Keywords

The French neologism ‘féminisme’ began to migrate into other languages around 1900. However, its journey did not leave the term unchanged. Although it had already arrived in German and English by the first decade of the twentieth century, it served as a translation of the French concept only in exceptional cases. The closely connected French, German, and English publications on which this chapter focuses illustrate this. In the following, I examine Käthe Schirmacher’s most successful book, Die moderne Frauenbewegung (1905, 2nd edition 1909), and compare it with its less comprehensive precursor, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, en France, dans la Grande-Bretagne, en Suède, et en Russie (1898), and the German book’s English translation The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement. A Historical Survey (1912).

Schirmacher’s French book compared women’s movements and the circumstances that gave rise to them in five different countries, while her German book and its English translation attempted to outline women’s movements across the world, although in reality gave strong priority to European and North American developments of the nineteenth century. By examining the contexts and constellations in which these transnational histories were created, I show the emerging market for concise descriptions of the new movement and characterise the readership and the use of such surveys. Turning to the books’ contents, I analyse some of Schirmacher’s strategies with regard to the challenging task of integrating different national histories and stories and finding a common perspective. In comparing the French and German texts, I demonstrate a change of strategy in building transnational connections from a typifying to an ethnicising approach.

Drawing on a conceptual history approach and theoretical reflections on self-translation, I analyse strategies of transfer and translation between these books and also discuss the transfers and transformations of the French key term ‘féminisme’ in a broader context.1 I am interested both in how a concept is transformed while it travels and in the ways an author who translates her own texts behaves much more freely with those texts than a translator would do. I trace the translations of this term in German and English and of the German term ‘Frauenbewegung’ in English and French and also point to early occurrences of the terms ‘Feminismus’ and ‘feminism’ in German and English. The final section of the chapter outlines some reviews and receptions and asks how these accounts have been reflected in other summary histories of feminism and women’s movements.

Public Interest in Women’s Activism as a Transnational Phenomenon

The upswing of women’s movements in several European countries in the 1890s aroused a growing public interest both in the forces behind this development and in the protagonists and their strategies. The 1893 women’s congress at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (see Chapter 4) was an important event, where activists began to create transnational links between their movements. In so doing, they also contributed to making this activism and its transnational dynamics visible across national borders. The 1896 conferences in Paris and Berlin (see Chapters 1 and 5) marked the arrival of transnational strategies on the European continent.2 Subsequently, activists reporting on the conferences used accounts of other countries and the movement’s successes there to push the cause in their own country.3 As a result, they also created interest in the women’s movement as a transnational phenomenon in the general public.

Having been in Chicago in 1893 and attended both the Paris and Berlin congresses in 1896, Käthe Schirmacher was well equipped to respond to this interest. Her multilingualism gave her access to a wealth of information obtained at the congresses and through the contacts she made there. This soon became visible in her French and German journalism. She reported on the Paris Congrès feministe in spring and the International Congress of Women in Berlin in September 1896 in various papers.4 In the following year, she wrote about the French movement in German and Swiss media and about the German movement in the French press.5 She also wrote on women’s issues in other countries, for example in the Ottoman Empire.6 With these texts and her earlier writings on Britain and the USA, she qualified as an expert on women’s issues and movements in many countries.7 As a result, she planned to generate an income from the growing interest in accurate information about the transnational development. In February 1897, she informed her mother that the French publisher Armand Colin had accepted a proposal she had already ventured a year earlier to write a concise account of women’s movements in different countries. However, she hoped it would go into several editions, as the assignment did not pay particularly well.8 In fact, only one edition appeared, but she was able to sell an abridged version to a French social-political journal shortly afterwards.9

Schirmacher’s 1898 and 1899 accounts were addressed to a wider public in France, where a considerable number of male intellectuals supported the movement.10 Her German book Die moderne Frauenbewegung, published in 1905, had other audiences and functions in mind. The publication appeared shortly after the official founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) at the 1904 congress of the International Council of Women (ICW) in Berlin and was strategically linked to this event (see also Chapter 8).

In the following years, the new organisation had to define its place in transnational activism, and exchanges of information about conditions and policies across borders became an important strategy in this context. Schirmacher’s Die moderne Frauenbewegung provided this sought-after information for a German audience.11 Alice Zimmern’s 1909 Women’s Suffrage in Many Lands, which used Schirmacher’s study as one of its primary sources, supplied similar content for an English audience.12 Both books served as quasi-official handbooks of the IWSA, as was shown by President Carrie Chapman Catt’s response to the request for the creation of an official manual at the 1911 congress in Stockholm. She drew attention to the ‘books written by Miss Zimmern and Miss Schirmacher’ which, she said, ‘fulfilled the purpose’.13 It may well be possible that this official recognition motivated the translation of the 1909 second edition of Schirmacher’s book into English by American historian Carl Conrad Eckhardt (1878–1946) in 1912. It could explain why, despite the wealth of information on women’s movements and the suffrage available in the English language media, a German book was translated into English. However, the most important market for this publication—those many members of the IWSA for whom English was either their mother tongue or the most accessible foreign language—was lost when Schirmacher left the organisation as a result of disputes soon afterwards (On the conflicts that resulted in this divide see Chapters 8, 9 and 10).

Comparing Constellations and Connecting Activists

When Käthe Schirmacher’s Le féminisme aux États-Unis was published by the prestigious publisher Armand Colin in 1898, the eighty-page book portraying women’s movements in five countries was innovative in several respects. Its systematic approach can be analysed in the context of the developing sociology of the time. As a collaborator of the Musée social, a then-new institution that studied and documented social realities and social movements in industrialising societies and advocated for better social politics, Schirmacher had insight into and made use of this new type of research.14 Her accounts of the different countries all began with statistical information on the population and included details on economic development, politics, law and major political and social institutions, thus explaining the situation of women in a broader social context. Although Schirmacher’s focus was on the middle-class women’s movement, working-class women and socialist movements were also considered. What is more, she claimed that women’s movement activists understood their movement as an answer to the social question.15

In conjunction with this empirical approach, Schirmacher created a typology of feminist movements based on cultural and political criteria such as religious belief, form of governance and, in the case of monarchies, the influence of the sovereign.16 Distinguishing Protestant and Catholic republics, constitutional, progressive, and absolute monarchies, she presented five case studies, each representing a particular type of society. In her conclusion she stated commonalities and differences between the movements she had examined. Thus, on the one hand, she asserted the existence of an international movement with common roots in larger economic and political developments. At the same time, she provided reflections and concepts to help understand differences between the movements in the context of the general development of their respective countries.17 Most importantly, however, Schirmacher firmly rejected the idea that ethnic differences could explain or legitimise the different levels of women’s emancipation and rights in different countries. These differences, she emphatically proclaimed, pointed exclusively to the fact that the idea of social justice had not yet made sufficient progress in a particular country.18

The book not only supplied information about the social situations and movements, but also references to English, German, and French sources. Schirmacher listed scientific studies, essays, articles, and anthologies, not least the minutes of women’s congresses in the USA and Germany and movement journals.19 By giving indications for further reading, she addressed a multilingual readership and thus developed a transnational common discussion space.

In addition to concise information on social and political situations, Schirmacher reproduced iconic narratives of the history of the movement and described constellations that were conducive to change; she supplied information on names of personalities, associations (and their membership and missions), and media and added anecdotes about prominent protagonists. With this combination she facilitated transnational networking in a practical sense but also created models for identification across borders. Another transnational dynamic, namely that of competition, was present in this account in a more veiled way, for instance, when she quoted a statement that France should promote women’s suffrage because it ‘had to set a good example for the civilised world’ (La France doit au monde civilisé l’exemple de cette grande initiative).20

Schirmacher began her book with a particularly detailed case study of the USA, which she described as the ‘birthplace of feminism’.21 She recounted the mythicised founding story of how Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and other American women decided to fight for women’s rights when they stayed in London in 1840. After having crossed the Atlantic to attend the international anti-slavery congress in the British capital, these experienced abolitionists faced a serious exclusion: as women, they were not admitted as delegates to the conference for which they had come so far and had to watch silently from the gallery.22 I argue that Schirmacher placed this narrative so prominently at the beginning of her book because the transnational character of political mobilisation that became evident here was particularly important to her.

Her interest in transnational dynamics is also apparent at the point where she posits that Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) had effectively initiated the women’s movement in Europe with the publication of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, claiming that Wollstonecraft had based her feminist thinking on the ideas of the French Revolution.23 A footnote links this statement to the book’s description of the Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791) by Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793). There, at the beginning of the chapter on France, another footnote refers the reader to the chapter on the USA to prove that American women had included Gouges’ claim in their declaration of objectives.24 Here one could assume that Schirmacher, in identifying the real origin of feminism in France, was also honouring her second homeland and thus hoped to inspire feminism there.

The most conspicuous omission in this comparative study is the German Reich. Schirmacher knew the movement in her country of origin well and had already published a detailed report in La Fronde in 1897; another was to follow in the Revue de Paris in 1898.25 It would have been easy to fill the pages of the book she published with Armand Colin with this knowledge in a time when she was struggling to earn enough money through her writing. Why did she leave it out? The three-part article in La Fronde provided information about the movement and its history. Here she went into detail about its factions and organisations, personalities and activities and gave useful hints on possible connections between the French and German movements. The article in the Revue de Paris, addressed to a wider audience, elaborated on German society, economy and culture, as well as on various social groups, and then explained why the movement was a logical development. Together they contained all the information she conveyed in the studies of individual countries in the Colin book.

However, at this time she avoided comparing Germany with other countries. With one exception (a reference in the Revue de Paris to partial municipal voting rights of American, Australian, and British women, which German women did not have), she treated Germany as a stand-alone case.26 Also, the German development could not easily be placed in the typifying categories she had established—at least not if one knew as many details as Schirmacher did. This also sheds light on the selection of cases examined in the French book Le féminisme aux États-Unis. The first three, long chapters on the USA, France, and Great Britain (under which chapter heading Schirmacher discussed England and Scotland) dealt with countries where she had lived for some time, a fact Schirmacher also mentioned in the preface. The much shorter chapters on Sweden and Russia were based on written material. In their extreme dissimilarity they helped to put into perspective the lesser differences between the first three countries she discussed. Apparently based on information from Schirmacher herself, a German newspaper announced the Revue de Paris article and stated that this text on Germany appeared as a separate article because there had not been enough space in Schirmacher’s study Le féminisme aux États-Unis.27 Thus Schirmacher kept the two French publications, the comparative book on feminisms in different countries and the report on the women’s movement in Germany, together and apart at the same time. But the missing space could possibly also have been a conceptual one.

A year later, Schirmacher included the German Reich in another, much shorter overview of the state of women’s movements, ‘Notes sur l'état actuel du féminisme’ (1899), now following a simpler classification. Claiming that up to the present day, feminist movements had only appeared in Western countries, she now distinguished Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox countries (consequently blanking out other religions from the map).28 She affirmed that feminism was an international movement with the same causes in all societies, but added that it found the best conditions in Protestant countries, while it faced stronger obstacles in Catholic countries and was only beginning to emerge in Orthodox countries. She included Germany, as a ‘predominantly’ Protestant country, in the leading group of this hierarchy; at the same time, she claimed that the entire women’s movement had a humanising mission from which women and men all over the world would benefit if only legislators would adopt its principles.29 It seems that Schirmacher’s global perspective was based on the introduction of a clear hierarchy that set the direction of the envisaged mission.

A Global Perspective Based on Ethnicised and Racialised Differences

By the time Die moderne Frauenbewegung was published in 1905, the movement and also Schirmacher’s position in the movement had changed considerably compared to 1898. This is clear even from the preface, where she explains her opinion on the division between bourgeois and socialist feminists in some countries and discusses the relationship between the older ICW and the newly formed IWSA. She openly took sides in ongoing debates, claiming that working-class and middle-class women had many common interests which socialists and liberal women’s movements would do best to address together—as they did in many countries other than Germany. She also posited that a productive division of labour existed between the ICW and the IWSA, with the former being the integrative and the latter the driving force.30 These performative statements document her efforts to bridge the deep rifts that marred the growing movement.

Among the textual elements that made their way from the French into the German publication unchanged are iconic descriptions such as the notorious narrative of the American activists at the London anti-slavery congress described above.31 A telling example of self-translation is the anecdote on American activist Lucy Stone (1818–1893), who had justified her desire to study Hebrew and Greek with her doubt of translations of the Bible that legitimised the subordination of women.32 It communicates Schirmacher’s conviction that education was a way to challenge power relations and demonstrates her awareness of the political relevance of translation.

The transnational character of the women’s movement had been only a theoretical perspective in her French publications of 1898 and 1899; in the new book the organisational structures of the transnational networks are an explicit theme. Furthermore, the German study describes the transnational character of activism and its organised nature, which contributed decisively to its success, as the main criteria for defining the women’s movement as ‘modern’.33

The structure of the book ties in with her earlier classifications based on religion and political system, but is different in two respects. First, Schirmacher translates the criterion of religion used in the French publications into ethnic differences. Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox countries were now classified instead as Germanic, Romance, and Slavic lands respectively (the ethnic sections for the most part encompassing the same countries as the former religious ones), and the reference to the West was substituted by the claim that the women’s movement was ‘led by women of the white race’ (Den Frauen weißer Rasse ist hierbei die Führerschaft zugefallen).34 Second, she added another group of countries she called ‘Orient and Outer Orient’ (Orient und äusserster Orient). Thus, and by subsuming Central and South America under the Romance lands, she sought a global perspective; this, however, is in the end only expressed in brief remarks on a few pages of her book.

The global perspective Schirmacher now was aiming for reflected the IWSA’s international mission. However, when she wrote Die moderne Frauenbewegung in 1904/05, she established this perspective through an orientalising discourse; for example, she postulated that ‘the woman’ is a ‘beast of burden and slave in most parts of the world’ (In dem größten Teil der Welt ist die Frau Lasttier und Sklavin) and combined this with her only reference to Africa by stating the (estimated) populations of Africa and Asia in a footnote.35 However, she also held that in most countries of ‘European civilisation’ women were infantilised and unfree, existing as ‘mere sexual beings’ (Geschlechtswesen). 36 Although she was thus also critical towards countries she called ‘civilised’, she continued to use the terms ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ to explain women’s subordination:

She is free and a human being only in a very, very small part of even the civilised world. And even here we are daily confronted with tough, not yet dead remains of the old barbarism and tyranny. (Frei aber und ein Mensch ist sie nur in einem ganz, ganz kleinen Teile selbst der zivilisierten Welt. Und auch in diesem Teile treffen wir tagtäglich auf zäherhaltende und noch nicht abgestorbene Reste der alten Barbarei und Tyrannis).37

In the logic of this argumentation, she could refer to non-Western civilisations only by othering them in orientalising categories.38 This approach was linked to the concept of calling all diverse forms of women’s action against male domination since prehistoric times women’s movements, but reserving the term ‘modern women’s movement’ for the organised international activism that first appeared during the French Revolution and took shape in Western countries in the second half of the nineteenth century.39

The new approach created more than one problem. This became evident in the way Schirmacher covered national conflicts in the Habsburg Empire. She created different sections on the various parts of the empire, placing ‘German Austria’ (Deutschösterreich) and Hungary in the Germanic section and ‘Czech Bohemia’ (Tschechisch-Böhmen) and Moravia, Galicia, and Slovenia in the Slavic section. Bosnia and Herzegovina she assigned to the ‘Orient’ section. Terms such as ‘German Austria’ reflected the colloquial language of national differences but were not official designations. Schirmacher only admitted certain inconsistencies in her system in a footnote on Hungary, saying the country was incorporated into the Germanic section for ‘political and factual reasons’. 40 Since she had no problem putting other parts of Austria-Hungary into other sections of her book, the unity of the Empire was obviously not the ‘political’ reason for this grouping of the countries; the positioning of Hungary suggests another very likely rationale. With two exceptions (Canada and Finland), all the countries in the first section were either founding members of the IWSA, or delegates from these countries had been present at the founding meeting. This was also the case with Australia and New Zealand, which Schirmacher dealt with in a long chapter in the Germanic section without mentioning this in the table of contents.41

Following this logic, the splitting of the Habsburg Empire and women’s movements there in Schirmacher’s book can again be linked to the politics of the IWSA. As Susan Zimmermann has convincingly argued, the issue of empires and the stateless nations they ruled posed significant problems for the politics of both the ICW and the IWSA, with the Habsburg monarchy being the most contentious issue in the early years. The ICW restricted membership to umbrella organisations representing a state (and in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire finally accepted only two organisations, Austria and Hungary, while tacitly accepting that the Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Slovenian movements were not represented). In contrast, the IWSA tended to support nation-building movements within the Habsburg Empire.42 This became visible, for instance, when in 1909 a Czech-Bohemian and a German-Austrian suffrage committee were both affiliated with the IWSA on an equal footing.43 In a sense, Schirmacher’s decision to classify parts of the Habsburg Empire as ‘countries’ and to discuss them separately in three different sections of her book not only reflected the political reality that women’s movements of different nationalities barely cooperated with each other within the multinational empire, but also foreshadowed the IWSA’s future policy towards national movements.44

Useful Information for Activists

Schirmacher included case studies of very different lengths in the ambivalent structure of her book. Clearly depending on the material which she had to hand, and on the relevance of a particular country for the international movement and the IWSA particularly, some of the chapters were more detailed, others rather vague. This reinforces the impression that this was not a study with a systematic approach (as had been the case with Le féminisme aux États-Unis) but a handbook intended to provide useful information for activists, journalists, and the interested public.45 For this purpose, Schirmacher compiled statistics and information on populations, women’s participation in the labour force, working conditions, and wages. She described political and legal conditions and social and educational institutions, as well as organisations and personalities who worked for women’s social and political rights. Wherever she had gained knowledge about achievements of women in the professions, universities, or legal institutions, she passed it on, often mentioning the names of these women.

There is thus considerable tension between the ideology conveyed in the book’s structure and framing argument and the more fact-based approach in the chapters. It seems that Schirmacher in many cases did not sacrifice a detail she considered worth telling to the concept of civilisation that had become so important to her. The chapter on Turkey is one of many examples that illustrate this. Although in this chapter she reiterates her view that in Muslim countries women are ‘slaves’ and ‘beasts of burden’, she not only lists the demands of the developing Turkish women’s movement, but also adds that the Quran gives the wife much better rights than the Code Napoléon or German civil law. Such insights were possibly behind her lament in the opening remarks of the book section that there were also relapses into barbarism in Europe that were not sufficiently condemned.46 This argumentative manoeuvre, however, also points to Schirmacher’s ambiguity: although she was interested in a variety of details, she also sought to impose her concepts of civilisation and barbarism on what she reported, even if this created arbitrary statements.

The very long chapter on the German Reich tied into this argument to some extent by stating that the women’s movement had not been confronted by more difficult circumstances in any other European country, a statement that contradicted Schirmacher’s previous view that the women’s movement had found most favourable conditions in the Germanic countries.47 Having shied away from comparisons between Germany and other countries for French audiences, she now offered a multitude of comparisons for her German readers:

In Germany, there is no talk of support for women’s aspirations by a large liberal majority in parliament, as is the case in England, France, and Italy. (Von einer Unterstützung der Frauenbestrebungen durch eine große liberale Majorität in den Volksvertretungen, wie England, Frankreich, Italien sie aufzuweisen haben, ist in Deutschland nicht die Rede).48

Following on from this introduction, Schirmacher critiqued in much detail German women’s lack of rights in education, employment, and marriage, as well as in politics. Here her argument had a double dynamic. On the one hand, she highlighted the steadfastness of the German movement, which had developed and prevailed despite these hindrances and obstacles.49 On the other hand, the comparative approach, which was also made clear in other chapters, aimed at questioning and combatting the status quo in Germany, particularly concerning the lack of collaboration between middle-class and socialist women’s movements.50

A major focus of the chapter was on events at the 1904 congress in Berlin and the conflicts that had escalated there. As in earlier publications, Schirmacher gave insights into the factions of the movement and their protagonists. But other than in her French publications a couple of years earlier, she no longer painted a picture of peaceful cooperation. Her more controversial approach can be seen as a reaction to the different audience she was now addressing, namely the German movement, in which she was trying to define her position.

At the 1904 conference, Social Democratic women had rather aggressively affirmed their view that cooperation between the middle-class-dominated women’s movement and socialist women was not possible. The moderate organisers of the conference, on the other hand, had hindered the radicals by forbidding them to distribute a pamphlet about their aims.51 In this way, the radicals were under attack from both sides since the Social Democrats did not differentiate between them and the moderates whereas the latter left no space for them to explain their programme.52

Addressing the Social Democrats in her book, Schirmacher pointed out that the radicals were not the ones who had excluded women workers’ associations from the women’s movement’s umbrella organisation but had actually called for their inclusion.53 At the same time, she sought to define a place and role for radicals in the larger women’s movement. She used the metaphor of the ‘leaven’ (Sauerteig) to characterise them as a driving force and held that the radicals had initiated all major innovations and programmatic demands in the movement; this had only been obscured by the fact that some of these protagonists had later become either socialists or moderate feminists.54

Schirmacher’s account of the German movement conveyed the major factions and their activities quite clearly. But although she tried to use factual language, it was clear she was speaking as a participant in ongoing conflicts. At some points her views on the international movement became visible, too. It is noticeable, for example, that she pleaded for a stronger influence of European activists within transatlantic cooperation and to that aim explicitly emphasised the historical role of Europeans in the USA.55 This was also reflected in the opening of the chapter on France. Having attributed the parenthood of the movement to both the USA and the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft, here she identified its birthplace as France: ‘The European women’s movement is born in France…’ (Die europäische Frauenbewegung wird in Frankreich geboren).56

In the second edition, published in 1909, Schirmacher added two types of information. She described developments since 1904, particularly on the suffrage movement, and also included knowledge she had gained through further investigations, particularly in the sections on Eastern Europe and Asia, where she also added a chapter on Serbia. In the considerably expanded chapter on Russia, Schirmacher referred to English translations of resolutions, speeches and court cases commissioned and made available to her by a Russian activist.57

The chapters on China, Japan, India, and Turkey now included descriptions of legislative initiatives, congresses, associations, journals, and personalities. In the China chapter she also referred to a Paris lecture on women in China by a Chinese official, Sie-Tou-Fa (life dates unknown). Criticising his claim that there was no ‘féminisme’ in China in the light of what she had learned about the movement there, on one occasion she also uses the German term ‘Feminismus’ as a translation of his French statement. However, it remained a one-off use. The new insights Schirmacher had acquired in the meantime also led to a readjustment of her concept of civilisation. She now distinguished between ‘uncivilised countries’ and ‘countries of non-European civilisation’ (nicht zivilisierte Länder und Länder nicht europäischer Zivilisation).58

Transfers and Translations of a Concept

Despite the changes in perspective and framing, both the French and German publications discussed in this chapter focus on a phenomenon that from today’s perspective we would call the feminist movement. Their common focus was on activism aimed at changing women’s situation in society. This identical theme was not conveyed by a common term, but rather by a stable translation of the French notion ‘féminisme’ into the German notion ‘Frauenbewegung’—literally, ‘women’s movement’—and vice versa. Nowhere in Die moderne Frauenbewegung (or indeed anywhere else) did Schirmacher advocate the transfer of the French word ‘féminisme’ into the German language. Quite on the contrary, in her German writing for many years she invariably called the French movement ‘Frauenbewegung’.59 In her 1905 book, she even clarified that by this German word she meant all factions of the French movement. By including the French words ‘le féminisme chrétien’ in this statement she also affirmed that in her view the notion ‘féminisme’ was not reserved for the radical wing in France.60 This was mirrored in her consequent use of the term ‘féminisme’ whenever writing in French about the German movement and all its different groupings.61

An even broader concept of ‘féminisme’ became evident in Schirmacher’s (abridged) self-translation of her own German article ‘Züricher Studentinnen’ (Zurich Women Students), to which she gave the French title ‘Le féminisme a l’Université de Zurich’ (Feminism at the University of Zurich).62 In the German version, the term ‘Frauenbewegung’ had not appeared anywhere, and scattered references to the woman question and emancipation only served to identify issues discussed among professors and students, among many other things. Schirmacher’s choice of the word ‘féminisme’ in the French translation indicated differences both of language and culture. First, in nineteenth-century Germany, the mentioning of ‘women students’ (Studentinnen) without further comment in itself already connotes the idea of a right that women did not have there, namely to study, implying a connection to the women’s movement. This was not the case in France, where the universities had admitted women since the 1860s; women students there were not necessarily connected to the women’s movement. A literal translation such as ‘Les Étudiantes’, for example, would therefore have omitted an important connotation of the German title. Second, in France, where women’s emancipation was an idea supported also by men, and feminist associations (which did not have a mass membership) existed mainly in Paris, the term ‘féminisme’ denoted a different kind of movement than in Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries, where organising was an essential strategy.63 In France, ‘féminisme’ described a more general view of the world, a view that was also found among women students (and some of their professors) in Zurich.

The conceptual history of both the French and the German terms can help explain the clear (and influential) choices Schirmacher made as a translator, self-translator, and author in both languages.64 In her research on the emergence of the French neologism, ‘féminisme’ Karen Offen has shown how the concept was brought to the fore in the growing feminist movement of the 1890s. She points to the misattribution to Charles Fourier (1772–1837) (which, however, helped to give the term some history) and traces its evolution from a pejorative term coined by Alexandre Dumas the Younger (1824–1895) into a positive label indicating a demand for women’s rights, first used in this sense by Hubertine Auclert (1848–1914).65 Gisela Bock has contributed to this research in her illuminating conceptual history of the term ‘Frauenemanzipation’ (women’s emancipation) and its onomasiological alternatives with her research on early uses of the term ‘Feminismus’ in the German language. She points out that ‘Feminismus’ was mentioned only very sporadically around 1900; its meaning remained disputed, and, above all, no faction of the women’s movement identified with the term in Germany.66 Its French original version, however, took off steeply from the mid-1890s onwards. Despite some criticism, it soon became the collective term for the entire movement.67

Bock and Offen mention an early record of the concept ‘féminisme’ in Germany, namely Eugénie Pontonié-Pierre’s (1844–1898) report on the French women’s movement at the International Congress of Women in Berlin 1896.68 However, as noted already in Chapter 1, Pontonié-Pierre did not attend the congress in person, instead entrusting Käthe Schirmacher with the task of presenting a German translation of her report.69 But in the minutes of the congress, which comprised English, French, and German texts, the French original was published in French without mentioning that the author had not been present at the congress personally and a German summary of her speech had been given on her behalf.70 Therefore, we have no record of whether Schirmacher proposed a use of the term in Germany on this occasion. However, her German press reports on the 1896 congress in Paris and her French reports on the women’s congress in Berlin in the same year speak strongly against this possibility, as Schirmacher consistently used ‘Frauenkongress’ for both events in German and ‘Congrès féministe’ for the same events in French.

In France, Schirmacher, as a writer for La Fronde, was among the activists who successfully propagated the new word ‘féminisme’. Among the contributions of the Fronde to its introduction was a column entitled ‘Chronique féministe’, which noted achievements of women and activities of the movement and thus defined a certain type of event and statement as pertaining to that category.71 Schirmacher, for her part, being both a French and German journalist, helped to establish ‘féminisme’ precisely by not transferring it into the German language. Consistently translating ‘féminisme’ into the then well-established German word ‘Frauenbewegung’ (and vice versa), she provided it with a stable meaning in her writings. Karen Offen’s claim that Schirmacher was ‘one of a handful of Germans who did use the French terminology’ and thus advocated the concept ‘feminism’, is misleading in more ways than one, as it disregards the fact that although Schirmacher propagated the French term ‘féminisme’, she used neither the German word ‘Feminismus’ nor the English word ‘feminism’.72 It also ignores the complex transnational dynamics of transfer and translation of key concepts of a movement.

How important it was for Schirmacher to avoid any confusion between the German term ‘Frauenbewegung’ and occasional and tentative uses of the Germanised term ‘Feminismus’ became clear in 1904. In a debate with a critic of the women’s movement who had identified the movement with ‘Feminismus’, she firmly rejected the equation of the two terms. The healthy and empowering ‘Frauenbewegung’, she declared, had nothing to do with the ‘unhealthy eroticism’ (ungesunde Erotik) and ‘liberation only of carnal desires’ (einseitige Emanzipation des Fleisches) that characterised ‘Feminismus’.73 The exchange illustrates the use of the term as early as 1904; but it also demonstrates that the meaning of ‘Feminismus’ was very similar to that of the concept ‘Frauenemanzipation’ (women’s emancipation) which in the early nineteenth century had become associated with the ‘liberation of carnal desires’. Many activists of the women’s movement, therefore, avoided references to ‘women’s emancipation’ which consequently led to the introduction of the terms ‘Frauenfrage’ (women question) and ‘Frauenbewegung’ (women’s movement).74 Taking this history into account, we can understand that Schirmacher, in order to maintain the stability of her translation between ‘féminisme’ (which she sought to promote in France) and ‘Frauenbewegung’ (which denoted a clear feminist agenda in Germany), perceived an ill-defined but sexually connoted German term ‘Feminismus’ only as a threat.

In Switzerland, however, the development differed from that in Germany. In 1900, in a Swiss article quoting Schirmacher’s 1899 overview on the state of the women’s movements in various countries, the author considered it necessary to clarify that ‘féminisme’ was to be translated as ‘Frauenbewegung’.75 But in the following years, the German neologism ‘Feminismus’ was increasingly used as a parallel term to ‘Frauenbewegung’ in Switzerland. Here, the Swiss proximity to French culture played an important role, as shown by several articles discussing ‘Feminismus’ in the sense of ‘féminisme` in 1909. They all either referred to the movement in France or were translations from French Swiss publications. As in France, male supporters were prominent in Switzerland, too.76 This exceptional development, however, does not seem to have had much influence on the word’s use in other German-speaking countries.

In 1912, the 1909 edition of Schirmacher’s book Die moderne Frauenbewegung was translated by Carl Conrad Eckhardt into English and published under the title The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement. A Historical Survey, which reflected the American terminology by using the singular ‘woman’.77 In any case, the term ‘women’s/woman movement’ conveyed such a broad concept that its meaning had to be specified. Schirmacher was already aware of this in 1898 when she distinguished between ‘the women’s movement’ and ‘the women’s rights movement’ which she identified with the ‘woman suffrage movement’. In her French publication she used the English terms and added the French translations ‘mouvement des femmes’, ‘movement pour les droit des femmes’, and ‘mouvement pour le suffrage des femmes’.78 Her translator Eckhardt, however, decided to refer to ‘rights’ in the title of his translation, which the German title does not. Presumably he did this because a reference to suffrage would have been too narrow given the book’s diverse content that included social and legal situations and movements. Thereby, he also highlighted a particular perspective of the text: its character as a handbook on different situations of women in different countries and various initiatives to change them. In a translator’s note, Eckhardt pointed to the book’s ambivalent character but also emphasised its practical usefulness. Since ‘there has been no English book giving a history of the woman’s rights movement’ he hoped it would be welcomed by English and American readers although it was also a ‘political pamphlet’ communicating views not everybody would agree with.79

At this time, the term ‘feminism’ was already circulating in the English language. That Eckhard decided not to use it as a translation for ‘Frauenbewegung’ points to the instability of the new buzzword. On its way from France to the UK and the USA it had adopted various new meanings. It connoted a younger generation of women and their dissatisfaction with the restricted aims and tactics of the older women’s movement.80 Sometimes, however, ‘feminism’ was also used in a very broad sense, referring for example to a distant historical period, or it was used in a pejorative context.81 These uses exemplify the term’s availability for diverse meanings. After 1910, the notions ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ became linked to radical factions of the women’s movement in the UK and the USA, most prominently represented in the magazine Freewoman. A Weekly Feminist Review, which first came out in 1911.82 Here, the term ‘feminism’ signalled a new formation of thinking that was characterised by a stress on individualism and self-realisation unknown to the older generation of activists.83

Unlike in Germany, in the UK and in the USA the term was adopted by a group of activists. These women, formerly associated with militant suffragism, called themselves the ‘feminist avant-garde’ and thus aimed at linking ‘feminism’ with a specific political idea.84 Translation was part of the strategy of these activists, as demonstrated by a 1911 publication by the recently-founded International Suffrage Shop.85 The third issue of the shop’s series ‘New Era Booklets’ had the title The Feminist Catechism. This was the English translation of the last chapter of the small book La Femme et le Peuple by French writer Léonie Rouzade (1839–1916). The English title indicates a programmatic text, but this is not reflected in the book’s style and content. And indeed, in the original French publication the translated chapter, a dialogue between ‘the people’ and ‘the woman’ about the future organisation of social life, has a different title, namely ‘Le Peuple et la Femme’. Moreover, the term ‘féminisme’ (or ‘catéchisme’ for that matter) is nowhere to be found in the entire French book. So we may say that the anonymous English translator had transformed a much more explorative and experimental text into a political programme and attributed the term ‘feminism’ to it in order to create an origin for this term.86 The English edition of Rouzade’s book chapter indeed was an activist translation as defined by Maria Tymoczko: it left out what was not useful in the new context (the first part of the booklet), changed the meaning, and imagined a model (a movement inspired by this catechism in France) for a new movement in the Anglo-Saxon world to emulate.87 It is worth mentioning that Rouzade’s French booklet published in 1905 was actually written in May 1896, as indicated on the last page. The absence of the term ‘féminisme’ makes it clear that neither in the year in which the French activists claimed to have introduced the very concept ‘féminisme’ successfully, nor nine years later, was ‘féminisme’ a necessary element of a text from the heart of the movement.

Reviews, Receptions, and Reflections

If one compares Käthe Schirmacher’s French overviews of women’s movements from 1898 and 1899 with her German survey from 1905/1909, the continuity of many themes and perspectives is conspicuous: the sociological perspective on the situation of women in a given society, the awareness of class differences, the focus on the history of the movement and its organisations, the details of education, work, legal and political situations.88 Information from her French studies was clearly excerpted, regrouped, and supplemented for the German book. Schirmacher used her earlier texts as a resource, as a repository for details and facts which were integrated in new contexts, but also for self-translations. The transfer of many elements from one text to the other may also help to explain the conceptual and formal heterogeneity of the German study, which not only contained chapters of varying length, clarity, and detail, but also left (or bent) its own conceptual framework when it got in the way either of Schirmacher’s intention of providing practical information for activists or of an argument she wanted to make.

However, several changes in terms of argumentative framework, message, and readership are also noticeable. The analytical comparative approach to a few European countries was replaced by the claim to cover the whole world. This resulted in a hierarchical ordering of countries based on the concept of civilisation. Instead of providing information for a general audience the new publication addressed activists’ need for politically useful information. Against this background, it is interesting to examine how these texts were received in different contexts.

Käthe Schirmacher’s small French book Le féminisme aux États-Unis and her Revue de Paris essay on the women’s movement in Germany in the same year were received well in France and in Germany. A French reviewer praised the clarity and conciseness of the comparative study and only regretted that the author had not included personal observations and views.89 A review of the essay on Germany reported on its content in detail and Schirmacher’s further publications in well-established intellectual journals not associated with the women’s movement show that she had been able to establish herself in the French press as an expert on the subject.90

The German Neue Bahnen not only praised the author for her multilingual writing and her academic achievements but—notwithstanding a minor critique of the Russia chapter—summarised all the book’s chapters approvingly and thanked Schirmacher particularly for all the new information about France. The reviewer A. S. also acknowledged the comparative approach saying that it would serve to better understand the movement in Germany, too. A. S., presumably the journal’s editor Auguste Schmidt (1833–1902), also reflected on the term ‘féminisme’ which in her opinion was not identical with the German words ‘Frauenbewegung’ and ‘Frauenfrage’, as it included also the activities of male supporters and was more focused on the issue of women’s rights. For lack of an alternative the author worked with the translation ‘Feminismus’ for her review, although she felt uncomfortable about it.91 And indeed, the word was not used again in this journal.92

Schirmacher’s German book Die moderne Frauenbewegung received mainly German reviews, most of them favourable, some criticising its polemics against men.93 All reviewers welcomed the comprehensive information, some particularly pointing to the statistical material, others to the information on juridical questions.94 The most critical (and also longest) review was by the Austrian Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein (1863–1940), former fellow feminist activist and a Social Democrat since 1897. She rejected Schirmacher’s criticism of socialist propaganda and accused her of political naivety and misrepresentations of the political aims of the Social Democratic Party. However, she also appreciated the wealth of data and the concise presentation and characterised the book as a useful handbook for the middle-class women’s movement, partly thanks to its brevity. Having obviously read the whole book, she listed errors but also appreciated Schirmacher’s careful research on the living and working conditions of working women of all classes. Like other reviewers, she disliked Schirmacher’s sharp remarks against men. Her respect for the author despite their political differences was expressed in the fact that she also reviewed the second edition and acknowledged the additions and corrections.95

Notwithstanding some positive reviews and an honourable mention in an edition of the suffragettes’ journal Votes for Women, the most decisive (and damaging) reaction to Schirmacher’s English book was a non-reaction.96 Schirmacher’s fellow activists of the IWSA greeted her new publication with complete silence. After the book’s German version had been praised as an informal handbook of the IWSA congress in Stockholm 1911, making the creation of a new handbook unnecessary, the translation of Schirmacher’s book into English had been a sensible undertaking.97 However, this changed after Schirmacher’s break with the IWSA. In 1913, a handbook of the IWSA was published in three editions—English, German, and French. Its editors claimed that the decision to produce these joint publications had been taken at the 1911 Stockholm congress.98 In these books Schirmacher’s writings, which had hitherto connected the movement across languages and borders, were not mentioned, either in the text or in the bibliography. Her work was increasingly erased from institutional memory. This was also exemplified in her growing disputes with the journal Jus Suffragii, which had refused to print an article by her in German but had instead (in Schirmacher’s view) mistranslated and abridged it.99 Schirmacher reacted by sending nit-picking corrections to the editor.100

The reception of Schirmacher’s English book took place only outside of her former political context of international suffrage activism. One such example was the book The Feminist Movement by socialist feminist Ethel Snowden (1881–1951). Being an outsider to the IWSA, she had no problem with quoting Schirmacher in the bibliography. Her book appeared in 1913, in the same year that the term ‘feminism’ gained prominence in the Anglo-Saxon countries and several books and programmatic articles propagated the new political identity of a group of younger women discontented with the ‘rights’ movement of an earlier generation and its moral rigour.101

Snowden, for her part, reflected the individualism of the British feminist avant-garde by claiming that the object of feminism was ‘to make female human beings as free as male human beings, and both as free as it is possible for the individual to be in a complex society like that of the present’.102 Like Schirmacher, on whose writings she drew heavily, Snowden embraced the concept of modernity and claimed to be speaking for the entire world. And like Schirmacher again, Snowden compared countries in an orientalising way. She declared: ‘the Romance countries are far behind the Teutonic communities in their treatment of women, whilst the Slavic and Oriental races are still in the earlier stages of development in this particular’.103 This hierarchisation of the world in the name of ‘feminism’ can serve as an example of what Lucy Delap has called the darker aspects of ‘vanguard feminism’ of the 1910s that also informed later uses of the term.104

By 1912, when the English translation of Die moderne Frauenbewegung was published, the movement Käthe Schirmacher had described in Le féminisme aux États-Unis in 1898 had grown considerably in many countries, a development Schirmacher documented in her subsequent publications. At the same time, the term with which she had characterised the phenomenon, the French neologism ‘féminisme’, had also emerged into the world. However, as I have shown in this chapter, it changed its meaning in various ways due to the varying uses by particular groups in different places. The term ‘feminism’ that the socialist internationalist Snowden used in 1913 differed significantly from what had been described as ‘féminisme’ fifteen years earlier. A neologism that described a male-supported movement for women’s rights had turned into an ambivalent term that on the one hand pointed to a radical faction of the women’s movement but at the same time also stood for a racialising and orientalising view of the situation of women from a global perspective.

Notes

  1. 1.

    On conceptual history see Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2006); Kari Palonen, ‘Translation, Politics and Conceptual Change’, in Global Conceptual History: A Reader, eds. Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic,) 2016; Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden, and Javier Fernández Sebastián, Conceptual History in the European Space (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017); on the concept of self-translation see Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, eds. Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Sara Kippur, Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Ilan Stavans, On Self-Translation: Meditations on Language (New York: State University of New York, 2018).

  2. 2.

    On the development of an inter/transnational women’s movement: Francisca De Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, and Krassimira Daskalova, eds. Women’s Activism. Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); on the concepts transnational and international: Corinna Oesch, ‘Internationale Frauenbewegungen. Perspektiven einer Begriffsgeschichte und einer transnationalen Geschichte’, Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte 22, no. 2 (2016), 25–37.

  3. 3.

    For example, Maikki Friberg, ‘Den internationella kvinnosakskongressen i Paris’, Nutid: Tidskrift for Samhallsfreagor och Hemmets Intressen (1896), 104–110; B. Phillips, ‘Women’s Congress in Paris’, The Woman’s Journal 27, no. 20 (1896); Arap-Vely, ‘Charakterköpfe aus der modernen Frauenbewegung. Zum Internationalen Frauen-Congreß in Berlin, 1.-26. September 1896’, Prager Tagblatt, 17 September 1896; Ozv Nendtvichne Hoffmann Jolan, ‘A BERLINI NOI KONGRESSZUS’, Nemzeti Noneveles 17, no. 8 (October/November 1896).

  4. 4.

    For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Der internationale Frauenkongress in Paris, 8. bis 12. April 1896’, Frauen-Reich: Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 23, no. 17 (1896); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Congrès Féministe International de Berlin’, Journal des Débats, 04 September 1896.

  5. 5.

    For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauenbewegung in Frankreich (Feuilleton)’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 Januar 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme allemand (La Tribune)’, La Fronde, 22–24 December 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauenbewegung in Frankreich’, Schweizer Frauen-Zeitung 19, no. 15 (1897).

  6. 6.

    For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frau im Orient’,Vossische Zeitung, 8 August 1897.

  7. 7.

    A selection was republished as a book already in 1897: Käthe Schirmacher, Aus aller Herren Länder. Gesammelte Feuilletons (Paris, Leipzig: H. Welter, 1897).

  8. 8.

    Nl Schirmacher 126/003, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 1 February 1897; Nl Schirmacher 011/004, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 21 January 1896; Käthe Schirmacher, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, en France, dans la Grande-Bretagne, en Suède, et en Russie (Paris: A. Colin, 1898).

  9. 9.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Notes sur l’état actuel du féminisme’, Revue de Morale Sociale, no. 2 (June 1899), 220–36.

  10. 10.

    On the male support of the movement: Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–11.

  11. 11.

    Käthe Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung. Ein geschichtlicher Überblick (Leipzig: Tebner, 1905).

  12. 12.

    Alice Zimmern, Women’s Suffrage in Many Lands, (London: Francis, 1909); the book was translated into French in 1911.

  13. 13.

    The International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Report of the Sixth Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Stockholm Sweden, June 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 1911 (London: Women’s Printing Society 1911), 34. The creation of a handbook had first been discussed in Copenhagen 1906. See International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Report: Second and Third Conferences of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Berlin, Germany, June 3, 4, 1904, Copenhagen, Denmark, Aug. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 1906, 36.

  14. 14.

    Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France. The Musée Social & The Rise of the Welfare State (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); The Musée’s approach is exemplified in a typical lecture: Georges Blondel, Les transformations sociales de l’Allemagne contemporaine, conférence faite au Musée social le 15 mars 1898 (Paris, 1898); Schirmacher, who made excerpts from German books for Blondel (Nl Schirmacher 011/017, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 10 May 1896) reviewed one of his books and referred to his social statistics: S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemange (“Le monde officiel est en vacances…”)’, La Fronde, 11 April 1898; S. [Käthe Schirmacher], ‘Lettre d’Allemagne (“Si le conflit hispano-américain…”’, La Fronde, 26 April 1898.

  15. 15.

    Schirmacher, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, 72.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 1.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 70.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 73.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 3.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 35.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 4.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 7 –8.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 40–41.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 12, 26, 40–41.

  25. 25.

    ‘Le féminisme allemand (La Tribune)’, La Fronde, 22–24 December 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le Féminisme en Allemagne’, Revue de Paris, 1 July 1898, 15–176.

  26. 26.

    Schirmacher, ‘Le Féminisme en Allemagne’, 172.

  27. 27.

    Anonymous, ‘Bücher- und Zeitschriftenschau’, Norddeutsche allgemeine Zeitung, 10 July 1898, 3.

  28. 28.

    Schirmacher, ‘Notes sur l’état’, 221.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 236.

  30. 30.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, III-V.

  31. 31.

    Schirmacher, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, 7–8; Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 3–4.

  32. 32.

    Schirmacher, Le féminisme aux États-Unis,, 9; Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 13.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., III.

  34. 34.

    Ibid. Schirmacher used the term ‘race’ as an equivalent for the human race she then specified through various national and cultural adjectives, e.g., ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ or ‘Romanic race’. See Käthe Schirmacher, Die Frauenbewegung, ihre Ursachen, Mittel und Ziele (Prag: J.G. Calve’sche k.u.k. Hof- und Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1904, second edition 1909, 133.

  35. 35.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 129.

  36. 36.

    Ibid.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    On ethnicising and racialising tendencies in international women’s movements see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History. British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC u.a.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994); Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy, and Angela Woollacott, eds. Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

  39. 39.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, III.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 84.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 22–30. The countries represented (either by delegates or messages) at the Berlin founder meeting were: USA, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. Alliance, Report: Second and Third Conferences, 5–10; the countries represented at the first suffrage conference in Washington 1902 (Canada among them) were invited to stand as charter members. See Report: First International Woman Suffrage Conference. Held at Washington, U.S.A., February 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 1902 (New York, NY: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1902).

  42. 42.

    Susan Zimmermann, ‘The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Development of Feminist Inter/National Politics’, Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005), 107–8; see also Corinna Oesch, ‘Kooperation, Konkurrenz und Separation. Von transnationalen Beziehungen und Nationalitätenkonflikten in der bürgerlich-liberalen Frauenstimmrechtsbewegung in Österreich vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in ‘Sie meinen es politisch!’ 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht in Österreich: Geschlechterdemokratie als gesellschaftspolitische Herausforderung, ed. Blaustrumpf ahoi (Wien: Löcker, 2019), 83–93; on the women’s movement in the Habsburg monarchy: Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Frauenbewegungen und Frauenwahlrecht’, in Politische Öffentlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft, eds. Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch, Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), 1005–27; Gabriella Hauch, Frauen bewegen Politik. Österreich 1848–1938, Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (Innsbruck et al.: StudienVerlag, 2009).

  43. 43.

    Zimmermann, ‘The Challenge’, 104.

  44. 44.

    Schirmacher also classified Norway and Finland as ‘countries’, although the former only left the union with Sweden in 1905 and the latter was under Russian rule.

  45. 45.

    With a footnote that the ‘theoretical side’ of the book was dealt with in another publication published in Prague in the same year, Schirmacher herself pointed out the pragmatic character of the compilation. Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, III. The theoretical text she referred to was: Schirmacher, Die Frauenbewegung, ihre Ursachen, Mittel und Ziele.

  46. 46.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 121, 123.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 69.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 70.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 76.

  50. 50.

    For example, Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 43, 90.

  51. 51.

    Else Lüders, Der linke Flügel. Ein Blatt aus der Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Berlin: Loewenthal, 1904); Anonymous, ‘Die Kongressleitung und die Radikalen’, Die Frauenbewegung, 15 August 1904.

  52. 52.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 73; see also: Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Frauenfrage – Frauenbewegung. Historisierung als politische Strategie’, in Rosa und Anna Schapire. Sozialwissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte und Feminismus um 1900, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Günther Sandner (Berlin: Aviva, 2017), 94–95.

  53. 53.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 74.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 73–74.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 5.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 87.

  57. 57.

    Käthe Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung: Ein geschichtlicher Überblick (second edition, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1909), 125.

  58. 58.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung (second edition 1909), 142.

  59. 59.

    For example, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauenbewegung in Frankreich (Feuilleton)’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 Januar 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauenbewegung in Frankreich’, Hillgers Illustriertes Frauen-Jahrbuch (1904/1905), 867–87.

  60. 60.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 93.

  61. 61.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme allemand (La Tribune)’, La Fronde, 22–24 December 1897; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme allemand’, Revue germanique 1, no. 3 (May/June 1905), 257–84.

  62. 62.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Züricher Studentinnen’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau (Freie Bühne) 6, no. 8 (1895), 817–25; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le féminisme à l’université de Zurich’, Revue Politique et Littéraire—Revue Bleue, no. 10 (1896), 310–14.

  63. 63.

    Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, 90.

  64. 64.

    Here I limit myself to aspects of the transnational history of the term feminism. To explore it as a ‘travelling concept’ in the sense suggested by Mieke Bal would imply an in-depth discussion on different theories of feminism which is beyond the scope of this book. See for this approach Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. (Toronto u.a., 2002).

  65. 65.

    Karen Offen, ‘On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist’, Feminist Issues 8, no. 2 (1988), 45–47.

  66. 66.

    Gisela Bock, ‘Begriffsgeschichten: “Frauenemanzipation” im Kontext der Emanzipationsbewegungen des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Gisela Bock, Geschlechtergeschichten der Neuzeit. Ideen, Politik, Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 100–52, at 125–6.

  67. 67.

    On contemporary rejections of the concept and alternative definitions: Rachel Mesch, Having It All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013), 5, 21.

  68. 68.

    Offen, ‘On the French Origin’, 48; Bock, ‘Begriffsgeschichten’, 125.

  69. 69.

    E. Dely, ‘Vom Internationalen Kongress für Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen zu Berlin’, Die Frau: Monatsschrift fur das Gesamte Frauenlebe Unserer Zeit 4, no. 1 (October 1896).

  70. 70.

    Rosalie Schoenflies et al., eds., Der Internationale Kongress für Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen in Berlin 19. bis 26. September 1896. Eine Sammlung der auf dem Kongress gehaltenen Vorträge und Ansprachen (Berlin: H. Walther, 1897), 39–42.

  71. 71.

    The irregularly published column was written by the Clotilde Dissard (1873–1919), the editor of La Revue Féministe. See, e.g., Clotilde Dissard, ‘La chronique féministe’, La Fronde, 12 January 1899.

  72. 72.

    Offen, Debating, 179.

  73. 73.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Frauenbewegung und Feminismus’, Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung (15 May 1904), 2116.

  74. 74.

    Bock, ‘Begriffsgeschichten’, 111.

  75. 75.

    Lina Hug, ‘Die Frauenbewegung in England und in der Schweiz’, Neue Züricher Zeitung und schweizerisches Handelsblatt, 26 April 1900.

  76. 76.

    Combe, T, ‘Feminismus ohne Polemik’, Frauenbestrebungen, no. 2 (1909), 11–2; A. de Morsier and C. C. St., ‘Feminismus mit Polemik’, Frauenbestrebungen, no. 4 (1909), 28–30; L L., ‘Einiges über den Ursprung des heutigen Feminismus (Vortrag)’, Frauenbestrebungen, no. 4 (1909), 31–2.

  77. 77.

    On this terminology: Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn. Et al.: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 3.

  78. 78.

    Schirmacher, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, 4.

  79. 79.

    Käthe Schirmacher, The Modern Woman's Rights Movement: A Historical Survey. Translated from the Second German Edition by Carl Conrad Eckhardt, Ph.D., (New York: Macmillan, 1912), VII.

  80. 80.

    Cott, The Grounding, 6.

  81. 81.

    Marie Alphonse René de Maulde-La-Clavière, The Women of the Renaissance: A Study of Feminism (New York and London: Putnam’s Sons and Swan Sonnenschein, 1900), this book was translated from French: Marie Alphonse René de Maulde-La-Clavière, Les Femmes de la Renaissance (Paris: Perrin, 1898); see also: Ernest Belfort Bax, The Fraud of Feminism (London: Grant Richards, 1913).

  82. 82.

    On the founding of the journal: Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20–29.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., 130–132.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 29–44.

  85. 85.

    On the history of the shop and other retail outlets of badges, pamphlets, books and other material in support of the suffrage movement cf. John Mercer, ‘Shopping for Suffrage: the campaign shops of the Women’s Social and Political Union’, Women’s History Review 18, no. 2 (2009), 293–309.

  86. 86.

    Léonie Rouzade, La femme et le peuple. Organisation sociale de demain, (Meudon: published by the author, 1905); Léonie Rouzade, The Feminist Catechism. The Social organization of To-Morrow. From the French of Léonie Rouzade (London: The International Suffrage Shop, 1911).

  87. 87.

    Maria Tymoczko, ‘Translation and Political Engagement’, The Translator 6, no. 1 (2000), 41–2.

  88. 88.

    For a first attempt to analyse this connection see Johanna Gehmacher, ‘In/Visible Transfers: Translation as a Crucial Practice in Transnational Women’s Movements around 1900’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin XLI (2019), 3–44, https://www.ghil.ac.uk/publications/bulletin/bulletin-41-2.

  89. 89.

    H. Bouet, ‘Le féminisme aux États-Unis, en France, dans la Grande-Bretagne, en Suède et en Russie, par Kaethe Schirmacher, in -16°. Paris, Aramand Colin et Cie, 1898’, Journal des économistes. Revue mensuelle de la science économique et de la statistique 57, no. 5°, XXXVI (October/December 1898).

  90. 90.

    P. Moreau, ‘Kaethe Schirmacher—Le féminisme en Allemagne’, Revue du droit public et de la science politique en France et à l’étranger 6, no. 4 (July/August 1899); further similar publications by Schirmacher, e.g.: Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le mouvement féministe à travers le monde’, La Revue, 1 December 1901; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le travail des femmes en France’, Le Musée Social. Mémoires & Documents, no. 6 (May 1902); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Le mouvement féministe’, La Revue,15 June 1902.

  91. 91.

    A. S. [Auguste Schmidt?], ‘Le Féminisme…’ [review], Neue Bahnen. Organ des allgemeinen deutschen Frauenvereins, 15 September 1898.

  92. 92.

    See also Bock, ‘Begriffsgeschichten’, 125–126.

  93. 93.

    Anonymous, ‘Dr. Käthe Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung (Bücherschau)’, Frauenbildung: Zeitschrift fur die gesamten Interessen des weiblichen Unterrichtswesens, 14 September 1905),

    ; G. H., ‘Die moderne Frauenbewegung. Von Dr. Kaethe Schirmacher’, Die Frauenbewegung 15 September 1910.

  94. 94.

    Anonymous, ‘Die moderne Frauenbewegung (Vom Büchertisch)’, Der Bazar, 8 October 1905; Anonymous, ‘Die moderne Frauenbewegung. Von Dr. Käthe Schirmacher in Paris’, Schweizer Frauen-Zeitung, no. 7 (1905).

  95. 95.

    Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, ‘Dr. Käte [sic] Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung, ein geschichtlicher Überblick. Leipzig 1905 [review]’, Die neue Zeit 23, no. 25 (1905), f828–9; Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, ‘Käte [sic] Schirmacher, Die moderne Frauenbewegung. Zweite Auflage. Leipzig 1909, Kamilla Theimer, Frauenarbeit in Österreich. Wien 1909 [review article]’, Die neue Zeit 28, no. 14 (1910), 508–9.

  96. 96.

    Anonymous, ‘The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement. A Historical Survey (Book Reviews)’, The Evening Star, 16 March 1912); Juanita Lea, I, ‘Woman’s Rights Movement by Dr. Kaethe Schirmacher’, The Detroit Times, 3 June 1912; K. D. S. [Katherine Douglas Smith], ‘An Irrestistible Force’, Votes for Women, 19 April 1912.

  97. 97.

    Alliance, Report of the Sixth Congress 1911, 34.

  98. 98.

    Chrystal Macmillan, Marie Stritt, and Maria Verone, Woman Suffrage in Practice. Second Impression with Corrections and Addition, ed. International Woman Suffrage Alliance and IAW (London and New York, 1913), vii.

  99. 99.

    Nl Sch 001/024, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 6 October 1913.

  100. 100.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Report of Galicia’, Jus Suffragii, 1 September 1913); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Dr. Schirmacher’s Corrections’, Jus Suffragii, 1 October 1913, 2–6; Nl Sch 001/022, Mary Sheepshanks to KS, 12 September 1913.

  101. 101.

    Cott, The Grounding, 13–5.

  102. 102.

    Ethel Snowden, The Feminist Movement (London: Collins’ Clear-Type Press, 1913), 18.

  103. 103.

    Snowden, The Feminist Movement, 43.

  104. 104.

    Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde.