Correspondences: Transnational Journalism

Abstract

This chapter discusses the growing participation of women in journalism in the late nineteenth century. It gives insights into contemporary perceptions of the profession and examines Käthe Schirmacher’s career as a transnational and multilingual journalist. Based on her example, the chapter explores the possibilities and challenges that this position between languages and cultures entailed and analyses particular practices of transnational journalism. It argues that both Schirmacher’s experience in translating and her personal practice of letter-writing were important resources for her activity as a transnational correspondent.

This chapter discusses the growing participation of women in journalism, which was driven both by the expanding newspaper market in the late nineteenth century and by educated women through their search for gainful employment in the liberal professions. After an insight into contemporary perceptions of the profession and the hopes that the activists of the German women’s movement associated with journalism, I examine the beginning of Käthe Schirmacher’s career as a transnational and multilingual journalist.

Taking Schirmacher as an example, I ask about the possibilities and challenges involved in her work as a journalist, situated as she was in this role between different languages, cultures, political arenas, and markets. Out of the broad variety of her writings in French and German, I discuss Schirmacher’s first reports from Paris for German newspapers and journals (often simply titled ‘Pariser Brief’ (Letter from Paris)) and her coverage of German politics in the Parisian daily La Fronde under the title ‘Lettre d’Allemagne’ (Letter from Germany). I also examine examples of two more specific transfer practices. A report for a French feminist journal on women workers in Vienna exemplifies Schirmacher’s information-gathering strategies, while a translation of a French article for a German journal points to links between journalism, translation, and activism. I conclude by arguing that both Schirmacher’s experience in translating and her personal practice of letter-writing were important resources that she could draw on as a transnational correspondent.

Journalism as a Profession for Women

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, with the burgeoning of women’s movements in many countries, a diverse press market emerged that specialised in women’s issues. A growing number of journals and newspapers provided a space where female journalists could not only learn the profession and test their skills but sometimes also find an income.¹ But even before this development, a considerable number of women had published in newspapers and magazines not specifically aimed at women. Many of these early journalists wrote anonymously, thus veiling their professional work, as it did not conform with bourgeois ideals of femininity. Editors, for their part, also often preferred to conceal the fact that women contributed to their newspapers and journals, seeing this as detrimental to their papers’ and their own reputations. For similar reasons, many books by women appeared anonymously.

The lack of knowledge about women writers was one of the things that motivated Sophie Pataky (1860–1915)—who first came into contact with the women’s movement at the International Congress of Women in Berlin in 1896—to compile a lexicon providing reliable information about German women writers, their works, and their pseudonyms.² Of the 4,547 writing women documented by Pataky, 2,047 were active when her directory appeared in 1898. More than half of these women (1,133) (also) published in newspapers and journals.³ Schirmacher was one of them. The considerable proportion of women writing for the press in one form or another reflected changes in the German print market and suggested the emergence of a special, if not yet clearly defined group: women journalists.⁴

A booklet published in 1905 by the German writer Eliza Ichenhaeuser (1869–1932) considered the possibilities that journalism offered for women.⁵ Combining a sociological examination of the current situation, a guidebook for women in search of rewarding gainful employment, and a political call for the development of professional standards, the handbook addressed a mixed audience. It gave an insight into the growing presence of women in journalism and their difficult working conditions. Drawing on a survey of colleagues, Ichenhaeuser concluded that women, who ten years earlier had hidden behind pseudonyms and mostly confined themselves to fashion and household topics, had entered all areas of journalism after the turn of the century.⁶ More than 60% of the publishers she contacted said that women wrote for their newspapers, although she suspected that the proportion was in fact even higher.⁷ For Ichenhaeuser, one issue, related to visibility, was of particular importance: how women were paid. She strongly warned women against working anonymously for too little money or even for nothing. This would ruin the market and women journalists would be seen by men as ‘dirty competitors’ (Schmutzkonkurrentinnen).⁸

Ichenhaeuser explained the increasing participation of women in journalism as resulting from the profession’s openness. Most liberal professions did not admit women; therefore, the press was one of the few places where they could try their luck.⁹ Since no formal qualifications were necessary, the rapidly expanding market provided them with a variety of opportunities. Ichenhaeuser recommended a journalistic career as a possible job for eager young women. She, however, also specified the requirements they should fulfil. Citing answers she had received from her respondents, she stressed not only the need for good general education and special language skills but also the willingness to work hard and to be prepared for particular challenges. Addressing official representatives of the profession, however, she called for a clearer definition of journalism and demanded the creation of a school for future journalists that would set standards.¹⁰

The extent to which this was also a transnational development was reflected in debates at the 1899 ICW congress in London. In her remarks, Ichenhaeuser drew heavily on the minutes of the congress, where the training of women journalists had been discussed in detail.¹¹ A lecture by the famous American journalist Ida Husted Harper (1851–1931) focused strongly on a report Harper had received from political journalist Isabelle Worrell Ball (1855–1931) on her working conditions at the Press Galleries of the U.S. Senate. In a combination of hints on the required skills (‘powers of observation, command of good newspaper English’) and remarks on how to behave vis-à-vis male colleagues, these explanations more than anything else demonstrated the precarious situation of women in journalism. As Harper quoted, in the words of her respected colleague, a woman journalist should ‘forget that she was a woman’ but nevertheless remain ‘womanly’. She should accept her male colleagues’ disrespectful behaviour towards her but ‘not ape mannish actions’ herself.¹² At the end of her report, Ball asserted that personally, she had never had bad experiences with male colleagues. Both Harper and Ichenhaeuser felt that this ambiguous message was worth rendering it in its entirety and approvingly. I argue that their focus here was less on the paradoxical and daunting advice to be and not to be womanly at the same time, nor was it on Ball’s implied victim-blaming when it came to negative experiences with male collaborators. Rather, they seem to have been fascinated by the still undefined, and thus malleable position of the woman journalist; as such, journalism could be seen as a challenging but promising space for adventurous personalities.

When Käthe Schirmacher’s career as a French and German journalist took off in Paris in the 1890s, the situation was even less clearly defined. Her story, however, allows some insights into a field Ichenhaeuser mentions only in passing, that of the transnational correspondent.¹³ The shaping of Schirmacher’s transnational career was aided both by her position between several countries with different public cultures and by her multilingualism. She earned a doctorate in Romance languages from the University of Zurich in 1895 and was one of the first German women ever to attain a doctoral degree.¹⁴ But her chances of finding a position in an exclusively male academic world were practically nil. It is, therefore, not particularly surprising that both before and after her time in Zurich she did not limit herself to academic writing but published fiction and non-fiction, literary criticism, political pamphlets and sociological studies, monographs, and contributions to journals and newspapers.¹⁵ For some time, she occupied an undefined position somewhere between various professions, as no formalised position (or persona) was open to her as a woman. Her detailed autobiographical contribution to Sophie Pataky’s lexicon reflects this ambivalence; it narrates her career as a student, writer of fiction and non-fiction, translator, and travelling activist without identifying with any single profession.¹⁶ At the same time, however, Schirmacher assessed her chances of employment by the German and French press in letters to her mother.¹⁷ Soon she would publicly call herself a journalist.¹⁸

Letter from Paris

In early 1895, Schirmacher, together with her companion, Margarethe Böhm (life dates unknown), moved to Paris to write a German biography of Voltaire. Her doctoral supervisor, the philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843–1896) had facilitated this assignment with a publisher.¹⁹ Although she probably received an advance for the book, she began writing smaller pieces for periodicals shortly after her arrival in Paris.²⁰ As she received no financial support from her parents, but rather, regretted not being able to support them financially, she needed a steady income if she wanted to stay in Paris.²¹ Having occasionally published in German newspapers since 1890, one of her first publications after settling in France was a piece for the newly founded German radical periodical Die Frauenbewegung, edited by Minna Cauer.²²

Published during the summer lull, Schirmacher’s first article combined the catchy topic of women’s bicycling, fashionable in Parisian society at the time, with the provocative issues of prostitution and sexual exploitation.²³ Under the title ‘Pariser Brief’ (Letter from Paris) Schirmacher described female cyclists’ costumes and the sensation they caused. Then, quoting from the magazine Echo de Paris, she cited the debate on whether this kind of dress should be permitted only for sport in order to prevent prostitutes from attracting clients by wearing the revealing outfit. She justified this exploration of issues relating to prostitution by arguing that all women had a duty to learn about the darker side of life and continued with translated excerpts from an article by the sociologist Léopold Lacour (1845–1939) on the sexual harassment of female servants in middle- and upper-class households. Lacour gave as an example the story of a young woman from Alsace who had fled several jobs because of the sexual importunity of male household members and finally tried to drown herself in the Seine; based on this example, he deplored what he called ‘men’s smut’ (cochonnerie des males).²⁴ In her German translation, Schirmacher left the strong phrase in French and noted that here, it was a man who was criticising men’s behaviour so harshly. She concluded by saying that Lacour had thus expressed that ‘the modern woman’ would ‘rather die’ than accept ‘sexual slavery’ (daß die moderne Frau ‘lieber sterben’ als sich in die geschlechtliche Sklaverei begeben wird).

The article shows how Schirmacher utilised the mode of correspondence and her translation strategies. She mixed light entertainment with social reportage and political demands, drawing on her transnational position and her multilingualism to get her point across. First, by reporting from Paris she could give her readers the opportunity to draw their own conclusions on the situation in German cities without having to discuss the exact circumstances of her examples. Second, by excerpting and translating from the French press, she was able to express her opinion in her selection of topics and at the same time show that she was not alone in her views. Third, by leaving certain words untranslated she not only addressed her readers as educated cosmopolitans (and at the same time excluded those who did not understand French) but also foregrounded a particular notion or statement. Finally, she in fact created two translations, one literal (where she cited passages from Lacour’s text) and one that summed up what she thought the author had actually been trying to say.

The contribution was well received, and Schirmacher’s very next ‘letter’ became a three-page cover story. In this, she reported on a celebration held for French women’s rights activist Maria Deraismes (1828–1894) in her native town of Pontoise, where a street was named after her and a monument erected in her memory.²⁵ Schirmacher pointed out how special and unexpected such an honour was in Europe, implying that it would be almost unthinkable in Germany. After having described Deraismes’ struggle for the rights of children of unmarried mothers, and for women’s political rights, she summarised the author’s comprehensive writings and translated a number of iconic sentences by Deraismes, most importantly her call for women’s full participation in society.

These transfer strategies—selecting, translating, leaving important words untranslated, summarising from her own point of view—were similar to those Schirmacher had used in her first ‘Letter from Paris’. But this time, she conveyed more of her own perspective, both in her description of the event and in her account of the French women’s movement in which Deraismes was such an important protagonist. One might also detect a veiled autobiographical note in her emphasis on the fact that Deraismes, as a woman, had not been allowed to make full use of her great talents. Schirmacher compared her to the protagonist in George Meredith’s bestselling novel Diana of the Crossways (1885). Quoting from the English original, she lamented the fate of a gifted woman who was ‘born an active’ [sic] but could only act politically indirectly, through men.²⁶ During the following ten years, Schirmacher remained an important contributor to Die Frauenbewegung, publishing several articles every year.²⁷ Many of her articles were written as reports from abroad, often covering congresses, legal issues in other countries, social statistics, or debates in the women’s movement.²⁸

Schirmacher also employed the epistolary genre in other parts of the German press. In her home town Danzig’s newspaper Danziger Zeitung, the literary journal Der Bazar and other journals and newspapers she reported picturesque scenes from the Paris boulevards, everyday life in the French capital, as well as the newest fashions and street songs, all under the title ‘Pariser Brief’.²⁹ Sometimes the more entertaining character of these articles was indicated by titles like ‘Plauderbrief’ (Chat Letter).³⁰ A ‘Paris letter’ by Schirmacher seems to have become a recognisable brand; she also used the title for texts on specific topics, for instance conveying a description of educational institutions in France or a report on the situation of unmarried mothers in Paris.³¹

Most texts written by Schirmacher in 1895 (and many of the later articles) drew in one way or another on the letter form: they were reports to a German audience from elsewhere, sometimes from far away. For example, an essay on woman students in Zurich aimed at both deconstructing the exotic flair of the figure and promoting women’s higher education.³² But even a literary text for a society magazine invoked the experience of being far from home by telling the story of a young girl’s first trip to her country’s capital in two different versions—in one, she is accompanied by male family members, in the other she travels alone.³³

Schirmacher’s private letters from this period show her daily routine; she worked on her Voltaire book at the Bibliothèque nationale de France during the day and read the journal Gil Blas in the evening, where she found valuable sources for her writing on public life in Paris without having to wander the dangerous streets herself. The letters provide insights into her life with Margarethe Böhm, with whom she shared a flat and later moved to a larger rented dwelling.³⁴ These letters also clearly show that she tried everything to earn money with her writing. She reported home on the articles she could place in journals and newspapers, recorded how much she got for them, and assured her parents that she would soon have a steady income.³⁵ Although she already had an ambitious academic book project and was writing regularly for German papers, she negotiated contracts for two more publications, a German book on women students and a French handbook surveying women’s movements in different countries.³⁶

The pressure she felt was related to yet another challenge. If she wanted to use the title of Dr. phil., which would help her in her journalistic work, she had to publish her dissertation, which was a costly endeavour.³⁷ The University of Zurich had already warned her that she had no right to use her title before the publication of her thesis.³⁸ She, therefore, had to earn as much as possible as a journalist in order to be able to sustain what many of her contemporaries regarded as a vanity project: her doctorate. In 1896, finally, the first part of her dissertation, a biography of the French poet Théophile de Viau, was printed as a book, the University of Zurich agreeing that the legal requirements were deemed to be met with this partial publication.³⁹ By 1896 she had established herself as a feature writer, reporting from Paris for several German journals and newspapers. The French press, however, was still closed to the young German woman.

Becoming a French Journalist

The feminist congress that took place in Paris in April 1896 (see Chapter 1) was an event that opened many doors to Käthe Schirmacher in France. She had strived to become connected with local networks from her arrival and had made fruitful contacts with the Society for the Propagation of Foreign Languages (Société pour la propagation des langues étrangéres) and with the Romance philologist Gaston Paris (1839–1903) who included her in a collaborative editorial project.⁴⁰ But it was her acclaimed speech on the German women’s movement at the Paris congress in 1896 that led to numerous invitations and new connections. The day after her appearance at the event, she wrote to her parents that many people had congratulated her after her talk and a journalist from the Neues Wiener Tagblatt had interviewed her on the spot. Her speech was eventually printed in La Révue Féministe and translated for journals in the USA and in Sweden. In her letter home she resumed that since ‘a lot of respected people were in the auditorium’ (Da sehr viele angesehene Leute im Saal waren…), this would probably help her journalistic ambitions.⁴¹ The publication in the Révue Féministe was the beginning of other invitations from French journals to write for them.⁴²

One of Schirmacher’s first French articles referred to correspondence and translation in yet another way. She reported on an inquiry that had taken place in Vienna in March and April 1896.⁴³ Initiated by a socio-political association in cooperation with representatives of the liberal women’s movement and the Austrian Social Democratic Party, the inquiry investigated the living conditions of working-class women. In thirty-five day-long sessions sociologists, welfare activists, and socialist politicians interviewed women about wages and working conditions in the sectors in which they were employed—from construction to tailoring, from metalworking to food production. It revealed the disastrous situation of women workers and attracted wide attention.⁴⁴

As Schirmacher’s private correspondence during this period shows, she herself was not present when this investigation took place in Vienna. What, then, were her sources? The report from the inquiry was not published until 1897. After each session, however, excerpts from the stenographic notes were handed out to journalists and the Viennese press reported extensively from these.⁴⁵ Thus Schirmacher, stationed in Paris but a diligent reader of the Austrian and German press, was able to draw on this coverage for her article. She provided systematic excerpts on working conditions, working hours, and wages in twenty-three occupations and summarised the ‘facts established by the Viennese commission’ from her own point of view.⁴⁶ Systematically compiling the fragmented information, she created her own overview, highlighting the low wages, poor hygienic conditions in workplaces, the widespread harassment of women by their male superiors, and their generally unhealthy living conditions.⁴⁷

Schirmacher concluded by saying that the situation of woman workers revealed by the Vienna inquiry was a ‘disgrace for a civilised country’ that had to be remedied for the sake of the ‘race they produced’.⁴⁸ The text thus pointed to two aspects of Schirmacher’s writing that would soon gain significance: on the one hand, critical social reportage, which became an important theme in her French journalism from the turn of the century, and, on the other, her use of the categories race and civilisation which foreshadowed the racist social constructions of her writings in the years leading up to the First World War.⁴⁹

In terms of transfer strategies, the article, similarly to her texts for the German press, relied on the strategies of excerpting, translating, and summing up from her own perspective. However, much more than in her German texts, Schirmacher blurred her sources and erased cultural difference. The way she presented financial issues is an example of this. Schirmacher provided her information on the financial circumstances of the Austrian women workers in francs, based on currency conversions she had carried out. Nowhere in her article did she problematise this form of invisible ‘translation’ that blanked out specific contexts and implicitly reframed the information. She even went one step further, neither stating the source of her information nor admitting that she had never been present at the event itself. Her report on the Vienna inquiry relied entirely on information gathered from unnamed newspapers.

Schirmacher’s ability to read foreign papers knowledgeably was also at the heart of her most important journalistic engagement of her early Paris years, her work for the newspaper La Fronde.

Letter from Germany

La Fronde was a spectacular project in more ways than one. It was written and produced exclusively by women. However, it was not limited to women’s issues, but reported daily on national and international political topics. In addition, many contributions also openly addressed controversial political issues and took decided perspectives. The paper was able to gain considerable attention through the fame and the publicity of its founder Marguerite Durand (1864–1936), which transformed the paper’s name into a symbol for a new form of women’s self-empowerment.⁵⁰ In her inspiring book on La Fronde and Durand, Mary Louise Roberts uses the French term cabotinage to characterise the paper’s subversive strategies. The word signifies both a cheap comedic performance and the art of improvisation. It can thus also convey the audacity of the famous former actress Durand in behaving as if she were entitled to do what she was doing.⁵¹ When Durand founded La Fronde in 1897, she declared in an interview for Gil Blas that the Congrès feministe, the international women’s conference in Paris in April 1896 had been decisive for the project. A divorced single mother, she was working for Le Figaro at the time and had intended to write an ironic article about the women activists, but the experience of the conference had converted her to the women’s cause⁵² (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1

La Fronde editorial offices, Paris around 1900 (University Library Rostock, Käthe Schirmacher Papers)

Schirmacher wrote for La Fronde from the very first issue. In the year and a half between the 1896 feminist congress and the founding of the newspaper, she had gained a foothold in Paris liberal society and journalism. She had befriended representatives of the Left and the social reform milieu such as Marie Léopold-Lacour (née Jourdan, 1859–1942; married to the author and co-education campaigner Léopold Lacour mentioned above) as well as the protagonists of the annual women’s conferences in Versailles, which brought together philanthropists and moderate women’s rights activists.⁵³ She had begun to work with economic historian Georges Blondel (1856–1948) for whom she made excerpts from German books.⁵⁴ As the ‘doctoresse allemande’, ‘the German woman with the doctorate’, she had been invited to a banquet given for the natural philosopher and Darwin translator Clémence Royer (1830–1902) in the spring of 1897, at which many influential personalities from politics and intellectual life were present.⁵⁵ She wrote in French journals on socio-political issues and by the end of 1897 had gained some notoriety in Paris.⁵⁶ However, it was Léopold and Marie Lacour who recommended Schirmacher to Marguerite Durand.⁵⁷

The collaboration with La Fronde opened up a new field of work for Schirmacher. She benefited directly from the paper’s approach of not limiting itself to what were seen as ‘women’s issues’. Her first contribution in December 1897 was a column on joint foreign policy written together with Claire de Pratz (1866–1934); the text was divided into two sections, ‘Allemagne’ and ‘Angleterre’. Both sections consisted of short factual extracts from major newspapers of the respective country and mainly reported on parliamentary debates, which in Germany at that time focused on the financing of the expansion of the German military fleet and the German Reich’s politics in China. (The winter of 1897/98 saw the German occupation of Kiautschou Bay.)⁵⁸ Although Schirmacher was initially uncertain whether her collaboration with La Fronde would last, by the end of December 1897 she already had her own column.⁵⁹ Titled ‘Lettre d’Allemagne’ (Letter from Germany), or sometimes just ‘Allemagne’, it appeared weekly for the next year and a half.⁶⁰ Subsequently, she wrote more thematic pieces; these, however, were usually also related to Germany in one way or another.⁶¹ Her task as agreed with Durand was to report once a week ‘in epistolary form’ on German politics.⁶² As she told her parents, she was rather pleased about the assignment, which was financially lucrative and interested her as it brought her closer to questions of power.⁶³

Schirmacher’s first ‘Lettre d’Allemagne’ at Christmas 1897 had a feuilletonistic touch. She wrote about the German Christmas tree tradition, while including a detailed account of how the German feminist press congratulated the Fronde on its courageous undertaking and hoped to follow its example soon.⁶⁴ From then on, however, she focused on political issues. The column usually began with factual reports on the proceedings in the German Reichstag or the Landtag of Prussia followed by an overview of major events in German politics. Thereafter, Schirmacher very often added a short section on the women question. In so doing, she established and confirmed a connection between politics and women’s emancipation and thus helped spawn a political understanding of women’s issues. Within this recurring framework of fact-oriented extracts from the press, her choice of topics was her main means of expressing her point of view. She often focused on foreign politics, particularly colonial politics in China, thereby emphasising her country’s international importance and power.⁶⁵ In her dealings with interior politics she revealed her liberal orientation by recurrently reporting on social politics or on the debate on the ‘Lex Heinze’, a law that sought to restrict public indecency and was seen as a severe threat to the arts by liberals.⁶⁶ In her notes on the German women’s movement, her radical leanings became visible. She reported on the public activities of the Berlin Verein Frauenwohl association and conveyed information on women students at German universities and the limitations and difficulties they were confronted with.⁶⁷ German opinions about French culture and politics were also an important, if sensitive, subject of Schirmacher’s public ‘letters from Germany’ written in Paris.

A detailed account of German reactions to the Dreyfus affair, that divided French public opinion for more than a decade, shows how she managed the delicate task of explaining France’s image in Germany to a French audience. Addressing the challenges at the very beginning of her first article on the issue in January 1898, she legitimised her critical observations of the French public with her ‘duties as a correspondent’ (devoir de correspondant), before describing the heated and polarised atmosphere in France where, she said, anyone who defended Dreyfus was insulted as unpatriotic. Under these circumstances the categories of the other, the foreigner, and the enemy coalesced:

For a long time now, all those who have had doubts about the guilt of Captain Dreyfus, […] have been treated by a large part of the French press as Jews, Protestants, bad patriots, and above all, as foreigners. The word […] has become […] the ultimate insult. […] [I]t took on the original meaning of the old Latin hostis, which meant both stranger and enemy. (Depuis longtemps, tous ceux qui ont conservé des doutes sur la culpabilité du capitaine Dreyfus […] ont été, par une grande partie de la presse française, traités a tour de rôle de juifs, de protestants, de mauvais partriotes et surtout d'étrangers. Le mot […] est devenu […] l’insulte supreme. [I]l a repris le sens primitive de l’ancien hostis latin, qui signifiait à la fois l’étranger et l’ennemi.)⁶⁸

Schirmacher, herself a foreigner in France, argued that these reflections on how the French public might react to statements from abroad, especially from Germany, were a necessary prerequisite for understanding the German newspapers’ handling of the affair. She pointed out that the major German newspapers mostly limited their coverage to factual accounts of the proceedings before the French military court, reiterating only official German government statements denying any attempt at espionage on their part. Making the court proceedings publicly known, was, however, a major strategy used by the defenders of Dreyfus in France, a strategy on which the Fronde would soon also embark by publishing the minutes of the proceedings.⁶⁹

Among the newspapers that raised questions was the national-liberal Kölnische Zeitung which criticised the fact that Dreyfus was condemned on the basis of secret documents that neither he nor his lawyer were allowed to see. From a German legal perspective, this could be seen as a bending of the law.⁷⁰ To stress the seriousness of the point, Schirmacher conveyed both the French and the German phrases for this: ‘courbure du droit’ and ‘Beugung des Rechts’. At the end of her excerpts she expressed her hope that light might soon be shed on the dark affair; she ended on the somewhat ironic note that the Kölnische Zeitung had basically repeated what had appeared in the French paper Le Siècle a few days earlier.⁷¹

Schirmacher’s short article not only illustrates how she used her transnational position to express her views without exposing herself as partisan. A few days later, after her mother’s admonitions not to risk her job with her sharp tongue, she sent home this article to prove that she was careful, and her mother had nothing to worry about.⁷² The article also demonstrated her detailed knowledge of public opinion and both the German and French press, which became the basis of her professional journalism.

A Public Exchange on Women Artists and Old Maids

A translation from the Fronde made by Schirmacher for a German journal reveals how French radicalism became re-contextualised in Germany. The Fronde was famous for sparking controversial debates on the situation of women in French society. Among these often deliberately provocative contributions was a text by the acclaimed novelist Marcelle Tinayre (neé Chasteau, 1870–1948) on artists’ marriages. Tinayre, who had given up her university studies to marry the painter Julien Tinayre (1859–1923), not only gave birth to three children but also published three novels within a few years, with which she earned a living for her family.⁷³

In February 1898, Tinayre published an article in the Fronde which more than a few readers may have read as a reflection on her own situation.⁷⁴ In a review of the life of the famous French writer George Sand (1804–1876) on the occasion of the death of one of her lovers, Tinayre lamented that women only had three options: to marry, to become an old maid, or to become a courtesan (il y a l’épouse, la vieille fille, la courtesan). Outside of marriage or celibacy women were denied respect without enjoying the benefits of being what she called a hetaera (hétaïre). She wondered how Sand would have fared in the society of the late nineteenth century when French middle-class education doomed girls to become housewives and nothing else. For a talented woman this entailed the necessity either of finding an exceptional husband who accepted an artist as a wife, or of sacrificing her talent and intellect.

Tinayre’s bold statements drew criticism. Two weeks later she published a response to one critic, whom she said she ‘respected and loved’. Without naming the addressee, Tinayre pleaded with her, as a representative of the older generation, to understand and support the younger woman’s protest against these unjust restrictions. To justify and explain her earlier statements she took a critical look at how girls were educated and examined the psychology of the relation between generations of women.⁷⁵ She thus shifted her focus from women who, like George Sand, led unconventional lives to follow their artistic genius, to those who remained unmarried because of the duties they fulfilled to their parents and families. These were as the title of her second article, ‘Les Sacrifiées’ (The Sacrificed) suggested, sacrificed for the sake of their relatives.

It was this second article that Schirmacher translated into German for the biweekly journal Neue Bahnen, the oldest then still active journal of the women’s movement in Germany, in Summer 1898.⁷⁶ However, she decontextualised the passionate appeal to the older generation of women. The only circumstantial information she conveyed was the fact that the text had been published in the Fronde and that her translation had been authorised. But she neither introduced the writer Marcelle Tinayre, who had achieved a certain fame in France at that time but had not been translated into German, nor did she explain the reason why Tinayre had published her appeal to her critic. The controversial issue of the female artist’s private life, which had triggered the whole exchange, was thus left out of the picture. What is more, Schirmacher deleted the whole first paragraph of the French article where the author addressed her critic and also justified her earlier statement that one should not force ‘intellectual suicide’ (suicide intellectuel) on an artist ‘under the pretext of morality’ (sous prétexte de morale).⁷⁷

By shortening the text by nearly a third, Schirmacher intensified Tinayre’s shift in focus between her first and her second article. What was still present in Tinayre’s text—the plea for female artists to be exempted from the dreadful choice of becoming either a wife, a celibate, or a courtesan—was now completely supplanted by Tinayre’s second focus, the sacrificed women who remained spinsters to serve their families. Educated to help their loved ones, many of them accepted a fate of quiet renunciation raising younger siblings or caring for elderly parents without receiving much thanks in return. These women, who had lived bitter lives, often regarded young, aspiring women as future victims who did not yet know of the disappointments that awaited them. Tinayre appealed to them not to frown upon the protest of a younger generation, not to deprecate their call for an individual life. In return, she assured them that the women who were now publicly standing up for their rights would never mock or devalue the lives of the previous generation and their hidden heroism but would revere them and demand change precisely in the name of the tears they had shed.⁷⁸

Schirmacher’s abridgements depersonalised and decontextualised the text she translated. Concealing the link to Tinayre’s earlier text and the artistic milieu it had described, Schirmacher abandoned the bold but clever association between ‘old maids’ and the potential freedom to be enjoyed by unmarried women made by the French woman. She also renounced the clever epistolary style with which Tinayre had softened the generational conflict. Schirmacher thus laid bare the central conflict about the economic character of marriage arrangements and also avoided the ambivalence that references to illegitimate sexual relations might have sparked among German audiences. But her translation also lost much of the charm of the French article. Whereas Tinayre had used the suffering of quietly exploited unmarried women as an argument for carving out opportunities for women to have their own careers—to develop professional or artistic personae—Schirmacher’s translation gave only a rather vague impression of that goal. Fittingly, the title also underwent a significant change. Whereas the French title ‘Les Sacrifiées’ (The Sacrificed) implied the existence of an actor, whether this was somebody who sacrifices another, or the person who chooses to sacrifice herself, the German title chosen by Schirmacher, ‘Die Opfer’ does not have this connotation. It simply means: the victims.

It is not clear from this text and its German publication whether the German editors had advised against discussing female libertinage, or whether Schirmacher herself had not considered her country of origin ready for this debate. Perhaps she did not want to feed the widespread opinion that her adopted country, France, was characterised by loose morals, if not depravity. We do, however, have some indication that the adaption of Tinayre’s text was not only a result of her assumptions about the readers of the Neue Bahnen but also an expression of her own view. In a later German review of Tinayre’s novel La Rançon (The Ransom) she revealed both her admiration for Tinayre and the high moral standards she thought it necessary to defend. She praised La Rançon for being the first novel to portray a ‘modern woman’ in French literature. However, what she also lauded was the fact that the female protagonist decided against continuing an illegitimate relationship and returned to the sincerity that she could only have in her marriage.⁷⁹

Reading Schirmacher’s rendering of Tinayre’s article as an activist translation, in which she focuses on its political efficacy for its intended readers, reveals both the effects and limitations of the transnational transfer of activist agendas.⁸⁰ It helps us to understand the incomplete transfer of the text’s message. By choosing a certain aspect of the text (about unmarried women sacrificing their happiness for the support of their families) she felt would resonate particularly well with a German audience, Schirmacher certainly maximised its mobilising effects there; but she also omitted an important concept that Tinayre had wanted to communicate to her French audience—that women artists should not be forced into marriages that entailed sacrificing their art.

A Transnational Journalist

For several years, the well-paid work for La Fronde seems to have been Schirmacher’s main source of income.⁸¹ However, the column ‘Lettre d’Allemagne’, usually signed with the abbreviation ‘S.’, was only a part of her work for the newspaper. From the beginning, she also wrote longer, more detailed texts under her full name. The first of these texts was a three-part essay on the German women’s movement published in December 1897.⁸² In 1899, Schirmacher published a series of articles on Germany and the German women’s movement under the pseudonyms ‘Sigma’, ‘Avanti’, or ‘Gédania’, but from January 1900 onwards, she published all her articles under her own name.⁸³ Her various pseudonyms can only be decoded because Schirmacher meticulously documented her writings and archived them in her papers.⁸⁴ Articles by Schirmacher appeared in the Fronde until November 1900. However, she was still listed as a ‘redactrice’ (contributor) in 1901.⁸⁵ Schirmacher also portrayed the project in several favourable accounts in German journals, thereby both utilising her personal knowledge of the editorial team and its work for her German journalism and creating publicity for La Fronde abroad.⁸⁶

Schirmacher’s relationship with the paper was not without conflict. Her use of various pseudonyms pointed to her multiple public roles as a researcher, journalist, activist, and travelling lecturer. This practice was not always to the liking of her editor who accepted other, more stable pseudonyms of some of the journalists working for her but insisted that Schirmacher should use her own name in La Fronde as she did in other papers.⁸⁷ Another problematic topic was that of subscriptions to foreign newspapers, an important resource for foreign correspondents. Exchange subscriptions were not always granted, and Marguerite Durand was not prepared to finance as many subscriptions as Schirmacher wanted.⁸⁸ It was probably due to Schirmacher’s work as an official collaborator of the Women’s Palace (Palais des Femmes) at the 1900 Paris Exposition (Exposition Universelle) in Paris and the new opportunities this assignment entailed that her documented work for the Fronde came to an end in the autumn of 1900.⁸⁹

By the turn of the century, Schirmacher had established herself as a journalist in more than one country and as a personality who linked women’s activism across borders. Her years with La Fronde had been formative for this in more ways than one. Her work for the paper had enabled her to venture into political journalism and significantly broaden her thematic horizons. It had also helped her to develop her own journalistic style and to become known as an expert on German and Austrian issues in France and as a Paris correspondent for several German and Austrian papers. Last but not least, her status as a journalist not only secured her theatre tickets and opened many doors to famous personalities she wanted to write about, but also allowed her to visit places to which an unmarried middle-class woman of her time normally would not have had easy access.⁹⁰ By 1900, it could be argued, Schirmacher had not only found a way to earn a living and, at least to some extent, to match her personal career goals with the opportunities available to her, but she had also developed a recognisable and respected persona: she had become a sought-after transnational journalist who could make her own choices about what and where to publish.

Schirmacher lived as a journalist in Paris for fifteen years, until 1910. During this time, she was an extremely prolific writer, author of several fiction and non-fiction books, and a researcher on social questions publishing in scholarly journals. As a journalist she wrote for French, German, Austrian, and Swiss, sometimes also for British and American newspapers and journals; we also know of texts written by her and translated into English, Polish, Swedish, and Serbian.⁹¹ Often publishing several articles a week and making lengthy annual lecture tours through Europe, she connected feminist and non-feminist publics in various countries.⁹²

However, her position in French journalism became increasingly difficult after Schirmacher’s increasingly fierce attacks on Czech and Polish nationalism and her support for ideas of German supremacy in the mixed regions in Bohemia and Prussia.⁹³ She was not only harshly criticised for her German nationalism by the French but also had growing difficulties in publishing her French articles, particularly when she also started to write critically about France.⁹⁴ In 1910 Schirmacher, who had been contemplating a return to Germany for several years, moved to the small Mecklenburg town of Marlow to live with her partner Klara Schleker (1852–1932), whom she had met in 1903. In her journalism she now focused on German-speaking media. A considerable part of her contributions in these papers dealt with French culture and politics.

Correspondences, Audiences, Epistolary Selves

Although Käthe Schirmacher experienced a severe setback in her career in the years before the First World War, we can still consider her fifteen years as a Paris-based transnational journalist as a great success for a self-made woman. She was one of the women who knew how to seize the opportunities of the expanding media market. But where and how had she learned the skills she needed for the profession?

I argue that her multilingualism, her extensive travels to various countries, and her experiences abroad were important prerequisites for her intimate knowledge of the media landscapes of several European countries and thus for her success. This enabled her to write from a transnational perspective early on. Even her early journalistic writings on the social question in the UK, on French literature, and on her travel to the international women’s congress in Chicago were based on her experiences abroad.⁹⁵ When Schirmacher settled in Paris in 1895, she continued along this path and gradually began to connect French and German-speaking publics.

However, another important resource for her journalism was her ability to adapt the focus and degree of explicitness of a text according to the intended audience, a skill she had acquired and perfected long before writing for publication. It reflected the widespread, highly developed epistolary practices of middle-class women in the nineteenth century. Since leaving Danzig at the age of eighteen in 1883, Schirmacher had shared many of her experiences with her parents and wider family in weekly letters, a habit she kept up until her mother’s death in 1915. Nearly every week she gave a summary of the past days, reported on difficulties and successes, wrote about her work and her experiences. Her detailed letters home, many thousands of which have been preserved, document both the complexity of these exchanges and Schirmacher’s special skills as a letter-writer.

Through their extensive written exchanges, many women of the nineteenth century not only kept in touch with each other, but also acquired what Rebecca Earle calls ‘epistolary selves’ in the process.⁹⁶ The distance between correspondents made it possible and to a certain extent necessary to create written identities that ensured continuity within the correspondence but did not always reflect the personal practice of the writers. The longer this distance lasted, the more narratives of daily experiences—surrogates for a shared life—necessarily became artistic constructions, emphasising certain aspects and omitting others.⁹⁷

Schirmacher’s letters home are a good example of this in more ways than one. In the early years when she was away from home, she sought her parents’ approval of how she lived and what she did. Later, there were several conflicts with her family about her lifestyle, which led to debates on how openly she could and would write to them, once resulting in a letter strike for several weeks. Later again, when her mother was a widow and Schirmacher a successful writer who had many other correspondence partners with whom she could exchange views, her letters home were meant to divert her often depressed mother. In many of these letters sent over more than thirty years, the audience was specified at the beginning. Schirmacher often stated whether her mother, her parents, or the extended family in Danzig should read a specific letter. Time and again she imagined the whole family reading her epistle together. These writings to intimate publics were often complemented with other texts: seminar papers during her studies, published articles after she became an author. They were passed from one relative to the other and discussed by them amongst themselves and with Schirmacher. In exchange, her parents sent newspapers and magazines from Danzig which their daughter could use for her articles about Germany.⁹⁸

In her letters home Schirmacher combined small scenes and short narratives of events she had witnessed with reviews of books, descriptions of places and personalities, and added her views and observations. This specific form may well have been a model also for her published letters. Here, too, she presented various themes in a succession of accounts, sometimes linked by a piquant association. As with her writings for different members of her family in Danzig, she kept in mind the audiences she addressed, the national sensitivities, the various degrees of radicalism in women’s journals, and the more general interests in newspapers she wrote for. More than once Schirmacher also used her private correspondence as a testing ground for later publications. Many of her travel experiences, for example, can be traced through various private and public media. This was the case with her reports from the USA in 1893, conveyed in elaborate descriptions in letters to her Danzig family, in newspaper reports and in public speeches after her return.⁹⁹ Schirmacher also received feedback from her intimate friend in Paris, Henri Chastenet (life dates unknown), who at the beginning of her career helped her with her French writing and the specific conventions of addressing a French audience.¹⁰⁰ These private echo-chambers also represented specific national identities and different political leanings. They thus expanded Schirmacher’s awareness of different opinions and sensitivities.

Schirmacher’s lifelong experience of communication with geographically remote individuals and intimate publics through correspondence allowed her to develop sophisticated strategies in connecting networks and media landscapes as well as different national cultures. All the more reason to ask why she turned more and more to aggressive German nationalism, in so doing damaging her professional reputation as a journalist. This was for more reasons than can be discussed here, but I would like to mention two aspects of this ideological conversion that are related to her identity as a transnational personality and as a writer. First, strong ideological identification with a national community is often closely linked to the experience of migration and exile, to the experience of being seen as and feeling like a stranger. It is, therefore, interesting that Schirmacher’s first conflicts about national identification arose in the context of exile: conflicts between her as a German in Paris and the Polish and Czech communities in the same city.¹⁰¹ Second, Schirmacher adopted German nationalism the same way she acquired her information as a journalist: through reading. It was above all Wilhelm Massow’s comprehensive anti-Polish book Die Polen-Not (The Polish Emergency) that she read with fascination in 1904 and soon recommended publicly.¹⁰² We can say, then, that her nationalist feeling was initially based less on a lived experience of belonging than on an intimate relationship with a text.

As this chapter has shown, excerpting, translating, and summarising from media sources were important practices and techniques in transnational journalism. However, as Schirmacher’s participation in various national media markets increased, another type of practice also became important for her: the translation and free reproduction of her own early texts. An example of this is Schirmacher’s work on women students in Zurich (discussed earlier in this chapter) which she herself translated into French and published in an abridged version for a French audience.¹⁰³ Very soon, however, far more extensive practices of reproduction followed. They are the focus of the subsequent chapter.

Notes

• 1. On the women’s journalism and feminist press in different countries around 1900: Faith Binckes and Carey J. Snyder, Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s–1920s: The Modernist Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); David Doughan and Denise Sanchez, eds., Feminist Periodicals, 1855–1984: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth, and International Titles (New York: New York University Press, 1987); Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse féministe en France de 1869 à 1914 (Paris: L. Rodstein, 1934); Susanne Kinnebrock, ‘Schreiben für die politische Öffentlichkeit. Frauen im Journalismus um 1900’, in Frauen in der literarischen Öffentlichkeit 1780–1918, eds. Caroline Bland and Elisa Müller-Adams (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007); Alexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers, eds., Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s: The Victorian Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); F. Elizabeth Gray, Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Making a Name for Herself (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Elisabeth Klaus and Ulla Wischermann, Journalistinnen. Eine Geschichte in Biographien und Texten, 1848–1990 (Vienna et al.: Lit-Verlag, 2013); Barbara Onslow, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Mary Louise Roberts, ‘Copie subversive: Le journalisme féministe en France à la fin du siècle dernier’, Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés [En ligne], 6 | 1997, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2005, https://doi.org/10.4000/clio.390, http://clio.revues.org/390; Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Ulla Wischermann, ‘Interaktion von Öffentlichkeiten. Zur Geschichte der Frauenpresse im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, in Kommunikationswissenschaft und Gender studies, ed. Elisabeth Klaus (Wiesbaden: Westdt. Verlag, 2002), 212–40.

• 2. Sophie Pataky, Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder. Eine Zusammenstellung der seit dem Jahre 1840 erschienenen Werke weiblicher Autoren, nebst Biographien der Lebenden und einem Verzeichnis der Pseudonyme (Berlin: Carl Pataky, 1898), V–VI (Introduction).

• 3. Susanne Kinnebrock, Journalismus als Frauenberuf anno 1900. Eine quantitativ inhaltsanalytische sowie quellenkritische Auswertung des biografischen Lexikons ‘Frauen der Feder’ (Berlin: German Council for Social and Economic Data [RatSWD], 2008), 13.

• 4. On the gendered difference between journalists and writers in nineteenth-century Germany Kinnebrock, ‘Schreiben’, 144–45.

• 5. Eliza Ichenhaeuser, Die Journalistik als Frauenberuf (Berlin u.a.: Frauen-Rundschau, 1905); see for another example: Henriette Jastrow, ‘Der Journalistinnenberuf in England’, in Jahrbuch für die deutsche Frauenwelt, eds. Elly Saul and Hildegard Obrist-Jenicke (Stuttgart: Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1899).

• 6. Ichenhaeuser, Journalistik, 7–8; Ichenhaeuser did not refer to Pataky’s lexicon but compared her results to an earlier overview: Max Osborn, Die Frauen in der Litteratur und der Presse (Berlin: Taendler, 1896).

• 7. Ichenhaeuser, Journalistik, 8–9.

• 8. Ibid., 11.

• 9. Ibid., 15.

• 10. Ibid., 16–17.

• 11. The Countess of Aberdeen, ed., Women in Professions. Being the professional Section of the International Congress of Women, London, July, 1899 (London: Fisher Unwin, 1900).

• 12. Ibid., 54 [all quotations from the English original]; the passage by Ball is translated into German in Ichenhaeuser, Journalistik, 27.

• 13. Ibid., 9–10.

• 14. Johanna Gehmacher, Elisa Heinrich, and Corinna Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiografische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2018), 532.

• 15. By 1895 she had published two books of her own, the novella Die Libertad (1890) and the novel Halb (1893), as well as a translation of Emma Hosken Woodward’s Men, Women and Progress (1893). She was in the process of publishing her dissertation on the eighteenth-century poet Théophile de Viau.

• 16. Pataky, Lexikon, 241–42.

• 17. Nl Sch 011/020, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 1 June 1896; Nl Sch 126/008, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 9 April 1897.

• 18. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Was eine Journalistin erlebt’, Schlesische Zeitung, 26 Oktober 1901.

• 19. Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 532.

• 20. Nl Sch 010/013, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 19 July 1895.

• 21. Nl Sch 011/001, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 11 January 1896; Nl Sch 126/027, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 30 October 1897. Less than three years later, Schirmacher was earning enough to offer her father a larger sum: Nl Sch 718/032, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 20 May 1900.

• 22. For the first few months Lily von Gizycky (Braun) (1865–1916) was Cauer’s co-editor.

• 23. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Brief’, Die Frauenbewegung. Revue für die Interessen der Frauen, 15 September 1895.

• 24. Léopold Lacour, ‘Plutot la Mort!’, Gil Blas, 13 August 1895.

• 25. Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Brief’, Die Frauenbewegung, 15 September 1895.

• 26. Ibid. Schirmacher quotes from a longer statement by the protagonist on activity and passivity in women. See George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911 [1885]), 64; see on the widely read author Richard Cronin, George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

• 27. Some articles were also published as ‘Pariser Brief’ (Letter from Paris), e.g., Die Frauenbewegung, 15 March 1896, 1 April 1896, 1 June 1897.

• 28. For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Der internationale Frauenkongress in Paris, 8. bis 12. April 1896’, Die Frauenbewegung, 15 April 1896; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Übersicht des ehelichen Güterrechts in den verschiedenen Ländern’, Die Frauenbewegung, 1 February 1899.

• 29. For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Brief’, Danziger Zeitung, 1 December 1895.

• 30. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Plauderei’, Illustrierte Frauen-Zeitung 22, no. 24 (1895); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Plauderbrief’, Der Bazar, 23 September 1895.

• 31. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Brief’, Neue Bahnen. Organ des allgemeinen deutschen Frauenvereins, 15 December 1896; Schirmacher, ‘Pariser Brief’, Die Frauenbewegung, 1 June 1897.

• 32. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Züricher Studentinnen’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau (Freie Bühne) 6, no. 8 (1895), 817–25.

• 33. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Gesellschaftliche Schranken’, Der Bazar, 4 November 1895.

• 34. Nl Sch 010/013, 016, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 19 July 1895 and 10 August 1895.

• 35. For example, Nl Sch 010/013, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 19 July 1895; Nl Sch 010/018, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 15 August 1895; Nl Sch 010/020, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 7 September 1895.

• 36. Nl Sch 602/001, Th. Schröter to KS, 24 September 1895 [publication contract]; Nl Sch 602/021, Armand Colin and Käthe Schirmacher, December 1895 [publication contract]; Nl Sch 011/004, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 21 January 1896.

• 37. Nl Sch 303/019, 020, Neukomm & Zimmermann [publishers] to KS, 6 August 1895, 10 August 1895; Nl Sch 303/033, 034 O. R. Reisland [publisher] to KS, 29 August 1895, 7 September 1895.

• 38. Nl Sch 303/036, Heinrich Morf to KS, 4 December 1895.

• 39. Käthe Schirmacher, Théophile de Viau. Sein Leben und seine Werke (1591–1626). Erster Teil: Die Biographie (Leipzig, Paris, 1896), 108.

• 40. Nl Sch 569/014, Société pour la propagation des langues étrangéres to KS, 15 February 1896; Nl Sch 11/003, 009: Käthe Schirmacher an Clara Schirmacher, 24 January 1896 and 5 March 1896.

• 41. Nl Sch 011/013, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 10 April 1896.

• 42. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘En Allemagne’, La Revue Féministe (1896), 308–11.

• 43. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘L’enquête sur le travail des femmes à Vienne’, La Revue Féministe (1896), 454–60; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘L’enquête sur le travail des femmes à Vienne’, La Revue des Femmes Russes et des Femmes Françaises: Organe international de science, art, moral, no. 3 (July 1896), 198–204. The identical article was published in two journals.

• 44. Anonymous, Die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse der Wiener Lohnarbeiterinnen. Ergebnisse und stenographisches Protokoll der Enquête über Frauenarbeit abgehalten in Wien vom 1. März bis 21. April 1896 (Vienna: Ignaz Brand, 1897); see also Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, ‘Die Arbeiterinnen-Enquête in Wien’, in Der Internationale Kongress für Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen in Berlin 19. bis 26. September 1896. Eine Sammlung der auf dem Kongress gehaltenen Vorträge und Ansprachen, eds. Rosalie Schoenflies et al. (Berlin: H. Walther, 1897), 191–95.

• 45. Anonymous, Die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse, V.

• 46. Schirmacher, ‘L’enquête sur le travail des femmes à Vienne’, 204.

• 47. Ibid.

• 48. Ibid.

• 49. Karen Offen has rightly pointed to the prominence of social questions in Schirmacher’s French writings. It is, however, necessary to clarify that the French ‘Paris writings’ included many other topics and that the German writings of these years were also written in Paris. Karen Offen, ‘Kaethe Schirmacher, Investigative Reporter & Activist Journalist: The Paris Writings, 1895–1910’, Proceedings of The Western Society for French History 39 (2011), accessed 19 June 2022, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0039.019; on Schirmacher as a journalist see also Corinna Oesch, ‘Zwischen Wissenschaft und Journalismus. Weibliche Lebensentwürfe und politisches Engagement um 1900 am Beispiel von Käthe Schirmacher und Anna Schapire’, in Rosa und Anna Schapire – Sozialwissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte und Feminismus um 1900, eds. Burcu Dogramaci and Günther Sandner (Berlin: Aviva, 2017), 102–18.

• 50. See, e.g., a story featured on the newspaper project in Britain: Anonymous, ‘Life on the Continent [From our special Corrrespondent]’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 14 December 1897; the paper’s symbolic value became visible on the stage, too. In 1900, a play about feminism and feminists entitled La Fronde came out in Paris. See Käthe Schirmacher, ‘“La Fronde”. Eine interessante Première’, Danziger Neueste Nachrichten, 26 April 1900.

• 51. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts. The New Woman in fin-de-siècle France (Chicago et al.: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002); see also on La Fronde: Roberts, ‘“Copie”’; Maggie Allison, ‘Marguerite Durand and La Fronde: Voicing Women of the Belle Epoque’, in A ‘Belle Epoque’? Women in French society and culture 1890–1914, eds. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr (New York and Oxford, 2006), 37–50; Colette Cosnier, ‘La Fronde, un “journal entièrement dirigé, rédigé… par les femmes” au cœur de l’Affaire’, in Être dreyfusard hier et aujourd’hui, eds. Gilles Manceron and Emmanuel Naquet (Rennes: Tout OpenEdition Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), accessed 19 June 2022, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.124812; for a contextualisation of La Fronde in the French newspaper market see Rachel Mesch, Having It All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013).

• 52. Marie Louise Roberts, ‘Acting Up: The Feminist Theatrics of Marguerite Durand’, French Historical Studies 19, no. 4 (1996), 1103–38, at 1117.

• 53. Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand 2/2Ol Sch, KS to Léopold Lacour, 21 May 1896; L. M., ‘Conférence de Versailles. Compte rendu de la Conférence de Versailles’, La femme, 1 July 1897, 98.

• 54. Nl Sch 011/017, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 10 May 1896.

• 55. Nl Sch 126/005, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 1 March 1897.

• 56. For the years 1896 and 1897 nineteen publications in French periodicals can be documented, reports from the international women’s congress in Berlin in autumn 1896 figured prominently among them.

• 57. Nl Sch 126/030, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 1 December 1897.

• 58. Claire de Pratz and Anonymus [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘A l’Etranger, Allemagne, Angleterre’ La Fronde, 11 December 1897; S. [pseud. Käthe Schirmacher], ‘A l’Etranger, Allemagne (“Les journeaux…”)’, La Fronde, 9 December 1897.

• 59. Nl Sch 016/002, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 17 December 1897.

• 60. S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“C’est la Noel…”)’, La Fronde, 26 December 1897. All these columns are signed ‘S.’, Schirmacher’s authorship is clear by her papers.

• 61. The change was due to a change in the way La Fronde covered foreign affairs. See Nl Sch 478/005, Emmy Fournier to KS, 21 September 1899.

• 62. Nl Sch 478/001, Marguerite Durand to KS, 25 July 1898.

• 63. Nl Sch 11/039, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 23 December 1897.

• 64. S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“C’est la Noel…”)’, La Fronde, 26 December 1897.

• 65. For example, S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“A cette époque de l’année…”)’, La Fronde, 2 January 1898; S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“Le Landtag de la Prusse…”)’, La Fronde, 6 February 1898.

• 66. S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“La nomination de M. Petri…”)’, La Fronde, 24 January 1898; see also Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Lex Heinze’, La Fronde, 21 February 1900.

• 67. For example, S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“La nomination de M. Petri…”)’, La Fronde, 24 January 1898; S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne. (“L’affaire Dreyfus…”)’, La Fronde, 16 January 1898; S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“Le Landtag de la Prusse…”)’, La Fronde, 6 February 1898.

• 68. S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“L’affaire Dreyfus…”)’, La Fronde, 16 January 1898.

• 69. Having reported on the affair from the beginning La Fronde started printing daily stenographic minutes in August 1899.

• 70. On the history of the paper see Georg Potschka, ‘Kölnische Zeitung (1802–1945)’, in Deutsche Zeitungen des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 1972), 145–58.

• 71. S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“L’affaire Dreyfus…”)’, La Fronde, 16 January 1898. Schirmacher’s report of January 1898 reflected several aspects of an article that had appeared a few days earlier: Anonymous, ‘Zum Esterhazy-Prozeß’, Kölnische Zeitung, 12 January 1898.

• 72. Nl Sch 607/002, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 22 January 1898.

• 73. Jennifer R. Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause, Feminisms of the Belle Epoque. Historical and Literary Anthology. Texts Translated by Jette Kjaer, Lydia Willis and Jennifer Waelti-Walters (Lincoln [u.a.]: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1994), 67–68; Rachel Mesch, ‘A Belle Epoque Media Storm: Gender, Celebrity, and the Marcelle Tinayre Affair’, French Historical Studies 35 (2012), 93–121, at 10–11, http://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-1424938; On Tinayre, who published a new book every two or three years, see also: Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters. Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 54–59.

• 74. Marcelle Tinayre, ‘Ménages d’Artistes’, La Fronde, 3 March 1898.

• 75. Marcelle Tinayre, ‘Les Sacrifiées’, La Fronde, 20 March 1898.

• 76. Marcelle Tinayre, ‘Die Opfer. Von Marcelle Tinayre. (Fronde.). Autorisierte Uebersetzung von Dr. Käthe Schirmacher’, Neue Bahnen. Organ des allgemeinen deutschen Frauenvereins 33, no. 15 (1898); on the history of the journal Neue Bahnen see Kerstin Wolff, ‘Ein ungewöhnlicher Schreib-Ort? Frauenrechtlerinnen im deutschen Kaiserreich und ihr politisches Schreiben im Frauenverein – Eine Annäherung’, in Frauen in der literarischen Öffentlichkeit 1780–1918, eds. Caroline Bland and Elisa Müller-Adams (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007), 121–42.

• 77. Tinayre, ‘Les Sacrifiées’.

• 78. Ibid.

• 79. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Marcelle Tinayre (Feuilleton)’, Fremden-Blatt, 4 Februar 1900.

• 80. On activist translation see Maria Tymoczko, ed., Translation, Resistance, Activism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

• 81. Nl Sch 125/028, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 28 August 1899.

• 82. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme allemand (La Tribune)’, La Fronde, 22 December 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme allemand. Suite. (La Tribune)’, La Fronde, 23 December 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme allemand. Suite II. (La Tribune)’, La Fronde, 24 December 1897.

• 83. Sigma [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Le Féminisme dans la ville de Kant’, La Fronde, 10 October 1899; Avanti [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Une Doyenne de Féminisme Allemand’, La Fronde, 17 December 1899; Gédania [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘L’Association des Étudiantes à Berlin’, La Fronde, 1 February 1900.

• 84. Nl Sch 581/001–134, Käthe Schirmacher, newspaper articles 1898–1900; see also Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 270–71 (Oesch).

• 85. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘L’art dramatique allemand à Paris’, La Fronde, 23 November 1900; Anonymous, ‘Couturières et Tailleurs pour Dames. Souscription en faveur des ourvrières tailleurs por dames’, La Fronde, 24 February 1901.

• 86. For example, Sigma, Paris [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Die “Fronde” und ihre Organisation’, Dokumente der Frauen 1, no. 8 (1899), 9; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘La Fronde’, Der Bazar, 13. Februar 1899; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Fronde’, Jahrbuch für die deutsche Frauenwelt, eds. Elly Saul and Hildegard Obrist-Jenicke (Stuttgart: Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1899), 175–81; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die einzige Frauenzeitung der Welt’, Die Woche, 7 April 1900.

• 87. Nl Sch 478/009, A. [Gile] (La Fronde) to KS, 28 January 1900; many articles in La Fronde were either anonymous or signed with pseudonyms. However, the real names were usually familiar to the readers as in the case of Séverine (Caroline Rémy de Guebhard, 1855–1929) or Savioz (Adrienne Avril de Sainte-Croix, 1855–1939).

• 88. Nl Sch 478/008, G. [Bassin] (La Fronde) to KS, 16 January 1900.

• 89. Financially rewarding were a popular illustrated book on Paris in German (Käthe Schirmacher, Paris! [Berlin, 1900].) and a laterna magica show on the Exposition universelle with daily presentations in Vienna for which Schirmacher received 30% of the profit. Nl Sch 124/017, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 10 July 1900. On Schirmacher’s changing relationship with La Fronde see also Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 270–71 (Oesch).

• 90. Nl Sch 126/028, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 15 November 1897; see also Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Französische Schriftstellerinnen’, Das litterarische Echo, 1 May 1899 [interviews with well-known French writers Gyp, Jeanne Marni, Daniel Lesuer and Jean Bertheroy]; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Im Pariser Frauengefängnis’, Der Tag, 20 November 1902 [report on a visit to a female prison].

• 91. For a bibliography of her writings: Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher.

• 92. On the concept of the transnational mediator: Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 261–81 (Oesch).

• 93. For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘La Question des langues en Autriche’, L’Européen, 12 September 1903; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le Partage de la Bohême’, L’Européen, 14 May 1904; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Polonais et Ruthènes (Galicie)’, L’Européen, 1 July 1905.

• 94. Théodore Brix, ‘Sur la question polonaise (Pologne Allemande)’, L’Européen, 7 January 1905; Anonymous, ‘Le Courrier Européen avait publié le 4 mai dernier…’, Bulletin Polonais, 15 June 1906; for more see detail see Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 387–389, 402, 533 (Oesch).

• 95. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Das dunkle England. “In darkest England and the way out”, by William Booth’, Unsere Zeit, Februar 1891; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Frederic Mistral’, Schlesische Zeitung, 4 September 1891; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Der internationale Frauenkongreß in Chicago’, National-Zeitung, 25 June 1893.

• 96. Rebecca Earle, Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot [u.a.]: Ashgate, 1999).

• 97. On the gendered art and practice of letter-writing see also Klaus Beyrer and Hans-Christian Täubrich, eds., Der Brief. Eine Kulturgeschichte der schriftlichen Kommunikation (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1996); Barbara Hahn, ‘“Weiber verstehen alles à la lettre”. Briefkultur im beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert’, in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Munich: Beck, 1988), 13–27.

• 98. For examples cf. Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher.

• 99. Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Moderne Frauen, die Neue Welt und der alte Kontinent. Käthe Schirmacher reist im Netzwerk der Frauenbewegung’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (OeZG) 22, no. 1 (2011), 16–40.

• 100. Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 216–17 (Heinrich).

• 101. Ibid., 387 (Heinrich).

• 102. Wilhelm von Massow, Die Polen-Not im Deutschen Osten: Studien zur Polenfrage (Berlin: A. Duncker, 1903); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘La question polonaise’, L’Européen, 24 December 1904.

• 103. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme à l’université de Zurich’, Revue Politique et Littéraire - Revue Bleue, no. 10 (1896), 310–14.