She thus implicitly characterises learning languages not just as a tool, but also as a goal in its own right that can unite a community of multilingual personalities.⁴

Schwimmer’s contribution to the anniversary edition of Jus Suffragii in May 1914 is anything but a naïve reminiscence. Growing up in a Hungarian-Jewish middle-class family, she had already learned German and French as a child and later also published in these languages. If her English was not yet up to her own high standards in 1904, this had certainly changed by 1914, when she worked as a press correspondent in London and would soon afterwards go on lecture tours to campaign for peace in the USA.⁵ As early as 1906, Schwimmer had translated Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s influential book Women and Economics (1898) from English into Hungarian.⁶ Still, in her description of those founding days in Berlin, multilingual Schwimmer places herself in the group of those who needed the help of translators. What could have been behind this modesty?

Among other things, this particular choice of self-positioning serves to substantiate Schwimmer’s claim that since then, many members of the IWSA had willingly and successfully learned the official languages of the Alliance as well as the languages of the various hosting countries, thus supporting understanding across language borders. She even mentions that some delegates to the IWSA International Congress in Budapest in 1913 had made an effort to learn Hungarian.⁷ At the dawn of the First World War, when nationalist sentiments were on the rise in many countries, this was not an arbitrary statement. Rather, Schwimmer charges the question of translation with strong political meaning by connecting growing multilingualism and transnational understanding. At the same time, her account of the events of 1904 confirms the power of European and North American countries and the priority of their most influential languages, which were also the official languages of the IWSA: English, French, and German. To learn Hungarian, a rather difficult language spoken only in one country with a relatively small number of inhabitants appears in Schwimmer’s jubilee text as an example of exceptional commitment rather than as a requirement for all members.

Schwimmer also reflects on the position of the translator and on different forms and levels of cultural mediation. Contrary to the published minutes, which mention the appointment of an official interpreter at the very beginning of the 1904 Berlin conference, her recollection suggests that at this meeting, multilingual members of the Alliance informally helped with the much-needed translations. Considering the dual role of delegate and interpreter, her remark on the envy these ‘linguists’ encountered gains particular significance. It points to the power of mediators and translators but also to the precarious situation they often find themselves in. Their intermediary position of the go-between involves leverage, but also the risk of becoming embroiled in one of the various conflicts so often faced by a transnational movement mediating between different national cultures.

The question remains why in 1914 Rosika Schwimmer avoids mentioning that an interpreter was appointed in Berlin in 1904, and thus refers by name to the person whose words she could not understand, Susan B. Anthony, and conceals the name of the person who translated between the languages, namely, Schirmacher. Does she only want to emphasise the emotional understanding without words between fellow activists, does the silence follow a convention to leave the interpreters anonymous, or does it also reflect Schirmacher’s conflictual relationship with the IWSA at the time of the Alliance’s tenth anniversary? Could it even be seen as an attempt to erase the memory of a member who had disturbed the positive self-image of the association? Schwimmer’s ambivalent strategy of reminding her fellow activists of Schirmacher’s important role at the founding conference, on the one hand, while hiding her behind a vague allusion to a group of ‘linguists’, on the other, requires further investigation and analysis.

‘Unfair Translations’? Enquiries About a Travelling Slander

Less than a year before Schwimmer’s jubilee article was published, in the summer of 1913, the once close relationship between Schirmacher and IWSA President Carrie Chapman Catt experienced growing cracks and eventually ended. Through her partner Klara Schleker, Schirmacher had learned of a slander against her person: she had been accused of tainting her translations with her personal views. Schleker had come across this rumour when it was being circulated at the 1913 IWSA congress in Budapest by German delegate Anna Lindemann (life dates unknown). Schirmacher, who because of her ill health had not been in Budapest herself, had stood for re-election as a member of the Committee of Admissions and had also applied for the editorship of Jus Suffragii, but was not elected to either post. Schleker and Schirmacher both blamed this failure on the gossip about her translations at the various suffrage conferences and congresses.⁸ More, after she discovered that negative comments on her interpretations had already circulated at the London conference in 1909, she thought that this had also been the cause for her non-re-election to the board there.⁹ Lindemann, who had translated together with Schirmacher in London, had succeeded her as secretary to the IWSA board in 1909 and on the Committee for Admissions in 1913.¹⁰

In the months after the Budapest congress, Schirmacher wrote to many fellow activists and to President Catt to find out why she had not been re-elected. Other differences and accusations also came to the surface in the context of these disputes. Among them, Schirmacher’s support of the British militants, her position vis-à-vis the Polish question, her stance on universal suffrage, the way her contributions were printed in Jus Suffragii, as well as also her personal life, were debated.¹¹ However, due in part to the way Schirmacher handled the issue, the focus soon lay on her interpretations at the IWSA conferences. This became evident when at the annual meeting of the German Federation for Women’s Suffrage (DVF) in Eisenach in October 1913 she demanded that the DVF board protect her against Lindemann’s accusations. Lindemann, she held, had claimed that as an official interpreter to the IWSA, Schirmacher had deliberately changed translations to underline her own political position. When the board failed to take action on her behalf and nobody came to her aid, she not only resigned from the DVF board in protest but also had a statement printed describing the conflict. Including the English wording of the accusations—‘several people did charge Dr. Schirmacher with making unfair translations’/‘when she was interested in the question under discussion she colored the translation with her own point-of-view’—the statement aimed at a multilingual audience.¹²

After the defeat in Eisenach, Schirmacher demanded an investigation should be carried out by the IWSA board as to whether the accusations were true.¹³ She even considered taking Lindemann to court.¹⁴ In the course of her correspondence with Catt on the issue, Schirmacher not only learned that the IWSA president had heard talk about Schirmacher’s style of interpretation years before, but that Catt had never taken the pains to tell her that such rumours were circulating. This was allegedly because as the speaker translated by Schirmacher, Catt did not believe there had been any wrongdoing directly against herself. Concerning the investigation demanded by Schirmacher, Catt made an interesting distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘honorary’ translator work, stating that an official investigation would have been possible if Schirmacher had served as a professional interpreter rather than as a board member. Catt argued that even if the accusations were behind Schirmacher’s failed election, this could and should not be investigated, as in a secret ballot everybody was free to base their decision on whatever reason they thought relevant.¹⁵ The distinction made by Catt echoed, avant la lettre, the differentiation between thin (professional) and thick (personal) trust.¹⁶ At the same time, the distinction thus also implicitly justified the IWSA’s decision to use members of the board as interpreters and the consequences of this decision; clearly, in Catt’s view, the fact that the opinions of board members played a role in their translations had to be accepted.

Despite Catt’s advice and request, Schirmacher insisted on an official investigation, as in her view this was a ‘moral question, not a technical one’—in terms of both her own, and the IWSA’s reputation.¹⁷ Catt, for her part, still refused to hold an official investigation; but since she only spoke English and wanted the dispute settled, in March 1914 she sent copies of Schirmacher’s request to other senior IWSA members for their opinion.¹⁸ One of them was Rosika Schwimmer. In a letter to Schirmacher early in April 1914, Catt summarised the replies she had received. As Catt saw it, her enquiries had ascertained that at the 1909 London conference, ‘the election was not taken on account of the translations’. She, therefore, urged Schirmacher to finally ‘drop’ the idea of an official investigation.¹⁹ Not satisfied with this answer and also infuriated by the fact that Catt had forwarded one of her letters to Anna Lindemann, Schirmacher resigned from the IWSA, together with Schleker, in April 1914. Catt deeply deplored this decision, as she wrote to both Schleker and Schirmacher in May 1914.²⁰

Schwimmer’s statement on the question, described as an attachment in one of Catt’s letters on the dispute, is missing in the Schirmacher papers—a marginal hand-written note on the letter suggests that it had never been included. However, in the light of the date of the dispute and Schwimmer’s involvement, we can read the latter’s contribution to the jubilee issue of Jus Suffragii that May as a public version of her view on the conflict. However, by writing about 1904 instead of 1909, she could not only avoid what was at the heart of the recent conflict (the alleged link between the election of officers and the translations) but also claim with some honesty that at that time her English had not been good enough to decide whether the translations had been correct. Yet, although she did not accuse the ‘linguists’ of acting incorrectly (instead merely pointing to their influence), neither did she defend Schirmacher, either by name or anonymously. Her intervention can thus be interpreted as a precarious act of intra-organisational diplomacy mediating between the different factions: while expressing her general view on the conflicts that can so easily arise when communication takes place in more than one language, she avoids taking sides in the ongoing conflict. Thus, her general consideration on translating also remains somewhat ambivalent; while pointing out the necessity of translators, she simultaneously pleads for finding a way to get along without them.

Ends of Translation and the Case of the Translator

Käthe Schirmacher ended her work both as an honorary and as a professional translator during her 1913/1914 dispute with the IWSA. The reasons for this were many, but her German nationalism, which had grown considerably since 1904, played an important role.²¹ This is apparent, for example, in her anger that a report she had written for Jus Suffragii was not only shortened but also translated into English, despite her wish that it be published in German in accordance with her earlier demand that the journal should be tri-lingual.²²

But even after her split from the international women’s movement, Schirmacher continued to earn money from her language abilities, since her journalism of that time consisted in large part of articles on politics, everyday life, and literature in France in the German press. When the First World War started in the summer of 1914, she lost this market, too, since newspaper editors told her that nobody was interested in reports from France anymore.²³ By the spring of 1915, Schirmacher had not only stopped writing her diary in French to continue it in German, she had also published a memorandum to the German Minister for Culture and Education demanding a reduction of foreign language teaching for the German youth. To stress her point, however, she referenced a French model and again relied on translation, summarising from official papers of the Alliance Française, a society promoting the French language worldwide. Praising the success of the organisation, she called for the creation of a similar ‘world league for German culture’.²⁴ Schirmacher thus proposed the complete opposite to Schwimmer (who by then was on her campaign for peace in the USA mentioned earlier): not to support multilingualism but to further the dominance of one language.

In this period Schirmacher, who supported the war not only by personally caring for a group of soldiers, but was also involved in right-wing circles debating maximalist war aims, finally cut her links not only to women’s internationalism, but also to German radical activists Anita Augspurg and Lida-Gustava Heymann, with whom despite all their differences she had collaborated for more than two decades. When in 1915 she received their request to attend the peace conference organised by a group of pacifists at The Hague and to serve as an interpreter at the event, she declined the invitation, stating that she was busy with patriotic duties.²⁵ The deep division between those who supported their country in wartime and those who fought for peace in an international arena, so evident in this exchange, was a defining moment for many movements of the period and a basic condition that should be given much greater attention in research on post-war women’s movements.

In Schirmacher’s life, the decision to leave the IWSA in 1914 ended a long and productive period during which she was involved in many projects of transnational transfer, mediation and translation. Since the 1880s she had campaigned for women’s rights in many countries, had given hundreds of talks and lectures in German, French, and English, she had served as an interpreter at a number of large conferences, and translated articles, short stories, and books between French, English, and German. She had written hundreds of journal articles in the context of her transnational French and German journalism, drawing on newspapers and books in various languages. In all, she had lived and worked as a transnational personality for more than three decades, although she was a German nationalist at least for the last decade of that period. Her multilingualism had been essential in both her professional and her political work.

At the end of the First World War, Schirmacher returned to her hometown of Danzig and campaigned for it to remain part of the German Reich, which, however, was separated from the Reich by the Treaty of Versailles in 1920. Schirmacher, who had sat for the German Nationalist Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) as a deputy for Danzig in the constitutional assembly of the German Reichstag, continued her political involvement in this right-wing anti-Semitic party even after losing her parliamentary mandate. Despite her increasingly racist and antidemocratic positions, she saw herself as a fighter for women’s rights until her early death in 1930, and in her last years, became a venerated figure among a group of right-wing women who combined nationalistic views with the struggle for women’s political participation.

This study has taken the phase of transnational activism in Käthe Schirmacher’s life as a case with which to illustrate practices of transnational mediation in a transnational civil society of female activists. Drawing on the rich sources Schirmacher left behind, I have explored practices of transfer that helped transnational women’s movements to thrive around 1900, namely travel, translation, and transnational journalism. In the remaining pages, I would like to recapitulate some points that I think can be learned from this case, which provides insights into the dynamics, practices, and internal logics of women’s transnational activism. Rosika Schwimmer’s short article of remembrance, which takes such a contrasting position to how Schirmacher responded to the challenges of transnational communication, is a good backdrop for this. Published shortly before a global war ended nearly all efforts for peaceful transnational exchange, Rosika Schwimmer’s call for language learning can be read as an impassioned plea for the continuation and advancement of communication and cooperation across borders despite the threat of war. The content and context of this article, as well as its ambiguities and silences, remind us of the relevance and of the limits of transnational practices of mediation for social and political movements.

Strategical and Methodological Nationalism

With this book and the mediation practices it discusses, I want to argue that research on women’s movements, and on social and political movements in general, should always consider and analyse the role of transnational mediation and transfer, regardless of the geographical scope of a particular study. As I have shown, many forms of transfer across national and language borders remain invisible or well-hidden due to a widespread stance I would like to call strategical nationalism. Since social and political movements have long had to address themselves primarily to national political arenas, where political decisions (as the inclusion of women into the electorate) are actually fought for and made, they have often tended to tell their own stories within a national framework. However, we should not add to this bias by giving in to the methodological nationalism driven by national research agendas, national source repositories, and limited language skills. Rather, I argue that systematic examination of the mobility of actors and of texts (and the ways in which their travels between languages and countries are interconnected) will not only differentiate and enrich our research on women’s movements around 1900 but can also serve as an exemplary case that opens up new theoretical and methodological perspectives on other social and political movements.

The Persona of the Modern Woman

Rosika Schwimmer’s reflections on multilingual communication allow a glimpse into the cultural milieu of an emerging society of female activists, who had carved out not only new ways of living and learning for themselves but also ways of claiming participation in the sphere of politics. Taking the case of Käthe Schirmacher I have shown in this book that the creation of this milieu was closely linked to the development of a new female persona in which transnational practices as well as learning languages played an important role. The persona of the modern woman shaped a growing transnational civil society and was itself shaped by the cultures, practices, and economies relevant in this sphere. However, I also argue that the various personae of the learned woman created in the women’s movement could not easily overcome the double standard of male and female learnedness that informed middle-class ideas of femininity. Gendered concepts of male knowledge production and female reproduction became particularly visible in the figure of the female translator. Therefore, it is not only rewarding for the history of knowledge to explore the gendered figure of the supporting scholar. For the study of social and political movements, too, it can bring valuable new insights to look for the often hidden figures of mediation, the translators, interpreters, and travelling activists who communicate concepts, ideas, and strategies between places, movements, and discourses.

Mediations and Differences in a Transnational Civil Society of Female Activists

The account of the IWSA conferences and the exchanges they facilitated that Schwimmer gives in her article also points to the importance of travel and transnational lives for the emergence of a culture of communication across national borders and language differences. Exploring the contact zones created by these practices and discussing both travel and travel writing, I posit that travel was an essential practice for the development of social and political movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, we should not overlook the hierarchies and inequalities of class, race, and culture that shaped these travel practices. The women who came to Berlin in 1904 were white middle- or upper-class women from the West. Still, there were also differences among them as well: some were able to pay for their own travel (and sometime the travel of companions), while others had to earn their living by travelling as lecturers, journalists, and translators. Through an examination of Schirmacher’s various forms of travel, her lecture tours, and the way she organised them, I have shown the close entanglement of political practice and economic strategy, arguing for a methodological approach that includes both aspects.

Trust and the Continuum of Activist Translation

Sometimes, as the cases of Schirmacher and Schwimmer show, professional translation and translation in political activism are closely entwined. However, both the goals related to translation and the ways trust is created differ significantly depending on the context. As shown earlier in this chapter, IWSA activists differentiated between trust created through political alliances and cooperation and trust shown to a professional translator. As becomes clear in the contexts of the conflicts about translation that lead to Schirmacher’s split from the IWSA, the board members consciously relied on the thick trust of shared political convictions. The extent to which this was also common in other movements, or whether it was related to the particular way in which women, who were excluded from most institutions of higher education and therefore often lacked formal training, acquired their translation skills, remains to be investigated. The case of Käthe Schirmacher shows that this practice provides translators with trust, even if their translations are questioned. But as can also be seen in this case, this means that if political consensus is lost, their translations can also be devalued regardless of their quality.

In this study, the first novel Schirmacher translated into German—Men, Women, and Progress by Emma Hosken Woodward—forms the basis for an exploration of literary translation as a part of feminist activism. Drawing on Maria Tymoczko’s concept of activist translation I show that, in contrast to professional translation, changing the structure, content, and argumentation of a text is considered legitimate as long as the goal associated with a particular translation is approved of.²⁶ Similarly, it seems acceptable in an activist context to use a text published in another language quite freely to inspire one's own writing, as can be seen in Schirmacher's first literary German book, which draws on ideas from the book she had previously translated from English.

Authenticity also is valued differently in an activist context. Schirmacher’s last transnational monograph on feminist issues, Die Suffragettes, consisted in large part of translated and referenced excerpts from Sylvia Pankhurst’s book The Suffragette. Nevertheless, for decades it remained the only German book about the suffragettes; it was translated into Polish and republished twice in German. Combining the analysis of these two books by Schirmacher—Männer, Frauen und Fortschritt (1893) and Die Suffragetten (1912)—and the texts they refer to, I argue that when engaging with activist translation, it is important to take both intertextuality and practical and political contexts especially seriously. I claim that in the process we will often find what I would like to call the continuum of activist translation: a dense network of translated, self-translated, and excerpted texts, that sometimes reference each other and sometimes adopt ideas without a reference. To also look into other, accompanying forms of transfer can help to better understand what strategies and what forms of trust constitute and stabilise such a network.

Transnational Journalism and the Travel of Concepts

One such other type of transfer was transnational journalism. New public spaces for women around 1900 were not only created by conferences and travelling activists, but also by the founding of newspapers and journals. The very place of publication of Schwimmer’s jubilee article for the IWSA, Jus Suffragii, is an important example of the burgeoning feminist media of the time. Schirmacher’s career as a transnational and multilingual journalist allows us to explore the possibilities and challenges that this position between languages and cultures entailed and to analyse particular practices of transnational journalism. I argue that her experience both in translating and in her personal practice of letter-writing were important resources for her activity as a transnational correspondent.

Schirmacher’s contributions to transnational communication included not only the transfer of ideas and information in her extensive reporting. She also provided and defended a stable translation of the French neologism ‘féminisme’, which helped spread the concept in France and contributed to the continuity of the political meaning of the German term ‘Frauenbewegung’. Against the background of these findings, I have revisited the conceptual history of the terms ‘féminisme’, ‘feminism’, and Feminismus (which appears the latest in history). Tying in with recent initiatives to combine global and conceptual history I advocate a more systematic consideration of how the travel of concepts and their transformations are also related to translation and non-translation.²⁷ To do so I analyse strategies of transfer, self-translation, and translation between Schirmacher’s book Die moderne Frauenbewegung, its French precursors and its English translation. I trace the translations of ‘féminisme’ in German and English and of the German term ‘Frauenbewegung’ in English and French and discuss them in the broader context of the uses of these terms for different political goals. Building on Nancy F. Cott’s historical analysis of the term ‘feminism’ I aim at further complicating its history by arguing that it changed its meaning more than once between languages and over time before becoming a clearly defined and established concept only in the late twentieth century.²⁸

Hierarchies and Divisions

Both translating and not translating can be a strategy to better understand each other in multilingual groups. Rosika Schwimmer’s memoir illustrates both the communication in a political jargon that enables understanding across language boundaries without translation and the extent to which translation was a central modus operandi of the IWSA and other transnational feminist organisations in working towards their aims. In so doing, however, her article also points to the power struggles that translation and interpretation always face. In this study, I not only examine practices of mediation that contribute to the creation of a transnational civil society, but also discuss the divisions and hierarchies of languages and cultures which a Western-dominated transnational body like the IWSA and similar associations were based on and perpetuated. More particularly, I discuss how orientalising discourses inform the practices and concepts of women’s movements of the West. Taking Schirmacher’s book Die moderne Frauenbewegung, which aims to take a global look at women’s movements, as a case study, I analyse the orientalising effects of the concept of civilisation, which she uses prominently but which can also be found in many other texts on women’s issues around 1900.

This brings us, finally, back to the different answers Rosika Schwimmer and Käthe Schirmacher gave to the crisis of rising nationalism in the years before the First World War. It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the different national, nationalist, antinationalist, and international orientations in women’s movements of the time and to analyse what nurtured both national engagements and indifferences vis-à-vis national communities. However, the cases of Schirmacher and Schwimmer show that it is neither self-evident that participation in the transnational arena of women’s activism produced international personalities committed to a political community beyond national borders, nor that the conflicts fought there necessarily exacerbated national differences between the protagonists. Rather, both developments are possible, and both can also be linked to processes of transfer and translation. Further research on transnational activism should, therefore, focus not only on the transnational communities it fostered, but also in the divisions it brought about.

Silences

I started this book by drawing attention to what I called ‘peripheral noises’, arguing that it can be rewarding to analyse what seems to be marginal: circumstances, problematic praises, and the practices of mediation by which actors in transnational spaces try to contain them. I want to end my study by emphasising the importance of also noticing silences. One such symptomatic silence is Rosika Schwimmer’s omission of Käthe Schirmacher’s name in her article on the use of languages in the IWSA. It points to the massive conflicts about translation with which Schirmacher ended her civil engagement not only in the IWSA but in the entire transnational women’s movement of her time. In the course of her final conflict with the IWSA president, carried out in a succession of ever more infuriated letters, Schirmacher among other things deplored that her most important book, Die moderne Frauenbewegung (1904, 1909), translated into English in 1912 (The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement. A Historical Survey), which had once been characterised as one of the IWSA’s inofficial handbooks, was not even mentioned in the tri-lingual IWSA handbook Woman Suffrage in Practice which was published in 1913.²⁹ Much more than the omission of her name in Schwimmer’s article, this can indeed be read as a form of damnatio memoriae. I, therefore, argue that while it is extremely valuable to work with the accounts that the activists of former times created about their movements, for a differentiated history of women’s activism we should also critically deconstruct these self-historicisations.

Along with the certainty that Käthe Schirmacher thought she had found in her writings on ‘féminisme’, ‘Frauenbewegung’, and the ‘women’s rights movement’, some glaring silence also grew. However, finding and interpreting the silences in the stories historical protagonists provide us with is probably the most challenging task for the historian, and I am sure I missed more than one of them. That said, I still believe that the systematic exploration of where our sources remain silent in spite of what they could tell us, should be part of any serious source analysis.

The Language of Translation

In her first French book on ‘féminisme’ in various countries, published in 1898 and setting off a chain of writing, translation, self-translating, and being translated, Schirmacher begged her readers to forgive the possible clumsiness of her language:

Finally, the author of this little work is a foreigner. She has no doubt that it will appear in her style. She has tried to express herself in French as well as possible and she asks the reader to judge her attempt with indulgence. (Enfin, l’auteur de ce petit travail est étrangère. Elle ne doute point qu’il n’y paraisse à son style. Elle a essayé de s’exprimer en français le moins mal qu’il lui est possible et elle prie le lectuer de juger sa tentative avec indulgence.)³⁰

As I myself do not write in my mother tongue, I must make a similar request for indulgence at the end of this book. However, working on this study, both the need for and the advantages of translation not only as a practice but also as an approach to history became increasingly clear to me.

First, to explore transnational practices of civil movements around 1900 (and in other periods) in a way that transcends organisational structure, and to understand the cultures that make them thrive and the limitations they have to deal with, it is necessary not only to read and analyse sources in more than one language, but also to understand what it meant for the historical protagonists to live in a multilingual environment. Trying to communicate my own thoughts in another language can be challenging but is also an extremely instructive way to get a grasp of what it means to live in more than one language. Although we should never draw simple analogies between our present experiences and those of historical actors and must accept the foreignness of any historical culture, we have no other starting point for our analysis than our own experience of multilingualism.

Second, as I have argued in this book, to discuss transnational practices it is necessary to define the subject with particular care since it is not predefined by an established (often national) framing. Here, I decided to use a biographical case: a personality who lived in several European countries and travelled even further, a writer who not only translated but was translated into several languages. Whatever the language of analysis chosen, the interpretation of some of the sources must, therefore, at least partly consist of translation, which, however, only reminds us that the past will always remain a foreign country and that any language of an earlier period must therefore be translated by the historian.³¹

Third, to examine case studies of transnational individuals also means to accept that not all sources are in languages the researcher can read and understand. If we do not want to limit ourselves to the few languages we were able to learn to some extent, we have to rely on and deal with the translations of others. The attempt to avoid methodological nationalism therefore also means that translation can never just be a subject of a research but must also be seen as part of its methodology. A transnational history that takes itself seriously can, therefore, only take place in the language so eloquently defended by the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, one hundred years after Rosika Schwimmer’s call for learning languages: in the Language of Translation.³²

Notes

• 1. Rosika Schwimmer, ‘Our Alliance as Teacher of Languages’, Jus Suffragii, 1 May 1914.

• 2. Ibid.

• 3. Ibid.

• 4. Ibid.

• 5. Rose Rauther, ‘Rosika Schwimmer. Stationen auf dem Lebensweg einer Pazifistin’, Feministische Studien 3, no. 1 (1984), 63–75, at 67; cf. also Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner, ‘International Women’s Movements, Peace Activism, and the World of Politics: The Rosika Schwimmer Archive in New York’, Hungarian Studies Review 49, no. 2 (2022), 258–65.

• 6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, A nő gazdasági helyzete: tanulmány a férfi és nő közötti gazdasági viszonyról, mint a társadalmi evolució tényezőjéröl [The Economic Situation of Women: Study of the Economic Relationship Between Male and Female as a Factor of Social Evolution] (Budapest: Politzer-Fele Konyvkiadovallalat, 1906); see also Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloosterman, eds., Politics and Friendship. Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 33.

• 7. Schwimmer, ‘Our Alliance’. Schwimmer did not mention what the readers of Jus Suffragii most certainly knew—that she herself had been instrumental in organising the Budapest congress. Susan Zimmermann, ‘Schwimmer, Róza (Bédy-Schwimmer, Bédi-Schwimmer, Rózsa, Rosika) (1877–1948)’, in Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Haan Francisca De, Loutfi Anna, and Daskalova Krassimira (2006), 485.

• 8. Johanna Gehmacher, Elisa Heinrich, and Corinna Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiografische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2018), 359–60 (Oesch).

• 9. Nl Sch 618/006, Käthe Schirmacher: Why I was defeated in London [manuscript].

• 10. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Report of Fifth Conference and First Quinquennial, London, England, April 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, May 1, 1909 (London, England: Samuel Sidders and Company, 1909), 3; The International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Report of Seventh Congress, Budapest, Hungary, June 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 1913 (Manchester, England: Percy Brothers, 1913), 4.

• 11. Nl Sch 618/002, Johanna Münter to KS, 18 August 1913; Nl Sch 608/047, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 31 October 1913.

• 12. Nl Sch 005/009, Dr. K. Schirmacher, Generalversammlung des Deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht, Eisenach, 5.-9. Oktober 1913.

• 13. Nl Sch 005/001, KS to Carrie Chapman Catt, 15 October 1913.

• 14. Nl Sch 5/005, Verband für Frauenstimmrecht Rostock, 27 November 1913 [general meeting, minutes]; Nl Sch 059/007, KS to Klara Schleker, 21 March 1914.

• 15. Nl Sch 608/047, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 31 October 1913; Nl Sch 608/048, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 8 January 1914.

• 16. On that difference cf. Andrea Rizzi, Birgit Lang, and Anthony Pym, What Is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2019), 115.

• 17. Nl Sch 005/003, KS to Charrie Chapman Catt, 17 December 1913 [concept].

• 18. Nl Sch 001/001, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 28 March 1914.

• 19. Nl Sch 001/002, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 7 April 1914.

• 20. Nl Sch 005/006, Klara Schleker to Carrie Chapman Catt, 15 April 1914; Nl Sch 001/004, Carrie Chapman Catt to Klara Schleker, 11 May 1914.

• 21. On Schirmacher as a German nationalist activist cf. e.g. Gehmacher, ‘Der andere Ort der Welt’, Gehmacher, ‘De/Platzierungen’, and Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher.

• 22. Nl Sch 001/0026, KS to Carrie Chapman Catt, 12 September 1913; Nl Sch 001/024, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 6 October 1013.

• 23. Nl Sch 872/013, Der Tag/Krüger to KS, 17 September 1914.

• 24. Käthe Schirmacher, Deutsche Erziehung und feindliches Ausland. Denkschrift dem Herren Staatsminister der geistlichen u. Unterrichtsangelegenheiten von Trott zu Solz übermittelt (Lissa i.P., 1915), 20, 24, 39; cf. also Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 435–39.

• 25. Nl 618/004, Anita Augspurg to KS, 14 March 1915 [Schirmacher’s reply is noted on the letter].

• 26. Maria Tymoczko, ‘The Space and Time of Activist Translation’, in Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. Maria Tymoczko (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 227–54.

• 27. Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier, ‘History of Concepts and Global History’, in Global Conceptual History: A Reader, eds. Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic,) 2016, 1–27.

• 28. Cott, The Grounding.

• 29. NL Sch 005/001, KS to Carrie Chapman Catt, 15 October 1913.

• 30. Käthe Schirmacher, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, en France, dans la Grande-Bretagne, en Suède, et en Russie (Paris: A. Colin, 1898), 2.

• 31. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Social History and Conceptual History’, in Global Conceptual History: A Reader, eds. Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic), 2016 [first published 1989], 55–73, at 56.

• 32. Arundhati Roy, ‘In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities? The Weather Underground in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, in Arundhati Roy, Azadi. Freedom, Fascism, Fiction (London et al.: Penguin, 2020), 7–52.