Maternalism shaped women’s politics for much of the twentieth century. This in turn affected how the possibilities for women’s citizenship were imagined and practised as well as how women perceived politics and represented themselves as a political interest group.
In much of Europe the confluence of maternalism and feminism was clear, although there was no necessary connection between the two. For example, in early twentieth-century Spain when women intervened in the public world it was largely through the Catholic social reform movement where they focused on maternal and family rights rather than on women’s political rights.95 Maternalism was enmeshed in a newer form of national and often imperial identity in which women could move themselves away from the margins towards the centre of politics. As the French feminist Maria Martin said, ‘If you want children, learn to honour their mothers’.96 This could result in a form of passive citizenship in which women’s greatest responsibility to her nation and the race was to produce and raise healthy children. For others, this was a clear argument to bring women as the ‘mothers of the race’ fully into civil society. Indeed the state might have to alter to meet this new crisis. The French suffragist, Hubertine Auclert demanded a new form of ‘mother state’, which would provide maternity endowment and children’s allowances, financed by a paternal tax on men. For Auclert, motherhood was as much a service to the state as military activity and therefore should be supported by the state. However, many other French feminists felt this was too radical, preferring to restrict their demands to the provision of welfare services.97
Maternalism does not seem to have empowered women in terms of broader political rights. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel suggest that ‘female reformers using maternalist arguments alone could seldom compel states to act. They were more likely to be effective when their causes were taken up by male political actors pursuing other goals, such as pro-natalism’.98 Instead, the effect of maternalism was that it could challenge the political agenda, bringing issues and practices that were previously understood as private matters into the public domain. Maternalism and ‘women’s issues’ seemed to be interchangeable. However, feminists rarely maintained control over how these issues translated into public policy, as can be seen in the long campaign in Britain for the endowment of motherhood spearheaded by Eleanor Rathbone.99 Maternalism could also be used in the service of a range of ideologies from fascism to Stalinism.
The configuration of political space and its permeability to organised women’s demands were crucial in determining the extent to which maternalism was a catalyst to greater levels of women’s political participation. In those countries where women continued to be defined as non-citizens, their room to manoeuvre was restricted. In the inter-war period we can see this most clearly when the first wave of nations enfranchised some or all of their adult female population. In France, women continued to be voteless but there was a significant involvement in informal politics (pressure groups and voluntary organisations) and in political parties. As Offen has shown ‘virtually all factions of politically active women had endorsed the importance of motherhood for women, and had argued for some form of meaningful financial assistance to moth-ers’.100 Across the political spectrum and amongst those who were determined that they were not ‘political’, maternalism was the language in which the female non-citizen talked to the state and to its citizens. Indeed, Gisela Bock and Pat Thane suggest that women could help bring about the implementation of maternity and family-centred policies ‘whether or not women had the vote’, citing the example of the cassa di mater-nitd. This was a system of statutory maternity leave for factory workers introduced in Italy in 1910. It was prompted by the demands of the women’s movement in a country where no women had the vote.101
However, maternalism was always inflected with class and with race. The latter was particularly evident through the enormous influence of eugenics on early twentieth-century progressive thought. This was before the Nazis put into practice their negative eugenic policies of mass sterilisation and later genocide while instituting a ‘cult of motherhood’ among the racially ‘fit’.102 Historians have debated the extent to which fascism was maternalist and whether in this particular context, separate spheres ideology provided an identity through which women could demand equality.103
Similarly, in terms of class, maternalism was not a means of empowerment for all women. Maternalist policies might provide employment opportunities for some, particularly the middle classes, but it could also mean greater intervention by voluntary and state agencies into the lives of working-class women. That is not to say that organised working-class women did not have strong views about the experience of maternity and a desire for ‘voluntary motherhood’, as the letters of Women’s Cooperative Guild members collected together as Maternity (1915) make clear.104 As Gillian Scott argues, these working-class mothers did not want to represent themselves as victims devoid of agency, instead ‘the Guild inflected this material in ways that buttressed its demands for women’s rights, its claims about women’s aptitude for public life, and its insistence on the value of autonomous women’s organisations’.105 At grass-roots level, maternity could be an issue that brought together local women activists across party lines and mobilised unorganised women. One example of this is local campaigning to combat the dangerous level of maternal mortality in Britain in the 1930s.106
The paradoxes in maternalism are also apparent after the Second World War. Yet mobilising self-consciously as mothers continued to be important to women’s self-perception as political actors. This applied particularly where civil society was rebuilt after a period of authoritarian rule. So in post-Soviet Russia, the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees of Russia have drawn thousands of women into their activities. Although in the Soviet period there was an elaborate quotas system to ensure the representation of women within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the soviets, women were always marginal to the exercise of real political power. The ruling body of the CPSU, the Politburo, only ever had three women members over its entire lifetime. Life was politicised, but the opportunities for women to express themselves politically were highly constrained. Nor did the thawing of the system lead to increased opportunities for women’s participation; indeed, a Russian feminist commentator has said of perestroika, ‘while women were waiting in line for food, men carved up the country into pieces’.107 Stalin had closed the CPSU’s women’s department, the Zhenotdel, in 1930 declaring that the woman question was solved. The entire focus of the Soviet woman was now to be the family, children and associated welfare issues. Later, Gorbachev commented that in the quest to make women equal to men in everything, ‘we failed to pay attention to women’s specific rights and needs arising from their role as mother and home-maker’.108 Thus the positive image of mothers and motherhood together with a tradition of women’s social and political activism has provided Russian women with what Catherine Danks has called ‘a maternal path into politics’.109 Soldiers’ mothers have exploited this path to demand a human-rights agenda and to promote women’s citizenship in the new ‘managed democracy’ of Vladimir Putin. Maternalism is therefore one way that women as citizens and noncitizens engaged with politics in a series of different regimes over the century.
This was also the century of women’s enfranchisement. Yet Anderson and Zinsser have suggested that across Europe,
Rights of citizenship - the vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to hold political office - in fact meant relatively little to most women. In addition, these were the kinds of rights which, when won, were often taken for granted.110
In the past, feminist historians were concerned to reclaim women’s struggle for the vote and to be recognised as full citizens; now with Pat Thane, we might ask, ‘What difference did the vote make?’111 Yet the paths to citizenship for European women differed. Indeed, the means by which women achieved the vote may be significant for the way they viewed politics once they were recognised as citizens. Despite campaigns for women’s suffrage from the 1860s, there is debate about what actually won women partial enfranchisement in Britain in 1918: women’s wartime work, suffragette militancy, the long constitutional struggle, the need to enfranchise voteless soldiers at the front. Yet in other cases the causal connection between suffragist campaigning and enfranchisement was much less clear. When French women finally gained the vote in 1944, the breakthrough was an addendum to a legislative bill that bore no direct relation to women’s lives and appeared to have very little connection to the feminist struggles that contributed to obtaining it.112 In France, women’s suffragism had itself been affected by the fact that male suffrage was not extended gradually as in Britain. For Britons, this provided a series of opportunities for suffragists to argue for women’s inclusion as citizens. In contrast, all French men were granted the vote in 1848 as part of the overthrow of the regime. Thus it seemed that the debate was concluded and reform could only result from equally cataclysmic events.113
The pattern of women’s enfranchisement, beginning with Finland in 1906, shows the Scandinavian countries in advance of most of Europe. Sian Reynolds suggests that countries with relatively uninterrupted parliamentary regimes from the nineteenth century on tended to grant women’s rights earlier than others.114 But there was certainly no clear run of continuity, with countries falling gradually into line on women’s suffrage. Also for a significant part of the twentieth century, various European countries had no parliamentary elections (such as Nazi Germany) or had quasi-elections, as in the Soviet Union. Female enfranchisement could be intermittent: Spanish women briefly acquired the vote in 1931 only to lose it again during the Civil War and under Franco’s regime. Ultimately the great majority of European states arrived at electoral equality over the period 1930-50. However, enfranchisement did not result in women moving en masse into politics. In much of Europe women remain a tiny minority in the formal institutions of democracy, and barriers to women’s participation continue to exist. These vary from mechanisms for candidate selection to gendered assumptions about what characterises politics and politicians.
The risk of female dominance in politics, despite the reality of continuing male hegemony, troubled many. One example is the Swedish vote on prohibition in 1922. Men argued that women, despite their newly won right to vote, should not be allowed to participate in the voting because they did not drink alcohol.115 Essentially men were seen as the legitimate representatives of the public interest while women could only represent a special interest, women’s issues. When Angela Cingolani made the first speech by a woman in an Italian representative assembly in 1945, she saw herself as speaking for all Italian women who were for the first time taking part in the country’s political life. However, she said, ‘We have heard many kind words addressed to us, but there is little evidence of trust in us through appointments to public office’.116 Mutual distrust was often a feature of post-enfranchisement politics.
Anti-democrats could exploit distrust or disappointment with the fruits of enfranchisement. In countries where women had the vote, fascist parties were often anxious to reassure women voters that they were not simply reactionaries. They presented themselves as radical alternatives to the status quo. The Nazis even promised not to endanger the gains made by women. Such promises may have attracted some feminists disappointed by liberal and socialist records on women’s rights. The three exsuffragettes who occupied senior positions in the British Union of Fascists had all failed in bids to be elected to parliament and felt they had been treated badly by established parties. In Sweden, Sigrid Gillner, a former suffrage campaigner and socialist, joined the Swedish National Federation because she was disappointed with how little difference enfranchisement had made.117
The significance of acquiring the vote could vary from country to country. In Italy there was a general indifference to women’s new right to vote in 1945. There was little public debate, but some women remembered their emotion on first going to vote: ‘I suddenly came face to face with myself, a citizen’.118 At the first election, women’s turnout was high and equivalent to that of men. Yet over time, women’s representation in national assemblies retreated. There were forty-one (7.8 per cent) deputies in 1947, thirty-six in 1953 and only seventeen in 1968. A similar picture is apparent in France where the number of deputies fell from thirty-nine in 1946 to eight in 1968.119 This experience was shaped by two interconnected elements: a culture in which politics was not seen as women’s business, and women’s lack of engagement in formal politics, which spoke so little to their daily life.
Yet this kind of narrative implies that women are apolitical. At the very least it accepts as normative a sexual division of politics: economics and national defence as ‘men’s issues’, education, health and social welfare as ‘women’s issues’. However, if we look beyond formal politics there is another story to be told. One of the continuities in popular politics is women’s protests against the high cost of living. As the economies of Europe developed during the twentieth century, a politics of consumption appeared with a clear gender dimension. The housewife, as opposed to the mother, increasingly became a figure invoked by politicians, and organisations were formed in her name across Europe. For Lynne Taylor, twentieth-century food riots are ‘examples of politics happening outside of the political arena, practiced by those who had been effectively silenced. . . including women, by the shift in the nature and location of politics’.120 Yet at times of crisis, particularly in wartime, food - its shortage, distribution and quality - became a focus for women’s political action. Some have seen this as an example of a gendered politics rather than merely class or community action.121 In the First World War, women’s cost of living protests were widespread. Temma Kaplan has argued in relation to Barcelona that women’s ‘everyday life became a political process, and through that process women’s awareness grew’.122 By collective action based on female consciousness, Barcelona’s working women broadened their concerns from consumption to wider political issues. Belinda Davis’s study of similar activities in Berlin challenges traditional conceptions of politics and political actors by demonstrating that woman’s identity as a consumer gave her opportunities ‘to act and interact in the public sphere’.123 Poor women consumers of wartime Berlin had little access to formal politics yet collective action at a neighbourhood level empowered them to make demands of the state, as women rent-strikers did in Red Clydeside in 1915.124 This women’s activism, which political parties even on the Left found hard to deal with, gave women confidence to link issues that sprang from everyday life to what were seen as much larger and more clearly political ones, such as the ending of wars. This was apparent in the British Women’s Peace Crusade begun in Glasgow in 1916 and more successfully in Petrograd and other parts of Russia in 1917.125
The Russian example is important not only because women dominated the crowd protesting at bread prices and the war but also because they were among the agitators and organisers who worked with the demonstrators. The successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviks showed that food riots in the twentieth century could have radical outcomes. Whether what the Revolution brought was what the protesters had demanded or imagined has been much debated, but what is undeniable is that the Revolution had a fundamental effect not just on Russian women’s relationship to political power but also to women’s politics beyond the borders of Russia.
The paradox was that Bolsheviks, like European socialists, disparaged feminism as ‘bourgeois’ and divisive for the working class. Yet the Bolshevik government was the first regime to declare across-the-board equality of the sexes. However, in the end, this commitment did not do much to shift the masculinism of the party. Indeed, Barbara Clements’s study of Bolshevik women suggests that the revolutionaries never seriously attempted to share political power between men and women.126 Beyond Russia, parties exploited both the promise and the warning that the Revolution represented across the political spectrum in their appeal to women, particularly new voters. This also affected women’s organisations, including international ones such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where ideological commitments soon overrode other identities.127 A revolution that was seen as beginning with women food rioters was the spectre that haunted women’s politics across the century as in some countries and organisations communism was proscribed while in others it was imposed.
Moreover, subsistence unrest was not limited to the extreme conditions of wartime but continued into the inter-war period. For example in almost all large German cities between 1920 and 1923, women engaged in spontaneous market and street demonstrations even using force, threatening traders and looting shops. As Hagemann shows, this disturbed the men of the Weimar labour movement who tried to control and prevent such unrest.128 To them, the women’s action was ‘unpolitical’. With economic stability and the channelling of political action into formal politics in the newly democratic Weimar Republic, these protests ceased. However, more and more women withdrew from any form of political activity. They took less part in elections, their membership of trade unions and political parties such as the SPD declined. Instead, what they favoured was local neighbourhood-based action that grew out of their social networks and that was both political and self-help. There are debates about whether there was a similar withdrawal from politics by British working-class women after partial enfranchisement in 1918. Thane suggests not, given the large numbers of women who joined the Labour Party once individual membership was possible and who sought to promote an agenda concerned with social deprivation and welfare.129 Yet locally, women’s experience of the Labour Party varied considerably and some male members of the party were not happy about women’s attempt to broaden the party’s understanding of politics.130 The housewife remained a contested figure in Britain at least, because of the ambiguity over her class. The cost-of-living street protester was usually urban and poor in the twentieth century but, increasingly, the organised housewife, or rather the organisations who spoke for the housewife, were middle class.131
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the post-enfranchisement era (which, of course, is dated differently across Europe) there is considerable debate among women about the extent to which they wish to be part of or even challenge a notion of politics framed by party. There have been various attempts to form non-party women’s organisations or to create their own party, such as the short-lived Women’s Party formed by the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst in 1917. A number of national suffrage organisations made their non-party status central to their strategy, such as the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies before 1912, or at least found that this single issue could unite women across party divisions. The Swedish national organisation for women’s suffrage, the LKPR (Landsforeningen for kvinnans politska rostratt [Swedish Women’s Suffrage Association], established in 1903) attracted liberal, conservative and social democratic women while those political parties were unwilling to support female enfranchisement. When the Liberal and the Social Democrat parties changed their position in the face of the 1911 election, the unity of the LKPR was rocked as suffragists divided on whether they should abandon their non-party position for support for the pro-suffrage parties even if the rest of the political programme was unacceptable to them as suffragists.132
A number of countries saw attempts to capitalise on suffragism to create organisations designed to encourage women’s political participation. In Britain, non-party Women Citizens’ Associations were set up locally ‘to organise and educate women so as to foster a sense of citizenship’ and ‘to ensure greater representation of women’.133 Similarly, the Swedish Women’s Citizen Organisation was created to promote women’s interests and to replace the suffrage organisation. However, there was little support from politically active women: ‘We women find our political home amongst those men that share our views, not in some sort of neutral zone amongst women with differing views’, argued conservative Berta Wallin.134 Both Swedish and Norwegian former suffragists discussed whether to form a women’s political party in the 1920s and made limited and unsuccessful attempts to contest elections with a list of women candidates.135 It seemed that women could not be persuaded to prioritise their gender over other loyalties, particularly those of party. But then such appeals were never tested in a vacuum: they were countered vigorously by men and women in political parties who saw cooperation across party lines as deeply threatening.
In the early years of enfranchisement, existing political parties sought to portray themselves as the natural representatives of women, while at the same time arguing against the introduction of a ‘sex war’ into the political arena. These actions were part of a long-standing tradition of ambivalence that male party activists had shown to women’s self-organisation even within their own political parties. Thus one male Swedish social democrat argued against the formation of party women’s sections, as these would be ‘battle organisations against the men’. At the same time, a leading female social democrat Kata Dahlstrom warned against making the sexual question the central plank in the workers’ movement ‘when other issues are of much greater impor-tance’.136 Similar views can be found amongst activists across the European Left. The issue for political women, like politicised men, was one of priorities, and gender clearly affected decisions as did class, party, generation, religion and so on. But a woman was much more likely to argue not just about relative priorities amongst those issues traditionally defined as political but to argue that the political agenda itself should be extended. This was most apparent in the area of ‘women’s issues’.
However, identification with these issues could be a double-edged sword for political women, to the point where a generation of British MPs from Labour’s Barbara Castle to the Conservatives’ Margaret Thatcher built their careers by distancing themselves from such ‘soft’ politics. This dilemma was particularly apparent in the transition to democracy in eastern Europe. Since 1989, the new elections saw women’s participation rates fall as the system of quotas and ‘token women’ was rejected. No large-scale women’s movements have emerged and self-styled feminist groups are few, despite the active role of women in the opposition movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Barbara Einhorn suggests that in the new democratic context there has been an ‘idealization of the role of civil society associations as opposed to formal party political structures’.137 This has meant that grass-roots groups stepped into the gaps created by the withdrawal of the state from social provision and thus the women who run these groups, far from making political demands, are compensating for the loss of some social rights associated with citizenship. In effect, women are being marginalised from the public sphere of mainstream politics and fall into what Einhorn terms the ‘civil society trap’.138 There is a potentially unbridgeable gap between women’s activism at the local, grass-roots level and the operation of power at the national level. Many of these groups focus on ‘women’s issues’, such as the Prague Mothers formed in 1988 to protest against the effect of environmental pollution on their children. For Einhorn, these women exercised their new civil rights but not in the name of women’s citizenship. Instead they acted to protect others, perpetuating the traditional image of the self-denying, self-sacrificing mother.
This is a recent example of an experience that has faced women across the century, as new political spaces appear to open up. Women negotiated these opportunities in different ways. One example is the moment when Italy began to move from fascism to democracy. The first free elections in Italy after the war saw all adult women enfranchised for the first time. Although the women’s mass organisations under Fascism had given women a specific form of political participation without citizenship, Italians had to look back to the pre-Fascist era to find a rich associational culture among women. The restoration of civil society was a crucial part of rebuilding a democratic country and this began in the chaos of the last years of the war. Historians observed that
It was women who gave back to the people in the liberated areas a sense of institutional life, but with different institutions from the traditional ones. . . They tried first of all to organise aid, to provide for the needs of the community. . . Nobody in 1944 was debating women’s suffrage. . . but women were solving the problem for themselves, taking part in public life, ‘politicising’ the
People. . .139
Immediately after the war, widespread women’s networks engaged in welfare work sprang up, some spontaneously, some as part of women’s organisations attached to political parties, from the Communists to Catholic Action. Women appeared to develop autonomy even in party-affiliated women’s organisations because men thought that welfare work was politically unimportant. The sexual division of politics was slightly adjusted for the new situation, but the patriarchal balance of power did not change. Women struggled to show that welfare was political work. They were most successful in local government and in the control of food rationing. The latter was an example of local direct democracy that flourished briefly at the end of the war in local liberation committees and people’s councils. Yet, as Anna Rossi-Doria comments, ‘The transition from direct to representative democracy was difficult for women who could draw on longstanding family and community traditions at local level, but who had no tradition at all to invoke as Deputies, at national level’. This was to be the case not only in other European countries at this time, but also was a broader characteristic of postenfranchisement politics across the century. As Rossi-Doria says, it is ‘as if “small-time” politics could accept women while “big-time” politics could not’.140 This is largely because ‘political’ has been understood as meaning party political. So, inter-war women’s organisations in Britain such as the Women’s Institute denied that they were ‘political’ even though they acted as a pressure group on the national and local state. For them, politics suggested a partisan position which introduced unnecessary tension into an organisation that focused on representing the interests of homogenous ‘women’.
Yet, of course, for many women, the only space in which they felt they could make any impact on the distribution of political power or achieve specific reforms was party politics. For many it meant choosing whether to involve themselves in party auxiliaries. Until well after the Second World War, the function of auxiliaries to parties of the democratic Left was to provide a space for women to discuss women’s issues without any real power to shape the agenda of the parent party. An example is the Swedish Social Democratic Women’s Federation, which had a co-opted deputy within the party leadership from 1948 who had the right to speak but not the right to vote. During the 1950s, women started to assert their right to participate in the formation of party policy. At the same time, the federation took an unequivocal stand against nuclear weapons despite the lack of a party decision on the issue. It was at this point that the federation began to grow in numbers and confidence.141
Organising women in auxiliary organisations was characteristic of the majority of political organisations, even those of the extreme Right. Authoritarian conservative regimes such as Primo de Rivera’s in Spain were willing to work with semi-autonomous women’s movements. However fascists organised women within the party itself. The idea was to maintain gender hierarchy while at the same time allowing women to express their special concerns in an atmosphere where national interest remained paramount. Rather than see women in fascist parties as totally subordinated, Kevin Passmore suggests that they merely had fewer choices than women in democratic or authoritarian conservative regimes. Their condition was one of ‘relative disempower-ment’.142
In the Nazi state, by 1936, all pre-existing women’s associations were integrated into the mass women’s organisation, Frauenwerk. Its leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was later to describe this as a separatist ‘state within a state’ for women only. Claudia Koonz argues that ‘While obeying all commands from the Nazi party, Scholtz-Klink. . . and hundreds of other ambitious women enjoyed considerable authority over their masses of followers in their separate sphere’.143 This of course, was a separate sphere that only ‘racially fit’ women qualified for. Indeed, Kirsten Heinsohn goes further and observes, ‘No political system politicised and made public the private sphere like Nazism did, for it offered many different possibilities for political involvement in both spheres’.144
In Italy, from 1932 it was compulsory for every local Fascist Party branch to have a Fascio Femminile, which were run by women locally although the male party hierarchy directed their tasks. It has been argued that the regime integrated women into the public sphere ‘by offering recognition not rights’.145 As Mussolini said of women, ‘As far as political life is concerned, they do not count here’.146 Yet the Fascist Party became the first Italian political party with a mass female membership. Women were asked to demonstrate their active support for Fascism and to play a role in forging the ‘consensus’ that the regime desired. This meant undertaking various types of welfare work. Perry Willson suggests that although the Fascio Femminile never obtained any political power, their real power was over other women, the recipients of party welfare. Working-class and peasant women were both organised separately as part of an attempt to put the entire nation into uniform. It was thought that these women’s sections could enable the party to bring Fascist politics into the heart of poor urban and rural families. Willson argues that this was something quite new to Italian politics as ‘it portrayed women as a key to the political mobilisation of whole families and households’. She concludes that although the precise meaning of membership varied, the sheer scale of the recruitment set an important precedent for the mass recruitment of women by the Communists and the Christian Democrats after the Second World War. ‘It helped women get used to the idea of political party membership’.147
A further space for women’s political action was activism. The extent to which it was possible for a woman to be a full-time activist either short term or as a career was affected by the gender expectations of her particular society. Stepping outside social norms, British socialist women in the late nineteenth century began to be fulltime propagandists who managed to make a living by speaking and writing for the movement. In the early twentieth century, suffrage activists, often employed as organisers, swelled their numbers. In inter-war Britain women continued to try to live ‘in the movement’ whether this was as propagandists or as party organisers, but within the political parties they were much more likely to be employed to mobilise other women than as mainstream party apparatchiks. As political organising - from parties to trade unions to pressure groups - professionalised, the opportunities for women diminished.
The issue was, as a British communist woman observed in 1927, ‘The women who could be active won’t, and the women who would be active can’t’.148 For most women the demands of activism were juggled with domestic responsibilities. For many this was more feasible at a local level. One example is Hannah Mitchell who, in 1920s Manchester, was a Labour city councillor, magistrate, columnist for Labour’s Northern Voice and an activist in local socialist and women’s politics. In her autobiography, The Hard Way Up,149 she recounted with considerable honesty the practical negotiations that made a woman’s everyday activism possible. Although there were constraints on Mitchell and her contemporaries in their practice as activists, they only faced marginalisation not illegality and its associated dangers.
Finnish Communist women such as Olga Virtanen,150 active from the 1930s, faced harsher consequences for their politics including exile, prison, estrangement from children and ill health. The model for the communist cadre was undoubtedly male and a private life could be hard to reconcile with political loyalty.151 Olga’s letters reveal the strain this caused and how little space there was for activists to express their emotions. In organising rural women, she also had to face how distant her own experience was from her neighbours’ everyday life. This caused more strain. If she was to remain a communist she had to try to get the party hierarchy to understand what organising such women entailed. This was much more difficult. For, like many European socialists and communists before them, her Finnish comrades began to express doubts about the seriousness of the women’s organisation and blamed women for its limitations. According to them, women could not see the really important things and their political action was often called ‘tinkering’.152 Nor was the stress of dealing with achieving some kind of accommodation between public demands and private needs only felt by communists. Women political activists in less disciplined organisations or in pressure groups suffered from what might be called ‘burn-out’. In Britain, Margaret Bondfield, the first woman cabinet minister, had regular health breakdowns while a number of turn-of-the-century socialist propagandists, such as Caroline Martyn, died young through overwork for the cause.153
In the later twentieth century, there were attempts to confront the gendered nature of politics and its practice. In some cases, the motive behind increasing women’s political representation was about achieving a critical mass in order to challenge the toll that political activism can take. Some women politicians do not just want to be part of politics, they want to transform them. Mariette Sineau has shown in her study of female politicians in France that they believe that with a majority in parliament, politics will change in form and substance.154 Some point to the European Parliament as an example of women organising effectively across party and national divisions, not only for women’s issues but also for women’s rights. However, the experience of Scandinavian women, with their high levels of political participation, suggests that except for very particular issues, party rather than gender determines loyalty and working alliances. Yet Birte Siim claims that, uniquely, it was in Scandinavia that the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s led directly to the incorporation of women into the political elite.155 The influence of second-wave feminism on the gender profile of other European political systems has rarely been so clear. In Britain there were non-party campaigns to increase women’s representation in parliament, such as The 300 Group. Pressure was also brought to bear within parties, particularly the Labour Party. This resulted for a short time, and with considerable resistance from within the party, in all-women shortlists for Labour prospective parliamentary candidates. This in turn was largely responsible for the significant rise in British women MPs at the 1997 election. Women now constitute 18 per cent of MPs. However, women elsewhere in Europe adopted other strategies.
Iceland provided the most successful example of one strategy: the separate women’s electoral list. The Women’s Alliance formed in the early 1980s in response to the continuing under-representation of women in the national parliament (5 per cent). By 1987 they had achieved 10.1 per cent of the popular vote. The movement was premised on women’s difference and on a fundamental feminist critique of political practice. It is claimed that the alliance managed to maintain its more democratic, practical and woman-centred focus, reflected in the language and behaviour of its representatives. It is less clear that the presence of the alliance has fundamentally reshaped the mainstream political agenda in Iceland.156
More recently in France, persistent gender inequality in the public sphere has prompted a campaign demanding a particular form of positive discrimination, known as parite. The intention, achieved in 1999, was to insert this principle into the Fifth Republic’s constitution, although the practical consequences of this are less clear. The hope is that this will shatter the glass ceiling that holds women back from positions of power in all French political parties and within government.157 At the end of the century, despite formal recognition as citizens, European women’s political action remains constrained by the continuing force of gendered understandings of politics and political practice.
World History
