Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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28 cathryn carson
fever, tetanus, and diphtheria set in motion several changes at once. First, they
brought bench scientists into the game of diagnosis. Even more than a physician’s
assessment of symptoms, now cultures or serological tests would be definitive, and
laboratories became universal in hospitals and municipal health authorities.
11
At the
same time, the practice of public hygiene was changing. Along with progressive
campaigns to clean up filthy habitations and workplaces, the vaccines, antitoxins, and
antisera developed by medical scientists and now produced in mass quantities became
standard immunological weapons in campaigns against disease. Chemotherapy –
chemical “magic bullets” which could be used to kill disease-causing agents selectively
without damaging the host – was given a celebrated boost with Paul Ehrlich’s dis-
covery of the arsenic compound Salvarsan against syphilis in 1907. While drug
therapy continued to raise hopes, its promise was only gradually fulfilled in the sulfa
drugs in the 1930s and antibiotics, first manufactured in bulk during World War II.
Still, few critics found much to object to in the progress of medical science. The
advancement of human health was less ambivalent, perhaps, than the advancement
of purely material welfare.
Public health measures pointed to something broader as well. In a multitude of
unremarkable ways, science’s practical uses were being integrated into the tasks of
the state. That is, as national, regional, and municipal authorities promulgated regula-
tions and expanded services, scientists infiltrated the bureaucracy and staffed the new
technical offices. Science came to be seen as a regular part of the governing apparatus.
At the same time, certain domains of political action became technicized. While the
process was gradual and more complete in some countries than others – scientific
spokespersons complained about civil service rules that favored non-scientists, espe-
cially in Britain and Germany – scientists nonetheless made inroads at the lower levels.
Many state functions today taken for granted had their origins in this early twentieth-
century movement: food inspection, drug testing, physical standards, and testing
bureaux. Even leaving aside the empirical social sciences, whose rapid ascent was
directly tied to this circumstance, wide domains of scientific application contributed
to the creeping expansion of the modern bureaucratic state. Historians are beginning
to study the creation of scientific careers and the mobilization of expertise in resource
conservation, mining, agriculture, or fisheries management. The same is true of
colonial administration, in whose framework the “mission civilisatrice” and the “white
man’s burden” were imbued with the claim to be bringing the fruits of western
science to colonized peoples.
Of course, states had one other overriding interest in science: its use for the
conduct of war. It was for good reason that World War I was styled the “chemists’
war.” Under the supervision of Fritz Haber and his Allied counterparts, an array of
poison gases were developed and deployed, starting with chlorine at Ypres in 1915.
12
Though ineffective as a military strategy, chemical warfare vividly symbolized the
conflict’s horrors. At the same time, it stirred up a wave of revulsion against science
– though some found it difficult to understand why death or injury through cutting-
edge chemistry was worse than death or injury by a bullet. In any case, the main
lessons were the capacity of scientists (not only chemists) to take their place among
modern warfare’s combatants, and their willingness to do so in just about any national
cause, without asking questions about ethical issues. Militarized or quasi-militarized
science – German aeronautics research or investigations of synthetic rubber, Soviet
the revolution in science 29
studies of tank armor, or British air defense – became part of the interwar scene.
Against some resistance within the armed services, scientific warfare began winning
converts. Then all that was needed when war came again was full-scale mobilization
of the scientific community. On all sides, scientists responded in strength. If Heisenberg
wrote ruefully in 1942 of unrest, misfortune, and political disorder, he did so while
engaged in applied fission research for the German war effort. In general, interwar
investments proved to be good preparation for the great technical advances of World
War II: short-wavelength radar, operations research, rocketry, and, of course, the
Anglo-American project leading to the atomic bomb. Interestingly, the much-feared
German technical community came up short in delivering radical new weapons.
13
That had as much to do with limitations of industrial production and Nazi demands
for short-term results as with the decline of German science. It nonetheless bears
noting how absolutely central a role in the Manhattan Project was played by refugees
from German persecution. The director of Los Alamos’s key Theoretical Division
was Hans Bethe, whose Nobel-winning work lay in the future when the Nazis
stripped him of his post. Under him worked an international crew including Edward
Teller, a Hungarian Jew and a student of Heisenberg who had presciently seen that
his prospects in Germany were nil.
With all this in the background, it is hardly surprising that attitudes toward science
were contradictory and polarized. In the mass media and popular culture, as histori-
ans have begun to analyze them, the pure spectacle of science was celebrated often
enough. Groundbreaking medical researchers were featured in breathless magazine
articles. The mysterious fascination of radioactivity made its way into musical revues
and medical tonics, and celebrity scientists like Marie Curie capitalized on their fame
to the advantage of their research. The prime example of scientific celebrity was Albert
Einstein, of course. Einstein was thrust onto the public stage immediately after World
War I, in 1919, when a British-led expedition to exotic lands found confirmation of
the German theorist’s abstractions in starlight’s minute deviation in a total solar
eclipse. As a relativity craze spread around the world, the unconventional genius with
the incomprehensible theory became a public icon. Einstein’s opinions on every
subject were solicited by newsmen and children.
14
But alongside tongue-in-cheek
celebrations of unintelligibility, earnest writers (not least Einstein himself ) tried to
boil down the theory in terms the public could understand. Older national traditions
of scientific popularization continued in strength. During these years they expanded
from the classic didactic forms (the short book or magazine article, the popular
science library, the illustrated lecture) into new media like radio and film (for instance,
the newsreel or nature documentary).
Intellectuals, too, took up scientific ideas as touchstones for modernist projects in
the arts and philosophy. Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory,”
for instance, has commonly been interpreted as playing off Einsteinian spacetime,
splaying fluidly surrealist clocks across a vaguely disquieting dreamscape. For some
philosophers, following the lead of physicists like Heisenberg and Bohr, the shifting
bases of natural science were indicative of a larger transformation at work. Talk of
revolution reached from epistemology all the way to social theory. At the start of the
1930s, a young Max Horkheimer was the first director of the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research. Soon to emerge as a leading light of “critical theory,” he went so
far as to observe:
30 cathryn carson
Since around the turn of the century scientists and philosophers have pointed out the
insufficiencies and unsuitability of purely mechanistic methods. The criticism has led to
discussion of the principles involved in the main foundations on which research rests,
so that today we may speak of a crisis within science. This inner crisis is now added to
the external dissatisfaction with science as a means of production which has not been
able to meet expectations in alleviating the general need. Modern physics has in large
measure overcome within its own field the deficiencies of the traditional method and
has revised its critical foundations.
15
The admiration implicit in Horkheimer’s comment on “critical” physics reveals the
extraordinary hopes that were placed in science. Operating at another level was the
Vienna Circle of logical empiricist philosophers, who advanced a “scientific world-
view” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Occupying themselves with logic, epistemol-
ogy, and the philosophy of science, they developed an antimetaphysical critique that
put its faith in empirical science as the model of inquiry.
Programs like those of the Vienna Circle often had political overtones – quite
frequently of the left or Marxist variety. Their desire to put human affairs on a ratio-
nal, empirical foundation carried forward Enlightenment impulses, questioning tradi-
tion and authority in the name of critical thought. Faith in science had more purchase
in some societies than others – in France, for instance, where Enlightenment rational-
ism still had admirers and high-caliber technical men had long been respected in state
service; and in the Soviet Union, where the cult of scientific Marxism-Leninism and
the drive for industrialization spilled over to hopes for science at large. In Britain,
too, the interwar “social relations of science movement” stood clearly on the left. It
was led by active scientists, some of them very influential, who argued that science’s
capacity to improve human life was constrained by its subjugation to the capitalist
order.
16
As common as it was in the 1930s, however, science’s alliance with leftist
politics was not universal. In Germany, for instance, no such movement ever came
close to arising. Many scientists argued, by contrast, that their discipline’s great virtue
was that it was unpolitical, standing above the partisan fray. That cut scientists’ politi-
cal choices free from their intellectual commitments, leaving nationalism as the
determining theme.
And on the other side, scientists could harness their own science in the service of
politically precarious goals. What we might call the “biologization” of social life –
understanding human communities in biomedical terms – was widespread by the turn
of the century. Urban poverty, for instance, was widely viewed as a problem of evo-
lutionary degeneration, at least by the well-off and educated classes. In the 1920s
especially, fascination with genetics carried over to groups that advocated eugenics.
Transferring breeding ideas to the human species, eugenics set up biological scales
of human worth: one type of human being was intrinsically more valuable than
another, meaning better equipped to contribute to evolutionary advance. The ulti-
mate subject of concern was not the individual, but the species as a whole. To the
eugenicist’s mind, this was simply clear-eyed rationalism, against which sentimental
objections could have no force. Then social problems, such as endemic pauperism,
required scientific solutions, such as the differential regulation of reproduction.
Eugenics not only borrowed its vocabulary from science, but also found its leadership
there. Scientists and physicians were in the forefront of the movement, and they
the revolution in science 31
offered their expertise for its implementation. Eugenics has typically been remem-
bered as a project of Nazi Germany, where the biologization of social life in terms
of the Volk reached its peak. The Third Reich encouraged procreation by sound Aryan
couples, as confirmed by genetic health courts, and set harsh penalties for breaches
of “racial hygiene,” such as intercourse with Jews. Starting in 1934, the Nazis also
sterilized more than 200,000 Germans for poor genetic constitutions, moving on to
murder a roughly equal number of the mentally or physically disabled.
17
As a rehearsal
for mass executions of Jews and other biologically “lower races,” Nazi eugenic mea-
sures in all their ghastly consistency have come to stand for the eugenic movement
as a whole. It is nonetheless essential to remember that eugenics was not solely
a fascist venture, nor one confined to Germany. Into the 1930s it found advocates
across Europe; the Scandinavian countries passed their own sterilization laws nearly
simultaneously with Germany. In its political allegiance eugenics was at least as much
a project of the progressive left. However, the energy with which the Nazis presented
themselves, in this respect, as “scientific” made the Nazis’ critics ask just what could
be expected from science.
These various stripes of scientism did not lack for detractors. Among academics,
resentment of imperialistic claims for science flowed together with reassertions of the
priority of the humanities. In an aesthetic mode, they merged with calls for romantic
reenchantment of nature and disgust at the industrial landscape, hatred of modern
material culture, and horror at World War I’s scientific destruction. This questioning
strain in interwar culture was not a unified movement, but it consistently dissented
from naive celebrations of progress. Along with various motions of withdrawal, it
found expression in pointed intellectual critique. Science was rigidly mechanical and
aridly analytic, unable to do justice to life and experience. If it claimed to bring human
beings under its purview, it worked with an impoverished notion of the human.
Uncritically wedded to an out-of-date positivism, it refused to scrutinize its own
procedures of knowing. Above all, through its demand for lawful regularity and its
elevation of experiment, it was structurally constituted as a tool to dominate the
natural world. The critique of science was especially well articulated in Germany,
where it was voiced in sophisticated form by philosophers such as Edmund Husserl
(The Crisis of European Sciences, 1936) and Martin Heidegger (“The Age of the
World Picture,” 1938), as well as the famous Frankfurt School partners in exile, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944).
Interestingly, historians have shown how some of these criticisms finally found
their way back into science. For instance, certain life scientists wholeheartedly agreed
that reductionistic mechanical strategies were unlikely to succeed in their domain.
When critics insisted that mechanism was the very essence of explanation, they
responded that this was passé, a cramped notion of science. Understanding mind-
body interactions, sense perception, or organismic functioning required a broader,
more integrated frame.
18
Such proposals, even when they came labeled with the now
suspicious word “holism,” were intrinsically no more unscientific than quantum
theorists’ suggestion that science could be carried forward without rigid cause and
effect. In fact, some historians have argued quantum mechanics itself responded to
contemporary cultural pronouncements on the bankruptcy of mechanistic physics.
19
While the case is subtle and has not been universally accepted, the creators of the
theory might have seen something in it. For some interwar scientists, the notion that
32 cathryn carson
science could fruitfully draw from its cultural environment was less controversial than
many people find it today. Revolutionary science for a revolutionary age?
Conclusion
In its own terrible way, World War II marked the end of an era in European science.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki encapsulated the deep ambivalence
with which science would henceforth be viewed. Carrying pre-1945 experiences to
their fullest conclusion, it brought scientists’ relations with political power to a cul-
minating point. And it sealed the ascendancy of American science, of whose postwar
dominance there could be no doubt. Still, the processes and factors that made the
atomic bombs possible were grounded in pre-1945 Europe. These included technical
knowledge, of course, but also the sustenance of a large and professional scientific
community. That scientific community could boast of social and epistemic authority
and of close integration with industry and the state. The process of scientization that
European society underwent between 1900 and 1945 was the hallmark of global
things to come.
Scientization means science’s permeation into a host of domains of our life. In
post-World War II experience it has been pervasively plain. But if science was equally
conspicuous to early twentieth-century observers, in our telling of that history it has
too often been put to the side. In a sense, we perpetuate the period’s own ambiva-
lence about science when we sequester it from other historical forces. That cannot
suffice, however, if we want to do justice to a remarkable and transformative era.
NOTES
1 Published posthumously as Werner Heisenberg,
Ordnung der Wirklichkeit (Munich: R.
Piper, 1989), p. 171.
2 Werner Heisenberg, “Die Beziehungen zwischen Physik und Chemie in den letzten 75
Jahren,” in Gesammelte Werke / Collected Works, Walter Blum, Hans-Peter Dürr, and
Helmut Rechenberg, eds, vol. C.1, p. 389.
3 Paul Forman, John L. Heilbron, and Spencer Weart, “Physics circa 1900: Personnel,
Funding, and Productivity of the Academic Establishments,” Historical Studies in the
Physical Sciences 5 (1975): 12, with a rough correction factor to account for non-academic
personnel.
4 Susan Quinn,
Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
5 An excellent institutional study is Rudolf Vierhaus and Bernhard vom Brocke, eds,
Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft: Geschichte und Struktur der
Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990).
Unfortunately, nothing comparable exists for the Pasteur Institute; a starting point is
L’Institut Pasteur: contributions à son histoire (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1991).
6 Nikolai Krementsov,
Stalinist Science (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997),
pp. 37–9.
7 Ian Varcoe, “Scientists, Government and Organised Research in Great Britain 1914–
1916: The Early History of the DSIR,” Minerva 8 (1970): 192–216; Roy M. MacLeod
and E. Kay Andrews, “The Origins of the D.S.I.R.: Reflections on Ideas and Men,
1915–1916,” Public Administration 48 (1970): 23–48.
the revolution in science 33
8 Elisabeth Crawford, Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880–1939: Four
Studies of the Nobel Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9 The classic study is Alan Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics
Community in the Third Reich (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
10 The vast literature is reviewed in Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini,
Laboratories, Workshops,
and Sites: Concepts and Practices of Research in Industrial Europe, 1800–1914 (Berkeley
CA: Office for History of Science and Technology, 1999); and Ulrich Marsch, Zwischen
Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft: Industrieforschung in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–
1936 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000).
11 Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, eds,
The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
12 Roy MacLeod, “The Chemists Go to War: The Mobilization of Civilian Chemists and
the British War Effort, 1914–1918,” Annals of Science 50 (1993): 455–81.
13 While the V-2 was technologically advanced, it was still next to useless as a practical
weapon. See Michael Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of
the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995); on nuclear weapons, Mark Walker,
German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
14 Michel Biezunski, Einstein à Paris: Le temps n’est plus . . .
(Saint-Denis: Presses
Universitaires de Vincennes, 1991); Thomas Glick, Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the
Recovery of Science (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
15 Max Horkheimer, “Notes on Science and the Crisis,” in
Critical Theory: Selected Essays,
Matthew J. O’Connell, trans. (New York: Continuum, 1999), p. 6.
16 For example, P. M. S. Blackett, “The Frustration of Science,” in
The Frustration of Science
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1935), pp. 129–44.
17 The still unexcelled treatment is Robert Proctor,
Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the
Nazis (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
18 Mitchell G. Ash,
Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest
for Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Anne Harrington,
Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
19 Paul Forman, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation
by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment,”
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 1–115.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Alan Beyerchen, “On the Stimulation of Excellence in Wilhelmian Science,” in Another
Germany: A Reconsideration of the Imperial Era, Jack R. Dukes and Joachim Remak, eds
(Boulder CO: Westview, 1988), pp. 139–68. Best short introduction to Germany before
World War I.
William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Sweeping attempt to integrate science with
other realms of intellectual endeavor.
Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993). Accessible introductory text by the field’s leading scholar.
Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought: The German Genetics Community, 1900–1933
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Exemplary study integrating science with the
sociology and politics of the scientific community.
34 cathryn carson
J. L. Heilbron, ed.-in-chief, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Comprehensive encyclopedia-style coverage from the
Renaissance to the present.
Arne Hessenbruch, Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000).
Critical assessments of the secondary literature of the history of science, arranged by
topic.
John Krige and Dominique Pestre, eds, Science in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic, 1997). Longer essays on more scattershot topics, some quite specialized.
Mary Jo Nye, ed., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 5: The Modern Physical and
Mathematical Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Essays at a high
introductory level; other topical volumes forthcoming.
R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge, eds, Companion to the History
of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990). Excellent short essays on both scientific and
historiographic topics, though concentrated before 1900.
Harry W. Paul, From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Good example of a detailed national
study.
Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Provocative essays covering more than the human
sciences.
Margit Szöllosi-Janze, ed., Science in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Exemplifies recent
trends in the subject, highlighting the ordinary conduct of scientific research rather than
persecution or pseudoscience.
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism,
1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Rich exploration of the inter-
face between biology and politics.
Chapter Three
Feminism: Women, Work,
and Politics
June Hannam
Feminism as a social movement and as a set of ideas has played a prominent part in
the political and social development of most countries of the world during the twenti-
eth century. The term itself first appeared in France during the 1890s, but was not
used widely in Europe until after World War I. Suffrage campaigners, for example,
referred to themselves as suffragists, suffragettes, or advocates of women’s rights rather
than as feminists. Feminism posed a challenge to the status quo and therefore pro-
voked a very negative reaction from its critics. Feminists were described as a “shrieking
sisterhood,” as “mannish” and unattractive in appearance, and as neglecting homes
and children. They were characterized as extreme in their attitudes – waging a war
against men or seeking to undermine “traditional” sex roles within the family. It is
little wonder, therefore, that even those who explicitly sought to challenge women’s
subordinate social position could be reluctant to describe themselves as feminists.
This poses something of a dilemma for historians. Should the term feminism or
feminist be used to describe organizations and individuals who did not use this word
themselves? In general historians have employed the term as a useful shorthand. It
conveys a set of meanings that are widely recognized and enables links to be made,
and comparisons to be drawn, between individuals and organizations operating in
very diverse contexts. Although feminist theorists and historians differ in what they
see as lying at the heart of “modern feminism,” it is possible to adopt a broad working
definition that is flexible and inclusive.
1
At the heart of being a feminist is the recog-
nition that there is an imbalance of power between the sexes and an intention to do
something about it. Central to feminist arguments is the belief that women’s condi-
tion is socially constructed, rather than rooted in biology, and therefore is open to
change. Thus feminists question conventional wisdoms about the roles played by men
and women and contest the assumption that there is a boundary between “private”
issues (sexuality, the family, marital relationships) and the public concerns of work
and politics. They emphasize that women’s voices need to be heard – that they should
represent themselves and achieve autonomy in their lives.
Any definition of feminism is inextricably linked to the ways in which its history
is written and understood and there have been shifts over time in the interpretation
36 june hannam
of its main features. Members of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s
and 1970s played a key role in developing a framework for analyzing the history of
feminism. They were keen to trace the origins of their movement and to establish
themselves in a feminist tradition and therefore tended to focus on well-organized
women’s movements that espoused explicit feminist goals. Reflecting divisions in
contemporary feminist theory, historians identified distinct strands in the nineteenth
and early twentieth-century women’s movement and emphasized the tensions between
ideas based on equality and those on difference.
2
They highlighted a key period of
activism: “first wave” feminism ca. 1860s–1914, in particular the highly visible suf-
frage campaigns in Europe and North America in the immediate prewar years, when
solidarity among women appeared to be at its height. In contrast the interwar years
were seen as a time of fragmentation in feminist politics and of setback for women
as they faced war, fascism, and unemployment. Indeed, it was assumed that feminism
as a movement only revived with “second wave feminism” in the 1960s and 1970s.
More recently, however, the interpretive framework for understanding feminist
history has shifted. Changes in feminist theory and politics, and the publication of a
number of histories of feminism that compare different European countries, have
drawn attention to the diversity of the movement. Thus historians are far more likely
now to write about feminisms rather than feminism and to point to the interconnec-
tions between ideas and movements that were once seen as “separate” and distinct.
3
Emphasis is placed on the complex ways in which women developed a political iden-
tity. Studies of women’s involvement in imperialism and colonialism, for example,
have highlighted the different meanings of women’s citizenship and the difficulties
in constructing a “universal sisterhood.” They point to the ethnocentrism and racism
of white, European feminists who saw themselves as having a “civilizing mission.”
4
Thus suffrage campaigners argued that if women had the vote they could use this to
push forward women’s emancipation in the colonies and to introduce social reforms
for women and children that would in turn strengthen the empire.
Differences between women, whether of class, race, nation, or religion, were a
central feature of the histories of feminism written in the 1970s and 1980s. Now,
however, historians are less likely to write about these in terms of binary oppositions,
such as sex versus class, but to look instead at how individual women and their orga-
nizations juggled between conflicting loyalties and at how the boundaries between
them were shifting and permeable. In her challenging study, Denise Riley raised
doubts about how far it was possible to talk about “woman” as a political category
at all.
5
Thus historians have questioned women’s attempts to create a “universal sis-
terhood” and have emphasized the class and race dimensions of European feminists’
claims to speak for all women. An approach that emphasizes complexity has led to a
reassessment of the extent to which feminists were active in periods that fell outside
the two “waves” of high profile campaigning. It has been argued that a focus on
“ebbs and flows” means that we can “miss the variety of ways in which feminisms
can flourish,” for example the “pragmatic feminism of women fighting for survival”
in the hostile climate of the interwar years.
6
It has been recognized, too, that women
pursued their feminist objectives in a variety of spaces and not just in overtly feminist
organizations.
It is clearly important that women’s attempts to challenge gender inequalities
in “quieter” periods should be rescued from obscurity and be seen as part of
feminism: women, work, and politics 37
feminist history. Nonetheless, there is a danger that the core of what it means to
be a feminist can be lost if we stray too far from a definition that includes an ex-
plicit challenge to gender roles and inequalities. By acting together in a collective
campaign, whether from the basis of a women-only group or from within mixed-sex
political parties, women could develop a feminist consciousness that had the potential
to affect the ways in which women and men thought about themselves and their
place in the world.
It is impossible in a short chapter to provide an overview of the history of feminism
in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, the approaches and issues
raised here will be examined through a focus on three areas: the women’s suffrage
movement; feminism, peace, and war; and the relationship between work, family, and
politics in the interwar years. Throughout, attention will be drawn to key themes.
Firstly, whenever women challenged gender inequalities they faced a dilemma: should
they be seeking equality with men or should they seek to value “feminine” charac-
teristics and roles and to celebrate difference, or indeed to look for a way of bringing
the two together? These questions were made explicit when feminists debated the
complex interrelationship between women’s economic independence, their position
within the family and the workplace, and their involvement in public life. Secondly,
it is important to explore how far women’s campaigns had an impact on their social
position and how far change has come from other directions. In examining these
questions it is crucial to make comparisons between European countries. These can
reveal the complexity of feminist ideas, methods, and strategies and highlight the
changes that took place over time.
Women’s Suffrage
The women’s suffrage movement has, understandably, received a great deal of atten-
tion both from contemporaries and from historians. In most European countries sex
was a key factor in deciding who was able to exercise the vote. Women’s exclusion
from the franchise, therefore, highlighted the extent to which they shared common
interests that could cut across class, religious, and political differences. It was the one
issue that brought women together from very varied backgrounds in highly public
campaigns that challenged conventional notions of a “woman’s place” and contested
the separation of the private and public spheres. In no country did women have the
right to vote before men and when they finally achieved the franchise it was usually
on a more restricted basis than their male counterparts. The one exception was
Finland, where universal suffrage was introduced in 1906.
In most European countries the demand for women’s enfranchisement was first
made during the nineteenth century, but it was until the decade before World War
I that suffrage movements increased the range of their activities and had a greater
impact on national politics. New organizations were formed, the basis of support
began to widen, and women developed different tactics and methods of campaigning.
In this period the British movement took center stage as “militant” actions caught
the imagination of women throughout Europe. Militancy was initiated by members
of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed in 1903 under the
leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. At the same time the “constitu-
tionalist” organization, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS),