Keywords

Käthe Schirmacher’s last book with a transnational agenda was published in the autumn of 1912. The beautifully designed cover of the volume bore the short, bilingual title Die Suffragettes in reference to a controversial topic, namely the militant faction of the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom.1 The book reveals Schirmacher as an expert on contemporary British suffrage politics. Although not a translation as such, the text drew heavily on the extensive 500-page history of the first five years of the movement by Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) that had been published the year before.2 Both books have in common the use of historicisation as a weapon to be instrumentalised in current political conflicts in their country.

This chapter examines Schirmacher’s 160-page history of the movement (which was to remain the only German book on the suffragettes for several decades), its contexts and receptions in German-speaking countries and beyond. I begin by exploring Schirmacher’s first references to the British militants and briefly outline the events and political stances on which she reported. I then discuss her decision to write a favourable book on the suffragettes in the context of her personal situation as well as the various controversies she was involved in at the time. Examining Schirmacher’s account of the movement and the arguments she used to explain militant strategies to a German audience, I analyse the ways in which she used and transformed the material available to her and how in her excerpts she adapted Pankhurst’s messages for her own agenda. The last two parts of the chapter give insights into the book’s considerable impact in various arenas, its contemporary reception, its translation into Polish, and its republications in the 1970s and 1980s.

Not Like a Lady

At the 1906 IWSA congress in Copenhagen, Dora Montefiore (1851–1933) reported on the British militants as a fraternal delegate (see Chapter 8) and was greeted with a ‘storm of applause’.3 In her account of the intensifying struggle for women’s suffrage, she reported that several women had been imprisoned ‘only for the manner in which they had demanded the vote’.4

In her newspaper report on the conference, Käthe Schirmacher highlighted this fact and discussed it in relation to British leader Millicent Fawcett’s (1847–1929) statement that every extension of the suffrage in history had involved some ‘breaking of the palings’, and that therefore suffrage societies should not be divided over militant or constitutional strategies.5 Schirmacher used this expression of sympathy for the suffragettes to argue against critical reports in German media on the heightened conflict in the UK. In her view, it illustrated the solidarity between moderate and radical suffrage activists in the country.6 Thus, her presumably first public reference to the militant activists already conveyed her support for these women whom she would adamantly defend in the years to follow. It also demonstrates how Schirmacher used a transnational reference as a way of intervening in controversies in the German Reich. At that moment, her critique was mainly directed at the press. She would, however, soon also use the example of the suffragettes in her confrontations with members of the German women’s movement. But who were the British activists she supported so enthusiastically?

From today’s perspective, the suffragettes are the most visible faction of the women’s suffrage movement in the UK. However, in terms of numbers and the time span of their activity, they represented only a small part of a much larger movement that dated back to mid-nineteenth-century initiatives.7 As early as the 1860s, a trans-regional network of women’s suffrage societies formed in the UK, and in 1896, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was officially founded.8 Under the presidency of Millicent Fawcett, it was already connecting hundreds of associations shortly after the turn of the century. These societies had a large membership campaigning for women’s suffrage, using petitions, publications, and the informal networks of politicians friendly to the women’s vote.9 Many of them hoped that the Liberals would help their cause, and some also officially supported the Liberal Party. However, despite the movement’s broad support, its history also shows that political participation was difficult to achieve by purely constitutional means. As women were not part of the electorate (whereby suffrage at the time was also based on property and census), they did not have any direct leverage on the political public. The decade up to the beginning of the First World War was characterised by parliamentary initiatives for women’s suffrage and various strategies to obstruct the bills on women’s behalf by Liberal and Conservative politicians.

The obvious lack of interest among major political forces of the country in bringing women’s suffrage about, and their strategies of deferring action, prompted the formation of a new and more radical association, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 in Manchester and led by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928). Although this had links to the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the WSPU activists committed themselves to non-partisanship and developed new and more visible forms of activism. From 1905 onwards, they disrupted public meetings of the ruling Liberal Party by pestering speakers with insistent questions about their stance on votes for women. When they were thrown out of the meetings, they provoked the authorities into arresting and sentencing them for obstructing the police, and then refused to pay the fines, risking imprisonment. In this way, they staged a spectacle of police and judicial violence against women, for which they (and a considerable proportion of the public) held the government accountable. Their intention to distinguish their cause from other forms of activism was symbolically expressed by the conscious adoption of the originally pejorative term ‘suffragettes’ (in contrast to the older movement’s self-designation as suffragists). The militancy of the early years consisted mainly of transgressing gender norms and not conforming to the behaviour expected of women, which provoked drastic reactions from public institutions and made the violence visible that went along with these reactions.10 However, this strategy had a radicalising logic that led the WSPU activists, who had moved their offices to London in 1906, to increasingly resort to practices beyond legality.11

With spectacular actions such as chaining themselves to the railings in front of Downing Street in 1908, the militants attracted a great deal of media attention.12 Provoking strong reactions, both negative and positive, they helped to bring the issue of suffrage onto the national agenda. The NUWSS leadership, therefore, initially credited the WSPU with revitalising the movement.13 In the following years, the whole suffrage movement, not only the militants, began to organise public speeches, marches, and performances of their struggle by employing various sorts of art, in short, to use ‘the street as a stage’.14 However, when in 1908 WSPU members not only started smashing the windows of public offices but also urged women to ‘rush the House of Commons’ the NUWSS publicly distanced itself from these strategies.15 This also led to tensions in the transnational arena. Although the delegates of the 1909 IWSA conference in London attended an event in honour of militant activists who had been imprisoned, the report on British suffrage politics also caused controversy on the question of whether to include recognition of extra-legal acts or not.16 And although the IWSA committed itself to non-interference into national politics, its president, Carrie Chapman Catt, dedicated a considerable part of her official speech to the controversies in British activism.17 In the same year, Schirmacher intensified her writing on the suffragettes in German journals,18 making clear her support for the activists. However, unlike Lida-Gustava Heymann, for example, she did not mention the growing disunity among the British suffrage organisations, but instead focused on the support for the suffragettes among constitutional suffragists and in important sections of British society (see Chapter 8).19

Schirmacher had good relations with both the major suffrage journals in the UK—the NUWSS journal Common Cause, where she published reports from Germany, and the WSPU journal Votes for Women, edited by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867–1954) and her husband Frederick (1871–1961), which favourably reviewed several of Schirmacher’s books.20 In 1911, she expressed her support for ‘the suffragettes who have gone to prison for the cause’ by sending them a poem of hers that she had had printed as a pamphlet.21 Votes for Women published the German lines together with an English translation.22 Two things are to be noted here. Schirmacher, who spoke and wrote English so well, did not try to translate her poem or find another way to address the suffragettes in their own language. Nor did the content explicitly refer to suffrage. It was a message about her own struggle, fought in a different place and language. But it conveyed the emotions that made her feel connected with the women she admired for their determination. In a mixture of rhyming and blank verse the poem alluded to chivalry, war, honour, and freedom and used the term ‘Frauenwacht’ (women’s watch) to establish a link between femininity and militarism.23 The anonymous translator gave up this connotation by choosing the gender-neutral title ‘The Advance Guard’ thus including an idea of progress that was not present in Schirmacher’s poem.24

Schirmacher’s German writings on the suffragettes bear witness of her admiration for the British militants. She stressed that these women were the first in history to use their efforts and their power for themselves. These women, she held, had ceased to contribute anonymously to the accomplishment of men through their work and sympathy; they did not support a cause important to men but demanded rights for themselves. Schirmacher was convinced that this new self-respect and the willingness to fight, suffer, and even die for the women’s cause had historical significance. She even called it ‘the biggest revolution in the world’ (die größte Revolution der Welt).25 Schirmacher also pointed out that the suffragettes were openly supported by a number of representatives of the Christian churches in the UK and described them as crusaders and martyrs for a just cause.26 She defended the suffragettes’ aggressive tactics by saying that to resist was the only way to win respect, a lesson that in her view was particularly hard to learn for women. In one of her articles she underlined this by inserting the French phrase ‘L’homme respecte ce qui lui résiste’ (Man respects what resists him) into the German text, thus emphasising the transnational significance of the message.27

Schirmacher used the British press, particularly Votes for Women, as the primary source for her journalistic reports, often explicitly stating the titles and publication dates of the articles she used.28 She combined this transfer to the German public with sharp criticism of the German press, accusing German journalists both of not being able to read English and of not recognising the heroic acts of women.29 She was particularly outraged that they had failed to report on the suffragists’ hunger strike in 1909, their self-sacrificing efforts, and their subsequent success in attracting public attention and their release from prison. This type of criticism remained a constant theme of her writings about the suffragettes in the years that followed. At times when she was not given space for an article, Schirmacher also got around this by writing letters to the editor adding information that she felt had been omitted from earlier reports in the same newspaper.30

In several of her articles Schirmacher chose a historical perspective, legitimising the suffragettes’ actions through examples from the history of men’s suffrage, which had also been won by violent methods.31 She also used historical accounts of women’s earlier suffrage campaigns to demonstrate how peaceful tactics had not been taken seriously.32 The text in question also shows how closely she followed the arguments developed in Votes for Women. In the case of one article, she literally translated into German a chapter from the history of the movement by Frederick W. Pethick-Lawrence which had been published in issues of Votes for Women in the spring of 1910. In her translation, she added an introduction and brief explanations and omitted some information that she thought was interesting only to a British audience. Although she did not name the author, she indicated the journal from which she had drawn the text.33 It is worth noting, however, that she cited Pethick-Lawrence’s English chapter title ‘Forty Years of Ladylike Methods’ in her introduction, but titled her translation with ‘Vierzig Jahre friedlicher Arbeit’ (Forty Years of Peaceful Work), thus erasing both the gender and class aspects of the term ‘ladylike’.

But she took up the notion of the ‘lady’ in a whole-hearted support for the suffragettes after their big window-smashing campaign in March 1912. Using the title ‘Sind das noch Damen?’ (Are These Still Ladies?) Schirmacher gave an overview of the history of the suffragettes’ struggle, explicitly justifying their violence, in the suffrage journal Frauenstimmrecht!34 Here, she distinguished the ‘lady’ and her class egoism from the suffragette and her thirst for justice. In their self-sacrifice, Schirmacher held, the militant suffrage activists ‘followed Christ’ and were thus recognised by the Christian church. The article combined comprehensive information drawn from British papers with burning support for the militant suffrage activists. The text was soon reprinted as a pamphlet, thus illustrating the propagandistic potential of transnational information transfer.35

Contexts and Controversies

Käthe Schirmacher would remain one of the most ardent advocates of the suffragettes in German-speaking countries until the beginning of the First World War, and thus consciously occupied a very exposed position in relation to the German reading public.36 Her 1912 book Die Suffragettes formed part of this. The significance of her support for the militant activists in the UK must be seen in the context of both the specific history of the demand for suffrage in the German women’s movement and the various controversies within and outside the movement in which Schirmacher was involved. These conflicts and controversies concerned her position on universal suffrage, the relationship between radicals and moderates in the women’s movement, and, above all, her growing commitment to German nationalism, one of the motives for her return to Germany in 1910.

As early as the 1890s, prominent representatives of the moderate movement were demanding equal suffrage.37 However, this was only one among other issues raised by the wider movement. Organised suffragism developed within the radical wing. Here, a single-issue association, the Hamburg-based German Union for Women’s Suffrage (Deutscher Verein für Frauenwahlrecht), soon to be transformed into an alliance of suffrage organisations from different parts of Germany named German Federation for Women’s Suffrage (Deutscher Verband für Frauenstimmrecht, DVF) evolved.38

However, the German suffragists active in the larger DVF were divided over the issue of democratic (universal) suffrage. Should they demand universal suffrage from the beginning, thereby risking a delay to women’s right to vote, or should they ask only for the same voting rights as men? This was complicated by different voting rights for men in different German states. Since 1871, the German Reich had adopted universal male suffrage in elections at a federal level. However, several member states had various hierarchical systems based on property and income; thus, many elections to regional diets did not admit all men on the basis of universal male suffrage.39 These differences, and the fact that the Social Democrats called for universal suffrage, meant that the question facing the DVF was difficult and controversial.40 The German women’s movement had committed itself to political neutrality and many saw it as a violation of that neutrality to explicitly demand what the Social Democrats also had on their platform, namely universal suffrage. The debates over these issues divided the member associations of the DVF, which in the end adopted universal suffrage in its programme in 1907. The controversies even led to the foundation of new associations that, like most British suffrage societies, simply demanded equal suffrage to men or left the question open. The split in the movement deepened in the following years and the conflicts could not be resolved until the beginning of the First World War.41

Unlike the majority of the radicals, Käthe Schirmacher, who had participated in the founding of the DVF, took a critical stance on universal suffrage for reasons of principle. In France, particularly, she viewed it as endangering the unity of society.42 But she also openly criticised universal suffrage in the context of the German debate and believed her own frankness was to blame for the fact that she was not elected to the board of the DVF.43 Thus, the disagreement about goals and strategies also became a question of her personal position within suffrage organisations in Germany.

Another controversy in which Schirmacher was involved concerned the relationship of the umbrella organisation of the radicals, the Federation of Progressive Women’s Associations (Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine, VFF) with the older League of German Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), the German member organisation of the ICW. The VFF united organisations with more progressive political positions (on education, the opening of the professions, the social question, and suffrage) than the BDF. The relationship between the two political bodies was, however, complicated, as they had many members in common. When the possibility of a formal membership of the VFF in the BDF was debated in 1907, a majority (including Schirmacher) favoured the connection with the BDF and its important networks. However, a group around Anita Augspurg and Lida-Gustava Heymann thought the VFF should remain a separate organisation, thus aiming at a clean break with the moderate movement.44 When this group left the board of the VFF, Schirmacher, although still living in France, was promoted to the position of vice president of the association, for which she went on extended lecture tours in 1908.45 However, she soon lost this position due to another conflict related to German nationalism (see Chapter 7).

Although many activists linked their struggle for suffrage with sympathies for left or left-liberal politics, some German radicals, among them Schirmacher, participated in nationalist politics that gained influence in the years leading up to the First World War. An important background to the growing nationalism in the country was the tension between the internal nationalising dynamics triggered by German unification in 1871 and the multinational population of some parts of the country, especially in Prussia, where a significant proportion of citizens identified as Poles and campaigned for a Polish state.46 The Prussian government, supported by nationalistic associations, in particular the German Eastern Marches Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein), pursued a harsh policy of Germanisation and internal colonisation via repressive language policies and the aggressive promotion of German settlement in the mixed parts of the country.47 Notwithstanding her active participation in transnational feminist networks, the IWSA in particular, Schirmacher actively endorsed this policy from 1904 onwards.48 It is worth noting that she developed these two commitments simultaneously and obviously did not see them as contradicting each other. Her first nationalist public statement dates back to 1903 when she published anti-Czech and anti-Polish articles in a French political journal.49

In a heated correspondence on the issue, Anita Augspurg declared that she would always try to prevent Schirmacher promoting her nationalist ideas in the context of the suffrage association DVF.50 In the VFF, two groups fought for dominance, a minority around Maria Lischnewska and the Liberal Women’s Party (Liberale Frauenpartei), who promoted nationalistic and imperialistic positions in the German East, and an anti-imperialist majority.51 As a member of the nationalist group, Schirmacher was not re-elected to the board of the VFF in the autumn of 1909 (see Chapter 7).52

The controversies that took place in and beyond the women’s movement became known to the public through articles in the press in Germany, France, and in Polish-language newspapers.53 Clearly, Schirmacher followed the various reports about her. In 1909, she published a rebuttal of an attack in a Polish paper, choosing a remarkable strategy; she published a translation of what had been said about her in Polish to illustrate the misogynistic strategies of her opponents, thus using translation as an instrument in a nationalist struggle to expose her Polish adversaries and to call for women’s solidarity. In Nowa Reforma she had been presented as ‘the rather ugly and now old Miss Dr. Schirmacher, or, as she is popularly called in Polish Poznań, “the furious Kasia”’ (dość brzydkiej i starej już panny dra Schirmacher, czyli, jak ją popularnie Poznań polski nazywa, ‘wściekłej Kasi’).54

These conflicts increasingly threatened Schirmacher’s professional position as a journalist.55 Her move to Germany in 1910 must thus be seen in the context of her political involvement in German nationalist politics and of a professional crisis. Having estranged many of her network partners in the French press and in German liberal papers, she obviously thought that she could only establish a new position in German journalism if she also lived in Germany. The fact that she increasingly chose controversial topics should, therefore, not only be taken as evidence that she was willing to abandon public consensus when she was convinced of a cause. It could also be seen as an escalation strategy by a journalist under pressure who hoped in this way to regain publishing space by creating visibility through polarising statements. The book on the suffragettes can be seen as evidence of both.

Explaining a Militant Movement to a German Audience

Schirmacher followed the events in the UK closely, and in the first months of 1912, when the fight between suffragettes and the British government reached a new climax with the window-smashing campaign in March, she repeatedly wrote in her diary how concerned she was about the situation in the UK.56 As early as February, she had made a plan to write a German book on the suffragettes.57 Just one week after she had first noted the idea in her diary, she signed a contract with her editor and committed herself to finish the work by the end of August the same year.58 The work on the manuscript is documented in her diary over four weeks in June and July 1912.59 Before and during her work on the book, she published several shorter pieces on the issue.60

The book’s stated goal was to explain to contemporaries why the suffragettes, whom Schirmacher described as ‘educated women of a leading civilised country’, used violence to demand their rights. Schirmacher had submitted to the task, she said, because of the total failure of the press to do so. Linking the liberal concept of the self-empowerment of the political individual with nationalism, she used a quote from Lord Byron’s famous stanza on the Greek struggle for independence when she held that ‘who would be free, themselves must strike the blow’. She declared that women had to be seen as sovereign individuals and demanded that the suffragettes, like the Greek nationalists, should be viewed as fighters for their freedom.61 With this quote, Schirmacher also implicitly referred to the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), who had brought Byron’s lines into the fight against slavery.62 Whether she knew of this connection is difficult to say, but given her close ties to the abolitionist movement against prostitution, it is imaginable that she was also familiar with the political language of abolitionism against slavery. However, she made explicit reference to the German literary canon by choosing a line by Goethe on the courage to change the world to be the motto for her book.

The 160-page volume is constructed as a useful handbook, giving short but well-documented answers to the major questions: Who are the suffragettes, what do they want, and how is this connected to the political institutions of constitution and parliament? After introducing the main protagonists and their cause, Schirmacher provides an overview of events since 1905 and then adds a number of short chapters describing the movement’s relationship to groups and institutions such as the law courts, the church, the press, but also ‘men’ and ‘women’ as well as ‘money’. In so doing, she also provides an introduction to the complex political system in the UK and to the main political groups, their goals, constituencies, and strategies. And she explains why the suffragettes had committed themselves to neutrality vis-à-vis political parties, making enfranchisement their only political aim. It allowed them to cooperate with whoever supported them and helped them sever ties with the Liberals, who the suffragists had long hoped would grant them the right to vote on the basis of their principles.63

A strong focus was on the legal and social situation of women, from the working class in particular. Like the suffragettes, Schirmacher argued that the legal situation of women was comparable to slavery. Many aspects of the social question such as poverty, overwork and extremely low wages for women, unhealthy living conditions, prostitution, women’s exposure to domestic violence, and their lack of a say in raising their children, all had to do with their lack of rights and the lack of understanding for the situation of women in the legislature. It was for the sake of the most exposed and exploited women that women needed to become legislators, the suffragettes held. This connection was expressed both in the participation of many working-class women in the struggle and the good relations of the WSPU with labour organisations.64 Thus a major legitimation of the struggle for the vote was the fight against social injustice, rather than an abstract concept of equality. Schirmacher made this clear by providing extensive details both of the social situation of working women and of examples of cooperation in activism between middle-class and working-class women.65 The suffragettes claimed that for working women, the suffrage movement was the equivalent of socialism for working men.66 Only if women were included in the process of law-making on equal terms could the situation of the people be improved and a more just society be created.

Another argument where Schirmacher followed the suffragettes concerned militancy. Referring to the history of constitutionalism and the democratisation of politics, she noted that at no time had those in power yielded to popular demands without some use of force from below.67 Therefore, the suffragettes not only made use of constitutional rights (such as demanding answers to questions posed to politicians publicly or submitting petitions to UK Parliament), but through the use of violent tactics also demonstrated their determination to claim these rights when they were not granted.68 Like the suffragettes, Schirmacher was convinced that only those who had the right to vote were taken seriously by the political establishment and that women would only gain equal rights if they showed their readiness to go to prison or even die for their cause.69 She connected this with hints regarding statements by liberal politicians who had on the one hand claimed that all progress had been won by the use of some force and on the other refused to engage in women’s suffrage as they did not see the will of the people behind it. With their militancy, Schirmacher said, the suffragettes showed that there was indeed popular demand for the women’s vote.70

Schirmacher underlined her explanations of the main political arguments of the British suffragists and suffragettes with a concise narrative of their common struggle to bring a women’s suffrage bill into parliament and get it passed. She highlighted how broad the movement was, militant or not, and pointed to the many respected representatives of society who contributed to the militant fight with money and moral support.71 However, Schirmacher did not go into any detail about internal conflicts in the movement, either between constitutionalists and militants or between different militant factions. Rather, she presented the image of a common cause where only minor strategical differences occurred.72 She thus created a harmonious picture of the suffrage movement in the UK for her German audience. This was helped by the fact that she published her book shortly before the break between the Pethick-Lawrence and Emmeline Pankhurst over differences regarding the escalation of the violent strategy.73 Neither the growing distance from the labour movement nor the undemocratic internal structure of the WSPU, which would soon lead to the split between Sylvia Pankhurst (who aligned with the Communists) and her mother, were an issue in Schirmacher’s book.74

Excerpt, Transfer, and Transformation

For her concise narratives and explanations in Die Suffragettes, Schirmacher used two major sources: Sylvia Pankhurst’s comprehensive history of the movement up to the autumn of 1910, and the weekly journal Votes for Women with its broad coverage and support of the movement. Pankhurst’s book came out shortly after a second reading of the Conciliation Bill (which would have brought at least restricted voting rights for women) was postponed in parliament and the ‘truce’ between the suffragettes and the government was broken.75 Her detailed chronology of the campaigns since 1905 was written in a period of optimism and meant as a model and reminder for activists ‘in other lands’ and ‘future days’.76 However, in the light of this setback, it also became a source of knowledge for the next and more radical campaign.

Schirmacher used this book extensively. Her seventy-page chapter about the events from 1905 to 1910 closely followed Pankhurst’s narrative. To shorten the text, she summarised what was explained in much more detail in her source. She occasionally added explanations for a German audience unfamiliar with British political institutions.77 But apart from a brief reference to two earlier accounts, she quoted exclusively from Pankhurst in her description of the first five years of the movement.78 At no point did she question the descriptions and explanations given in the English volume. For the period from the end of 1910 up to June 1912, where her account of the movement ended, Schirmacher mostly used the fairly detailed reports on activist and government activities that Votes for Women provided. Here she often only referred to the journal issue number, not to specific authors or articles, thus giving the impression that Votes for Women actually spoke with one voice. As with Pankhurst, she adopted what served her historical account, but did not critically engage with any of the texts printed in the journal.

It is noticeable that Pankhurst hardly cited any sources. Quoting political actors and the press without precise references, she presented her book as a record of the struggle in which everything was to be taken at face value. Whereas Pankhurst relied on her prominent role in the movement to create the authenticity of her account, Schirmacher aimed to do the same for her own book through adding an abundance of footnotes. Hence, her book, which was narrated from the same activist perspective as the English volume, often has the appearance of an academic text.

This method of excerpting had the advantage of producing a concise summary of Pankhurst’s long treatise and allowing targeted insights into the arguments presented in Votes for Women. The result was a concentrated text with a wealth of factual information on dates of events, numbers of participants in demonstrations, workers’ wages, statistical data on the social situation, election results, membership figures, amounts of money collected, etc. The excerpts also included incisive quotes from politicians and activists, along with a reference to the source.79 In this way, Schirmacher provided the material that journalists, whom she had so often accused of misrepresenting the suffragettes, could use in their articles. Photographs of major activists and drawings from Votes for Women added to the wealth of this material. That said, Schirmacher’s text should not be read as an analysis of the different factions of the movement in the UK nor as a debate on the cause. Rather, it was a retelling of the WSPU’s self-historicisation, which transferred a certain part of the knowledge publicly available in the UK to the German Reich.

Schirmacher proceeded in a similar way in the shorter explanatory chapters that follow the long chronological chapter. However, her excerpts also transform the English source texts in characteristic ways. For example, where Schirmacher gives information about money that had been collected or spent by the WSPU, she usually adds a conversion into German marks, thus translating the amounts into values of a German economy with all problems this entailed.80 She often does not bother to do so when talking about workers’ wages or fines for offences.81 However, in the short chapter on the suffragettes and money, the enormous sums that the activists were able to raise in their various campaigns are only given in marks.82 Obviously, it was particularly important to her to make clear to her readers how well the militant movement was equipped with financial resources provided by committed supporters, while the women’s movements in other parts of the world were generally rather poor. To emphasise her argument against those who held that ‘militancy does not pay’ she says in English: ‘Oh, it pays splendidly’. She adds in German that financial support had always increased when persecution became more severe.83 Here we can see her developing an argument that was certainly in line with what she learned from her UK informants, but was specifically addressed at an audience interested in the German women’s movement. Thus, it was also particularly important for her to convey the economic dimension of the support by ‘translating’ the currency.

A peculiarity of Schirmacher’s writing is the occasional use of the German grammatical masculine form for women. That this was a deliberate decision becomes clear at the very outset of the book, when in the first sentence of the first chapter she introduces the protagonists as ‘Freiheitskämpfer’ (freedom fighters) in the masculine form of the noun.84 The symbolic relevance of this masculine term to describe women is also expressed in the formulation ‘weibliche Wähler’ (female voters) instead of ‘Wählerinnen’, which would have been the more correct use of the German grammatical form used for women, in the further course of the book.85 I argue that in this way Schirmacher marks the political relevance of the concept of the voter and stresses the equality between male and female citizens. To do so, she imitates the more gender-neutral English language in a German context, a strategy she had already successfully promoted when translating the IWSA principles from English into German in 1904 (see Chapter 8). The meaning of this becomes clear in the chapter on the constitution, where she draws on the research of Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1840–1929) and Helen Blackburn (1842–1903), who had pointed to the legal tradition of using of the word ‘man’ for both women and men.86

Another characteristic of Die Suffragettes is the repeated use of English words and phrases to document statements by activists and politicians. Sometimes Schirmacher does so to clarify a double meaning, for example when she explains the expression ‘to rush Parliament’.87 Sometimes she inserts the English words in brackets into the German text to emphasise the importance of a slogan or to illustrate the hostility or audacity of certain statements.88 However, often she does not take pains to translate phrases or sentences she finds particularly significant.89 She probably identified so strongly with certain slogans that it was important to her to convey them in their original form. It is also likely that she hoped to paint a more vivid picture by adding some original tones. It should be noted, though, that she wrote the book in just one month and probably forgot to add the translation in some cases. Obviously, however, she did not think that her readers would have problems understanding these occasional English sentences.

It becomes quite clear that she was in complete agreement with a pompous slogan Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence had used in Votes for Women to call women to action: ‘Acquiescence is criminal. Patience is cowardly. Consent is contemptible’. Schirmacher quotes it twice. The first mention, together with a translation, is in the course of an argument about the necessity of transcending the ideals of femininity.90 The second mention, without a translation, comes in the last sentences of the book, in which she refers to a book she had written the year before, entitled Das Rätsel Weib (Woman, the Riddle). She holds that while this earlier book had been the expression of her life experience, Die Suffragettes factually proved the ideas laid out in the earlier book. She then repeats the three sentences as if they were her own words, thus identifying herself with the ‘freedom fighters’ she had presented at the beginning of the book.91

Schirmacher transferred the suffragettes’ uncompromising attitude towards the government into another struggle. She ‘translated’ the strategies they used in their fight for the single political issue of suffrage into a response to conflicts over the new definition of women’s position in the society.

‘Suffragettes’ in the German Women’s Movements

In the UK, Die Suffragettes was noticed immediately and reviewed in Votes for Women.92 The anonymous reviewer particularly commended Schirmacher’s thorough use of Sylvia Pankhurst’s book and Votes for Women and praised her effort to ‘bring about a stronger feeling of comradeship and solidarity among all women fighting for their emancipation’.93 Only one other reviewer, the Austrian Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein noted the close connection between Sylvia Pankhurst’s and Käthe Schirmacher’s book, which she discussed in a collective review together with an overview of the suffrage movement by Millicent Fawcett. The socialist Schlesinger-Eckstein criticised all three authors for identifying suffrage with the liberation of women in a broader sense and neglecting economic background.94 She appreciated Schirmacher’s effort to continue where Pankhurst’s book left off, but as with Fawcett’s book missed a thorough explanation of the suffragette phenomenon.

In other parts of the German-speaking press, the response was far less positive and sometimes openly hostile and derogatory. The daily press even called on the movement to distance itself from the British suffragettes.95 Several critics chided Schirmacher for her declared sympathy with the latter, calling them hysterical women and invoking the nobility and sanctity of true womanhood.96 Her open sympathy for the women she wrote about often led not to greater understanding but to disparaging remarks about the suffragettes, who were accused of having whipped the British public into a frenzy.97 Most of the critics, whose main concern was the loss of the gender order they wanted to uphold, did not address the political arguments of Schirmacher’s book but confined themselves to reaffirming their ideas of femininity.98 A more neutral review in the Vienna liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse acknowledged the volume’s informative value and the excellent style but also made clear that it did not agree with its arguments.99 In the women’s movement, more positive reviews appeared.100 However, in the spring of 1913, against a background of arson attacks and the bombing campaign launched by the WSPU, Sophie von Harbou (1865–1921) in the radical journal Die Frauenbewegung doubted that Schirmacher would still support the suffragettes and hinted at the possible negative impact of these deeds on the wider women’s movement.101

Harbou expressed her criticism of the suffragettes only in the form of a question, but more openly negative attitudes towards the suffragettes were widespread among the moderate majority of the movement in the German Reich, with Helene Lange the most influential voice. These attitudes came to a head in early 1913. In March, Lange wrote an extensive article in her journal Die Frau characterising the suffragettes’ activism as dangerous, useless, and inappropriate. It could easily escalate in uncontrollable ways, she said, and would estrange potential supporters, as the violence contradicted the goal of positive participation in public life. She emphasised the importance of ‘dignity’ (Würde), especially for women, and called it a mistake to risk ‘the spectacle of powerlessness’, as she believed the suffragettes were doing. More, she explicitly declared that the suffragettes damaged the cause of women’s suffrage in other countries. Therefore, solidarity with them should have limits.102 This uncompromising criticism appeared in orchestrated unison with a statement by the BDF board in April condemning any use of violence as incompatible with the nature and aims of the women’s movement.103 Helene Lange’s article, legitimising this official distancing from the suffragettes, was republished as a pamphlet and also reprinted in a journal in Switzerland.104

The BDF’s public statement prompted a harsh critique from the radicals. Lida-Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg published an open letter accusing the BDF board members of stabbing the suffragettes in the back on behalf of the German women’s movement.105 In many other countries, the members of women’s movements reacted in more differentiated ways (or less publicly).106 In the German Reich, the issue showed the deep rift in the movement. And here Schirmacher found herself on the same side with Heymann and Augspurg, with whom she disagreed about universal suffrage and German nationalism. The common minority position led to solidarity between them, which was expressed, for example, in the fact that Augspurg continued to give Schirmacher publishing space in her journal despite their disagreement on other topics.107 Shortly after the publication of the BDF statement on violent strategies, Schirmacher once more tried to make clear her unconditional support for the suffragettes in the daily press. But as evidenced by a letter from an editor who rejected her article, she had difficulty making herself heard to a wider German public.108 However, she was also embroiled in other conflicts at the time, besides being seriously ill.109 She probably did not try as hard to counter Lange’s assessment and the BDF statement as she might have done under other circumstances.

If the aim of Schirmacher’s book had been to enhance understanding for the British suffragettes in Germany, or even to encourage the German movement to adopt more militant methods, it was not a very successful endeavour. But her writing on the suffragettes helped to improve her disturbed relationship with the left wing of the radicals. And it brought her considerable attention from a German audience, although marginalising her in the press as somebody with rather extremist views. She received encouragement from personal letters as well as a positive international response.110 It should be noted, however, that her book had a second aim, namely to fight against the paragraph on universal suffrage in the official programme of the German federation for women’s suffrage, the DVF. More than once she made it very clear that the suffragettes did not demand universal suffrage, implying that German women would do well to follow their example. Although this did not become the prevailing opinion in Germany, her intervention certainly contributed to the further division of the organised German suffrage movement.111

Sufrażetki and the New Type of Woman—Reception Across Time and Borders

In the years before the First World War, Schirmacher was among the very few authors from the German-speaking women’s movements whose works were translated into other languages. Her 1911 book Das Rätsel Weib (Woman, the Riddle) was rendered into Swedish and Serbian.112 Translations of this book into English and Polish were discussed but did not materialise.113 However, a translation of Die Suffragettes into Polish was successfully realised in 1913.114 Schirmacher and the Polish translator, Melania Bersonowa (also referred to as Melanie Berson, life dates unknown), knew each other from the IWSA,115 where Schirmacher had been a member of the admissions committee since 1909. In 1911, a Galician women’s suffrage committee led by Melania Bersonowa applied for affiliation to the IWSA; it was Schirmacher’s remit to inform her that their application had been successful.116 We do not, however, have any correspondence between the two women regarding the translation project. The newly founded Galician committee obviously wanted information on the suffrage cause abroad and publicity material in Polish. But the choice of Schirmacher’s book on the suffragettes is still remarkable. It provided comprehensive information, but it was also obvious that the author openly sided with the militant activists in the UK, whose strategies were controversial among IWSA activists. The Galician suffrage committee, in sharp contrast to the German moderates, obviously opted for a publicity strategy that included the threat of militancy. It must also be assumed that Bersonowa herself was among the supporters of the suffragettes abroad.

Even more surprising is Bersonowa’s decision to translate an author who was known as a committed and vocal anti-Polish activist in Prussia. Schirmacher’s anti-Polish propaganda and her collaboration with the German Eastern Marches Society had been discussed in the Polish exile press since 1906.117 In 1911, several of Schirmacher’s lectures on the German-Polish question had been published as pamphlets.118 It is difficult to imagine that Bersonowa, who obviously read German well, knew nothing about them. It must, therefore, be assumed that she did not see it as a hindrance to the publication of Schirmacher’s book on the suffragettes in Polish. Whether she felt that Schirmacher’s activism in Prussia did not affect the Polish cause in the Habsburg Empire, or whether she was so convinced of the single-issue approach of the IWSA that she considered other political commitments of fellow activists irrelevant for the common cause of suffrage, we do not know. Similar to the ongoing cooperation between Augspurg, Heymann, and Schirmacher despite their serious disagreements over universal suffrage, one can assume from Bersonowa’s decision that support of the suffragettes, who polarised the public in many areas, was able to build bridges even across deep political and other divides.

As early as 1913, the Polish translation Sufrażetki was published in Lwów (Lviv/Lemberg) by the publishing house Kultura i Sztuka (Culture and Art).119 In her close rendering Melania Bersonowa followed Schirmacher’s linguistic peculiarities and also kept the English terms and phrases Schirmacher had scattered throughout the text, sometimes adding explanations, sometimes leaving a term untranslated. However, she did not emulate Schirmacher’s strategy of masculinisation/neutralisation, which was probably less acceptable in Polish than in German. Where Schirmacher, for example, named the suffragettes ‘freedom fighters’ in the masculine form of the German word, Bersonowa used the feminine Polish form.120 Some small omissions may have had economic reasons. The Polish translation had fewer illustrations and Bersonowa also omitted the abridged version of the WSPU anthem, the ‘Women’s Marseillaise’, which Schirmacher had put on the very last page of her book. Some less precise or even erroneous footnotes probably indicate that the translation was done in a hurry.

Two changes, however, are significant. They both pertain to the framing of the book and reorient the narrative in a certain way. First, the unsigned Polish preface, which replaced the original, is a mixture of Schirmacher’s translated words and Bersonowa’s engagement with their content. Bersonowa adopted Schirmacher’s remarks on the unprecedented character of the suffragettes’ struggle quite literally and, like her, stressed the necessity of explaining the suffragettes’ deeds to a broader public. However, she mitigated the harsh judgement on the press. While Schirmacher saw a complete failure in the coverage of the militants, Bersonowa only remarked that sensational reports contributed to obscuring rather than explaining their struggle.

Adding her own view to Schirmacher’s account, Bersonowa also connected women’s suffragism with the American struggle for independence, which in her view had given birth to the fight for women’s equality in the USA. She thus linked the suffragettes to a movement in another country and opened up a broader historical perspective. More, she also said that women were oppressed all over the world and could only succeed in their fight through international solidarity, which already existed. In this way, she not only located Schirmacher’s rather isolated narrative about the British suffragettes in a historical context but also emphasised the importance of transnational reflections and relations which, given the attention outside the UK and the debates on militancy in the IWSA and elsewhere, was a notable omission in Die Suffragettes.

While these additions can still be read as differentiations of Schirmacher’s viewpoint, another, bolder intervention had a different character. Bersonowa not only cut the Goethe quote that Schirmacher had chosen as a motto for the book but also replaced the lines from Lord Byron’s freedom poem for Greece with a quotation by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855). By substituting the references to the English and the German literary canons with a reference to the most venerated figure in Polish literature, she nationalised the book’s message in a very specific way. By inserting a well-known line in which Mickiewicz had demanded that women, as the companions of men, should have the same rights in the society, Bersonowa said (or rather, made readers believe that Schirmacher had said) that militant suffrage activism only existed because people had not heeded Mickiewicz's words.121 In so doing, she no doubt intended to make militant suffrage activism acceptable for a Polish audience. But she thereby also Polonised an author—Schirmacher—who was known as an anti-Polish German nationalist. This was possible because Schirmacher and Bersonowa not only shared a support for the British suffragettes, they also both connected the fight for women’s suffrage with the idea of national freedom. The astonishing substitution of one national poet’s words with those of another thus points to the conceptual link many suffrage activists made between women’s equal political participation and the idea of the nation and nationalism.

The second, more significant intervention was the omission of Schirmacher’s one-page concluding chapter referring to her earlier book Das Rätsel Weib as a theoretical background to the book on the suffragettes.122 Although the cut was probably motivated by the pragmatic thought that it was unnecessary to introduce an untranslated German book to a Polish audience, the decision to not translate the short page also removed the only place in the entire book where Schirmacher had spoken in the first person singular. By omitting these last sentences, Bersonowa depersonalised the book and thus distanced it from an author who was certainly controversial among the Polish-speaking public and other readers.

A similar consideration may have been behind the decision to mention the publisher of the book but not the author or the translator in a review of Sufrażetki in the women’s literary magazine Bluszcz (Ivy). The detailed article first appeared in the ‘readers’ voices’ section of Bluszcz and was soon republished in an abridged version in the Chicago-based weekly newspaper Zgoda.123 It summarised the book’s main arguments approvingly but spoke of Schirmacher only as ‘the author’ (in the masculine form of the word). The reviewer J.P. praised the book’s author for not expressing her opinion but quoting only the facts, which J.P. felt spoke vividly for themselves. The review ended with a personal statement in support of active political struggles, saying that rights are not given, but earned, which, interestingly, echoes Lord Byron’s statement in the German book which the translator had edited out.

Although some obviously thought it wiser not to mention Schirmacher’s name, another reviewer, E. Wielowieyska (life dates unknown) praised her openly in a comprehensive review in the women’s magazine Nasz Dom (Our House). She reproduced many details from the book, focusing mainly on social issues and reinforcing the suffragettes’ claim that only women’s suffrage could improve the dire situation of the working class. Wielowieyska concluded by saying that she found Schirmacher’s book moving and hoped that everybody would read it and thereby understand that the suffragettes were fighting for an ethical culture.124

Bersonowa’s translation and the favourable reviews show that Schirmacher’s book met a demand for information about the suffragettes among the Polish public. In contrast to the German women’s movement, the question of militancy did not cause the same heated debate among Polish women. Since the Poles, lacking their own state, lived in parts of the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires, the attack on institutions of the state probably did not have the same meaning as it did in Germany. However, the translator’s interventions and the partial concealment of the author’s name show that the decision to translate the book must still have been a delicate one. Obviously, there were different ways of dealing with people with opinions like Schirmacher in the different Polish communities. Most certainly, however, the publication of the translation was only conceivable because Schirmacher had exclusively focused on suffrage in her account and had not included her political opinions about other matters. The project thus demonstrates both the extent to which feminist networks were able to overcome political and national differences and the advantages of a single-issue approach that made it possible, at least in certain circumstances, to neutralise or ignore such differences for the sake of the cause.

It is likely that it was precisely this exclusive focus on one topic—the militant struggle for suffrage—which made the book both interesting and readable for feminist activists of the 1970s, too. In 1976, a bootleg copy of Schirmacher’s Die Suffragettes was published in West Berlin.125 The small volume, presumably the only book ever put out by the movement-based publisher ClitVerlag, was a printed copy of the original. Apart from the deletion of the Goethe quote that Schirmacher had used as a motto and the omission of photographs of the historical activists (which, like the motto, were on separate pages in the original), the text was a facsimile reproduction of the historical text. While the pictures (as in the 1913 Polish edition) were probably left out for reasons of cost, it can be assumed that the omission of a reference to the bourgeois educational canon had a different objective. It had been important for Schirmacher to stress the compatibility between the middle-class tradition of liberal values and the violent strategies of the suffragettes. The 1970s activists, however, were emphatically convinced that a break with that tradition was a necessary precondition of women’s liberation. Quoting Goethe obviously did not fit this approach.

What Schirmacher and the feminists of the late twentieth century probably had in common, however, was their interest in the concept of militancy as a means to fight a stifling consensus that could not be overcome by mere argument. The editors of the new edition remained invisible, they did not take responsibility by name, nor did they explain their approach to the subject in an introduction. We can, however, draw some assumptions from the cover of the new edition. It shows a suffragette being arrested by two policemen, emphasising thus the militant struggle, not suffrage, as the main theme. The back cover of the book features a quotation taken from the text proclaiming the need to create a new type of woman who is willing to break with norms of femininity—thus again stressing cultural, not legal issues. It is quite conceivable that the activists of the 1970s who wanted to free themselves from bourgeois conventions of femininity were intrigued by this assertion by a prominent protagonist of an earlier movement. A further edition published in 1988 by the publisher Jassmann indicates also some commercial success. It bears witness to the fact that Schirmacher’s militant approach resonated with the attitude of many women in the 1970s and 1980s.126 Neither the author’s stance against universal suffrage, which is barely veiled in the text, nor her nationalistic commitment, which was certainly unknown to the majority of her readers in the 1970s and 1980s, were an issue at this time.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Käthe Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes (Weimar: Alexander Duncker Verlag, 1912).

  2. 2.

    E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette. The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement 1905–1910 (New York: Sturgis & Walton Co., 1911).

  3. 3.

    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 (Copenhagen, Capital Region: Bianco Luno, 1906), 26–27.

  4. 4.

    Ibid.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 20.

  6. 6.

    Nl Sch 180/049, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Ergebnisse des Frauen-Kongresses’ [newspaper clipping, 1906].

  7. 7.

    Krista Cowman, ‘Female Suffrage in Great Britain’, in The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe. Voting to Become Citizens, eds. Blanca Rodriguez-Ruiz and Ruth Rubio-Marín (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 274.

  8. 8.

    Cowman, ‘Female Suffrage’, 276–77.

  9. 9.

    There is broad literature on the suffrage movement. See, e.g., Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland (London: Routledge, 2006); June Purvis and June Hannam, eds., The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign: National and International Perspectives (Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2021).

  10. 10.

    Cowman, ‘Female Suffrage’, 277.

  11. 11.

    Jana Günther, Die politische Inszenierung der Suffragetten in Großbritannien. Formen des Protests, der Gewalt und symbolische Politik einer Frauenbewegung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Fwpf, 2006), 115.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 34, 116. On spectacle and media attention see also Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, ‘Vision et visibilité: la rhétorique visuelle des suffragistes et des suffragettes britanniques de 1907 à 1914’, LISA. E-Journal 1, no. 1 (2003), 42–53, https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.3116; Ute Gerhard, ‘Skandalöse Bilder – Momentaufnahmen der englischen Suffragettenbewegung’, Feministische Studien 2017, no. 1 (2017), 52–60; Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Covering the Suffragettes. Austrian Newspapers Reporting on Militant Women’s Rights Activism in the United Kingdom’, in The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign. National and International Perspectives, eds. June Purvis and June Hannam (Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 199–221.

  13. 13.

    Cowman, ‘Female Suffrage’, 278.

  14. 14.

    Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women. Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘‘With Banners Flying’: A Comparative View of Women’s Suffrage Demonstrations 1906–1914’, in The Street as Stage. Protest Marches and Public Rallies Since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Matthias Reiss (Oxford et al.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

  15. 15.

    Günther, Die politische Inszenierung, 37, 117.

  16. 16.

    The International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Report of Fifth Conference and First Quinquennial, London, England, April 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, May 1, 1909 (London: Samuel Sidders and Company, 1909), 46–48, 59.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 68–71.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 46–48.

  19. 19.

    E.g. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die englische Geistlichkeit und das Frauenstimmrecht. (Frauen-Rundschau)’, Berliner Tagblatt, 13 August 1909.

  20. 20.

    E.g. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Women’s Work and Training. Germany (Foreign News)’, The Common Cause, 29 May 1909; e.g. K. D. S. [Katherine Douglas Smith], ‘Modern Youth’, Votes for Women, 18 November 1910; K. Douglas Smith, ‘Woman: The Riddle’, Votes for Women, 5 January 1912; K. D. S. [Katherine Douglas Smith], ‘An Irrestistible Force’, Votes for Women, 19 April 1912.

  21. 21.

    Nl Sch 693/004, Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauenwacht’ [printed poem, 1911?]; She sent the same poem for possible use for publicity to the IWSA conference 1913 which she did not attend in person. Nl Sch Rosika Schwimmer to KS, 19 May 1913.

  22. 22.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘A Message from Germany (Die Frauenwacht/The Advance Guard)’, Votes for Women, 3 February 1911.

  23. 23.

    On connections Schirmacher made between physically fighting women and militancy see also Johanna Gehmacher, Elisa Heinrich, and Corinna Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiografische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2018), 383 (Oesch).

  24. 24.

    Schirmacher, ‘A Message from Germany (Die Frauenwacht/The Advance Guard)’. It is likely that Katherine Douglas Smith (1878–??), who reviewed several of Schirmacher’s German, works very positively, translated the poem.

  25. 25.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Augen links!’, Centralblatt, August 1909.

  26. 26.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die englische Geistlichkeit und das Frauenstimmrecht. (Frauen-Rundschau)’, Berliner Tagblatt, 13 August 1909.

  27. 27.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Augen links!’, Centralblatt, August 1909.

  28. 28.

    E.g. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die englische Geistlichkeit und das Frauenstimmrecht. (Frauen-Rundschau)’, Berliner Tagblatt, 13 August 1909.

  29. 29.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Hungerstreik’, Centralblatt, September 1909.

  30. 30.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Suffragettes [Sprechsaal]’, Rostocker Zeitung, 21 July 1912.

  31. 31.

    E.g. ibid.

  32. 32.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Vierzig Jahre friedlicher Arbeit’, Femina, 4 January 1911.

  33. 33.

    Schirmacher, ‘Vierzig Jahre friedlicher Arbeit’; Frederick W. Pethick Lawrence, ‘Women’s Fight for the Vote’, Votes for Women, 8 April 1910; see also Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence, Women’s Fight for the Vote (London: Woman’s Press, 1910).

    Schirmacher’s text was printed in a press-correspondence and became reprinted in the same month, interestingly by a housewives’ journal: Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Vierzig Jahre friedlicher Arbeit’, Wiener Hausfrauen-Zeitung, 15 January 1911.

  34. 34.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Sind das noch Damen? Sonderabdruck aus [Special print from] Frauenstimmrecht!, ed. Anita Augspurg’, Frauenstimmrecht! Monatshefte des deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht, April/May 1912.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 8.

  36. 36.

    See for the reputational damage Schirmacher’s fellow activist Anita Augspurg experienced because of her support or the suffragettes Anne-Laure Briatte, Bevormundete Staatsbürgerinnen: die ‘radikale’ Frauenbewegung im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus Verlag, 2020).

  37. 37.

    Gisela Bock, ‘Das politische Denken des Suffragismus: Deutschland um 1900 im internationalen Vergleich’, in Gisela Bock, Geschlechtergeschichten der Neuzeit. Ideen, Politik, Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 178–79.

  38. 38.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 351 (Oesch); Briatte, Bevormundete Staatsbürgerinnen, 209, 258–59.

  39. 39.

    On differentiated voting rights in the German Reich in international comparison: Gisela Bock, ‘Wege zur demokratischen Bürgerschaft: transnationale Perspektiven’, in Gisela Bock, Geschlechtergeschichten der Neuzeit. Ideen, Politik, Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 204–40, at 225.

  40. 40.

    Briatte, Bevormundete Staatsbürgerinnen, 205.

  41. 41.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiografische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik, 354–55 (Oesch); Briatte, Bevormundete Staatsbürgerinnen, 344–54.

  42. 42.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Das allgemeine Wahlrecht in Frankreich’, Der Tag, no. 324 (29. Juni 1907); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Gegenparlamentarismus’, Der Tag, 9 August 1909.

  43. 43.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 351–53 (Oesch).

  44. 44.

    Auguste Kirchhoff, Zur Entwicklung der Frauenstimmrechts-Bewegung, ed. Deutscher Frauenstimmrechtsbund (Bremen, 1916). 8; Briatte, Bevormundete Staatsbürgerinnen, 252–55; Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 323–24 (Oesch); see also Susanne Kinnebrock, Anita Augspurg (1857–1943): Feministin und Pazifistin zwischen Journalismus und Politik. Eine kommunikationshistorische Biographie (Herbolzheim: Centaurus, 2005).

  45. 45.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 324 (Oesch); Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Reisekostenabrechnung. Praktiken und Ökonomien des Unterwegsseins in Frauenbewegungen um 1900’, Feministische Studien 35, no. 1 (2017), 76–92, at 85–88.

  46. 46.

    Martin Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), 142–72; Wolfgang Wippermann, ‘Antislavismus’, in Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871–1918, eds. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht (München et al.: Saur, 1996), 512–24.

  47. 47.

    Elizabeth A. Drummond, ‘In and Out of the Ostmark Migration, Settlement, and Demographics in Poznania, 1871–1918’, Itinerario 37, no. 1 (April 2013), 73–86, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115313000417.

  48. 48.

    Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Der andere Ort der Welt. Käthe Schirmachers Auto/Biographie der Nation’, in Geschlecht und Nationalismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1848–1918, ed. Sophia Kemlein (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2000).

  49. 49.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘La question polonaise’, L’Européen, 24 December 1904; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Polonais et Ruthènes (Galicie)’, L'Européen, July 1905; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘L'oeuvre de la commission de colonisation en Posnanie’, L'Européen, 27 May 1905; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Allemands et Polonais en Posnanie’, Le Courrier Européen, 4 May 1906; see for the context of these publications Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 388–89 (Oesch).

  50. 50.

    Nl Sch 992/023, Anita Augspurg to KS, 29 May 1908.

  51. 51.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 405 (Oesch).

  52. 52.

    Nl Sch 476/002, Adelheid von Welczeck to KS, 29 October 1909; see also Gehmacher, ‘Reisekostenabrechnung’, 88.

  53. 53.

    Hugo Otto Zimmer, ‘Offener Brief an Fräulein Dr. Kathe Schirmacher’, Zeitschrift für Frauen-Stimmrecht, 1 August 1908; ‘Le Courrier Européen avait publié le 4 mai dernier…’, Bulletin Polonais, 15 June 1906.

  54. 54.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die gerechten Polen (Polnische Nachrichten)’, Posener Tageblatt, 21 March 1909; Utis [Pseud.], ‘Korespondencya “Nowej Reformy”’, Nowa Reforma, 14 January 1909.

  55. 55.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 402 (Oesch).

  56. 56.

    E.g. Nl Sch 922/018 diary, 7, 8, 13 March, 23 and 29 June 1912.

  57. 57.

    Nl Sch 922/018 diary, 14 February 1912.

  58. 58.

    Nl Sch 699/004, Käthe Schirmacher and Alexander Duncker, publisher, 26 February 1912 [book contract].

  59. 59.

    Nl Sch 922/018 diary, 17 June–19 July 1912.

  60. 60.

    E.g. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Was England und Amerika lehren (Frauen-Rundschau)’, ?, no. 15 (14 April 1912); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘[Maud, Constance: No Surrender]’, Centralblatt, 01 June 1912; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Grenzen der Weiblichkeit’, Frauenberuf: Blätter für die Fragen der weiblichen Erziehung, Ausbildung, Berufs- und Hilfstätigkeit, 29 January 1898.

  61. 61.

    Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, III.

  62. 62.

    https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/, accessed 19 February 2022.

  63. 63.

    Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 22–23, 37.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 19, 32.

  65. 65.

    E.g. ibid., 8–10.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 19.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 32.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 36.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 82, 145.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 40, 42, 71.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., 108–14.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 37, 137.

  73. 73.

    Günther, Die politische Inszenierung, 70–71; Schirmacher noted the split in her diary on 20 October 1912. Nl Sch 922/018, diary 1912.

  74. 74.

    Günther, Die politische Inszenierung, 70–71; June Purvis, ‘The Pankhursts and the Great War’, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime. International Perpectives, 1914–19, eds. Alison S. Fell and Evelyn Sharp (New York: 2007), 142–57.

  75. 75.

    Pankhurst, The Suffragette, 501.

  76. 76.

    Pankhurst, The Suffragette (Preface).

  77. 77.

    E.g. a footnote on parliamentary rules in the UK or the position of a mentioned politician Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 21, 25, 36, 52, 54.

  78. 78.

    Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 23; references to: Pethick-Lawrence, Women’s Fight; Helen Blackburn, Women’s Suffrage. A Record of the Women’s Suffrage movement in the British Isles, with Biographical Sketches of Miss Becker (London and Oxford: Williams & Norgate, 1902).

  79. 79.

    E.g. Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 43, 45, 49, 60, 68, 87–89.

  80. 80.

    E.g. Ibid., 41, 77.

  81. 81.

    E.g. Ibid., 14, 16, 27.

  82. 82.

    Ibid., 113–14.

  83. 83.

    Ibid.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 1.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 20.

  86. 86.

    Ibid., 91; Blackburn, Women's Suffrage; Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (1907, republication Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  87. 87.

    Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 44.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 74, 78.

  89. 89.

    Ibid., 60, 82, 98, 100, 102, 108, 116, 125–26, 133, 137, 138, 143.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., 144.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 148.

  92. 92.

    Anonymous, ‘[Books Received]’, Votes for Women, 29 November 1912.

  93. 93.

    Anonymous, ‘As Germany Sees Us’, Votes for Women, 21 February 1913.

  94. 94.

    Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, ‘E. Sylvia Pankhurst…’ [review essay], Die neue Zeit 31, no. 44 (1913).

  95. 95.

    Anonymous, ‘Die Frauenfrage’, Hamburger Nachrichten, 8 May 1913.

  96. 96.

    S. in R., ‘Die deutschen Verteidigerinnen der englischen Suffragettes’, Deutsche Tageszeitung, 12 December 1912; Anonymous, ‘Die Frauenfrage’, Hamburger Nachrichten, 8 May 1913.

  97. 97.

    Alexander Salkind, ‘Frauen?’, Fremden-Blatt, 6 June 1913.

  98. 98.

    E. g. Anonymous, ‘Eine deutsche Verteidigung der englischen Stimmrechtsweiber’, Neueste Nachrichten, 14 December 1912.

  99. 99.

    Anonym, ‘Käthe Schirmacher: Die Suffragettes’, Neue Freie Presse, 8 December 1912; on the coverage of the suffragettes in the Neue Freie Presse see Gehmacher, ‘Covering the Suffragettes’, 205–6.

  100. 100.

    M. W., ‘Mrs. Pankhurst’, Die Frau der Gegenwart: Deutsche Zeitschrift für moderne Frauenbestrebungen, 15 December 1912; Agnes Harder, ‘Die Stimmrechtlerinnen’, Magdeburgische Zeitung, 9 January 1913; Johanna Karsdorf, ‘Die Suffragettes, von Käthe Schirmacher’, Frauenstimmrecht. Monatshefte des deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht 1, no. 10 (1913); Anonym, ‘Bücherschau. Käthe Schirmacher. Die Suffragettes’, Frauenwohl, 4 October 1913.

  101. 101.

    S. v Harbou, ‘Literarischer Teil – Ein Plaidoyer’, Die Frauenbewegung, 15 April 1913.

  102. 102.

    Helene Lange, ‘Die Taktik der Suffragettes’, Die Frau 20, no. 3 (1913), 366–67.

  103. 103.

    Gerhard, ‘Im Schnittpunkt’, 416.

  104. 104.

    Helene Lange, Die Taktik der Suffragettes (Düsseldorf: Frauenstimmrechtsverband für Westdeutschland. Ortsgruppe Düsseldorf, 1913); Helene Lange, ‘Die Taktik der Suffragettes’, Frauenbestrebungen. Organ der deutsch-schweizerischen Frauenbewegung, no. 4 (1913).

  105. 105.

    Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg, ‘Offener Brief an den Gesamtvorstand des Bundes deutscher Frauenvereine’, Die Frauenbewegung, 1 June 1913.

  106. 106.

    See, e. g., for Austria Anonymous, ‘Zur Frauenstimmrechtsbewegung in England’, Der Bund. Zentralblatt des Bundes österr. Frauenvereine 7, no. 8 (Oktober 1912); Leopoldine Kulka, ‘Die Verurteilung der Suffragettes’, Neues Frauenleben 14, no. 6 (Juni 1912). Schirmacher pointed out the differentiated reaction in the USA: Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Suffragettes’, Vossische Zeitung, 22 February 1914.

  107. 107.

    Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauen und der Krieg. I.’, Frauenstimmrecht. Monatshefte des deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht 2, no. 1 (April 1913); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die Frauen und der Krieg. II.’, Frauenstimmrecht. Monatshefte des deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht 2, no. 4 (Juli 1913); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Der Mann ist objektiv’, Frauenstimmrecht. Monatshefte des deutschen Verbandes für Frauenstimmrecht 2, no. 6 (September 1913); see also Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 383 (Oesch).

  108. 108.

    Nl Sch 485/031, Frankfurter Zeitung (Hörth) to KS, 31 May 1913. Schirmacher’s intention had been to counter a front-page story disparaging the suffragettes. See Anonym, ‘Frankfurt, 21. Mai’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 May 1913.

  109. 109.

    Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 377 (Oesch).

  110. 110.

    Carrie Chapman Catt promised to write a review in the Woman’s Journal. Nl Sch 608/043, Carrie Chapman Catt to KS, 17 December 1912; see also A.B., ‘“Suffragetter”. En Bog om de engelske Kvinders Kamp af Dr. Käthe Schirmacher’, Kvindestemmerets-Bladet ([1913]); N.K., ‘Käthe Schirmacher: Die Suffragettes’, Rösträtt för Kvinnor, no. 7 (1913).

  111. 111.

    For a contemporary overview of the various splits: Kirchhoff, Zur Entwicklung.

  112. 112.

    Käthe Schirmacher, Gatan Kvinnan: en uppgörelse. Bemynd. öfvers. från tyskan af E. T. (Stockholm: Geber, 1912); for the report on the Serbian translation: Nl Sch 344/006, Katherine Holec to KS, 8 March 1912.

  113. 113.

    On a possible English translation: Nl Sch 1003/135, Constance Maud to KS, 25 February 1912; Nl Sch 034/005, Harriet C. Newcomb to KS, 8 November 1913; on the plan to translate it into Polish: Nl Sch 719/002, KS to Clara Schirmacher, 12 January 1912.

  114. 114.

    Käthe Schirmacher, Sufrażetki, trans. Melania przeł. Bersonowa (Lwów [Lviv]: Wydaw. Kultura i Sztuka, 1913).

  115. 115.

    They were both present at the 1911 IWSA conference in Stockholm where Melanie Berson gave a report on Galicia. International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Report of the Sixth Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Stockholm Sweden, June 12–17, 1911 (London: Women’s Printing Society, 1911), 99–100.

  116. 116.

    Nl Sch 155/010, Martina G. Kramers to KS, 26 December 1911.

  117. 117.

    ‘Le Courrier Européen avait publié le 4 mai dernier…’, Bulletin Polonais, 15 June 1906; Anonymous, ‘Dzien Hakatystyczny [Wiesci z Ojczyzny]’, Dziennik Chicagoski, 3 September 1907; Anonymous, ‘Zjazd Kobiet Niemieckich W Lesznie’, Gɬos polek, 24 November 1910.

  118. 118.

    E.g. Käthe Schirmacher, Die östliche Gefahr. Vortrag, gehalten auf dem 3. Ostdeutschen Frauentage in Allenstein O. P. (Eulitz: Lissa, 1908); Käthe Schirmacher, Was ist national? Vortrag, gehalten auf dem 5. Ostdeutschen Frauentage in Culm (Eulitz: Lissa 1911).

  119. 119.

    Schirmacher and Bersonowa, Sufrażetki.

  120. 120.

    Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 1; Schirmacher and Bersonowa, Sufrażetki, 1.

  121. 121.

    Schirmacher, Sufrażetki, 1.

  122. 122.

    Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes, 148.

  123. 123.

    J. P., ‘Sufrażetki [Głosy czytelniczek]’, Bluszcz, no. 5 (1914), https://bcul.lib.uni.lodz.pl/dlibra/doccontent?id=659.

    p. 59; Anonymous, ‘Sufrażetki’, Zgoda, 5 March 1914.

  124. 124.

    E. Wielowieyska, ‘Sufrażetki’, Nasz Dom, no. 44 (1913).

  125. 125.

    Kaethe Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes (Berlin: Frauen-Clit Verlag, 1976); on the movement practice of bootleg copying: Cristina Perincioli, Berlin wird feministisch. das Beste, was von der 68er Bewegung blieb (Berlin: Querverlag, 2015), 27, 29; Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Macht/Lust – Übersetzung und fragmentierte Traditionsbildung als Strategien zur Mobilisierung eines radikalen Feminismus’, in Erinnern, vergessen, umdeuten? Europäische Frauenbewegungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Angelika Schaser, Sylvia Schraut, and Petra Steymans-Kurz (Frankfurt/M.: Campus Verlag, 2019), 95–123; Johanna Gehmacher, ‘The Production of Historical Feminisms, Part One: Historical Awareness and Political Activism; Part Two: Transnational Strategies and the Feminist ‘We’’, German Historical Institute London Blog, https://ghil.hypotheses.org/445 (27/05/2021) https://ghil.hypotheses.org/477#more-477 (17/06/2021).

  126. 126.

    Käthe Schirmacher, Die Suffragettes (Frankfurt/M.: R. Jassmann Verlag, 1988).