On 11–12 November 2024, the workshop titled International Networks of Women’s Activism and Mobility in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Successor States 1848–1945 took place at the Collegium Hungaricum Vienna.
The event was organized by the Collegium Hungaricum Vienna. The Institute of History of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities and the Committee for Women’s History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences also contributed to its organization. This unique event was the first and highly successful step in the development of a more intensive scientific cooperation between researchers from different disciplines at different stages of their careers. Researchers from ten countries and 15 institutions, ranging from early career scholars to the most renowned representatives of their profession, attended the workshop.
The main aim of the workshop was to promote scholarly cooperation between researchers from Hungary and abroad on the local, national, and international (transnational) dimensions of women’s activism and their struggle for emancipation. The participants’ presentations focused on the international networks of women’s rights activists in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the successor states. They did this by focusing on longer historical periods and different political systems, and by transgressing the borders that historically divided individual activists and different types of activisms. In other words, the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was considered at the workshop as a transnational laboratory.
In the presentations and the thought-provoking discussions, participants explored different aspects of women’s activism and their struggle for emancipation in an interdisciplinary approach. The participants discussed the international networks between women’s activists in the Monarchy and the successor states before 1918 and in the interwar period. They have also made the relationship of women’s movements to nation-building in the Monarchy’s multi-ethnic environment more visible and understandable. The research projects presented at the workshop were unique both because of their thematic focus and their methodology.
Participants were experienced and young researchers at different stages of their careers and they arrived from a variety of disciplines. They arrived to Vienna from Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Romania, as well as from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Canada. Talented early career PhD students, post-docs, and even researchers who have been working in their field for several decades attended the workshop. This was favorable, as the workshop aimed to deepen the dialogue between different generations of researchers and to create a framework for possible future collaboration between them.
On the first day of the two-day event, Márton Méhes, Director of the Collegium Hungaricum Vienna, and Iván Bertényi Jr., Deputy Academic Director of the Collegium Hungaricum Vienna and Director of the Hungarian Historical Institute in Vienna, welcomed the participants and the audience. They both emphasized that it was particularly important for the Collegium Hungaricum to organize a workshop on the subject-matter of women’s history. In her welcoming remarks, Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner, Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, emphasized the relevance of the topic. She mentioned that, as organizer of the event, she was delighted and extremely honored by the intense professional interest shown by the colleagues. She also stressed that, from the very beginning of the organization of the workshop, she considered it crucial that the event should be open to the younger generation of researchers, in addition to the most outstanding scholars.
The two keynote speakers, Johanna Gehmacher (University of Vienna) and Judith Szapor (McGill University, Montréal), are two distinguished representatives of the field who have made a significant contribution to the body of knowledge in the field of women’s history. As university professors, they have helped generations of distinguished researchers to integrate into the field. Gehmacher and Szapor spoke in their presentations about the historiography of the field and the role of language and translated texts in the international women’s movement.
Gehmacher stressed that the study of translations and translation practices is often a neglected aspect of social movements, even though it can bring extremely important results. The role of translators and the importance of texts translated from one language into another, was illustrated through one of the most influential transnational organizations of the women’s movement, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which was established in Berlin in 1904. In addition to numerous examples, Gehmacher also discussed the academic theories behind the practice of translation. Furthermore, she outlined the possible dynamics of the relationship between the translator and the person who used the text.
In her presentation, Judith Szapor reviewed the most important contributions published on women’s history and women’s movements in Europe and the Habsburg Empire, as well as the historiographical narratives that have been associated with them. Closely related to the subject-matter of the workshop, she outlined the possible research questions for the near future. She reflected, for example, on the question, repeatedly raised during the workshop, of the need to redefine “women’s activism”. She also raised the question of how the concept of “mobility” should be (re)defined in relation to women’s movements. Partly reflecting on Gehmacher’s presentation, Szapor argued that it was urgent to extend the research directions towards the “younger generation” of women’s movement activists.
Workshop participants
The first panel focused on women's movements and activists in the regions of the Monarchy in the Habsburg and post-Habsburg periods. The participants’ research projects focused on the changing networks of relations that had been formed between women’s activists of the region before 1918 and in the period following the collapse of the Monarchy. Chiara Paris (Center for Advanced Studies, Bolzano) presented the (international) activism of Maria Ducia, co-founder of the social democratic women’s movement in Tyrol. She described the legal regulations that hindered the emergence of the women’s movement in Tyrol and the impact of the creation of women’s organizations on the (political) awakening of local women. She also outlined the limits to women’s political participation and the path taken by women in South Tyrol after the region’s annexation to Italy in 1920.
Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner described the turning points in the development of the three most important bourgeois-liberal feminist women’s organizations in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy between the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and 1914. She argued that the associations acted on similar principles to promote women’s political empowerment, and that they were connected to each other by a number of direct and indirect links. She also pointed out that there was a significant overlap between the associations in terms of their aims, working methods, press activities, communication strategies, and the composition of their membership. Assessing their work, she concluded that the three associations had in many respects remained limited in scope, but had achieved important successes in the social, economic, and political empowerment of women.
Agatha Schwartz (University of Ottawa) argued that the concept of “women’s activism” needs to go beyond the usual notion of “political activism”, using the examples of four women activists and writers. In the traditional understanding of the term, it means only that women form associations for political purposes or demand the extension of political rights for their own gender. All the women in Schwartz’s presentation were born and/or worked in the southern regions of the Monarchy, later Yugoslavia. While Nafija Sarajlić lived and worked in Sarajevo, Milica Tomić and Adél Nemassányi (or Nemessányi) both lived in Novi Sad. Jelica Belović-Bernadžikovska visited many regions of the Monarchy during her life. What all four of them had in common was that they were all well-educated and had built up significant networks of contacts as a result of women’s movement activism, which Schwartz also gave an insight into during her presentation.
The second panel focused on women’s activists, organizations, and networks in minority or stateless position. Julia Bavouzet (University of Vienna) gave a presentation on transnational women’s voices. To discuss this, she used as a source the petitions sent to the League of Nations from 1919 (i.e. the period before its official establishment) until 1938. The petitions, which were signed by women, and then were taken up by women’s associations organized in the successor states of the Monarchy and then forwarded to the League of Nations. The women who signed the petitions included women of Slovak nationality living in Hungary. They feared the abolition and/or restriction of women’s suffrage introduced after the end of the First World War. Hungarian women from Transylvania also petitioned the League of Nations. Two women, with the help of the Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége (National Association of Hungarian Women), attempted to free their sister, who had been arrested by the Romanian police. Bavouzet argued that a closer examination of the petitions would allow a more detailed understanding of the development of the relationships between individuals and women’s associations/activists and the framework for transnational cooperation.
Isidora Grubački (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana) analyzed the networks of relations between women’s associations in Yugoslavia in relation to the history of their post-war organization. In addition, she examined the ways in which the post-1918 transformation and changes in state boundaries influenced the activism of certain groups of Yugoslav women. She has also explored the changing dynamics of relations between national and international organizations in the immediate post-war period. She discussed in detail why the international congresses of the two most important transnational women’s organizations, the International Council of Women in 1920 and the IWSA in 1923, mentioned in several other presentations, proved to be important for Yugoslav women.
In this present war situation, it was a particular honor for the workshop organizers to welcome a scholar from Ukraine, Alla Shvets (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ivan Franko Institute). Shvets discussed the development of the Ukrainian women’s movement with an international perspective. She spoke in detail about the links of Ukrainian women’s associations in Vienna from 1914 to the interwar period. She pointed out that Vienna became an important focal point for the Ukrainian women’s movement during the First World War, as many activists fled to Vienna from Galicia, which was occupied by the Russian army. Many of them founded a women’s association under the name “Ukrainian Women’s Committee for Wounded Soldiers”, which aimed to support wounded Ukrainian soldiers and to carry out educational and cultural activities. Its members were among the most prominent figures of the Ukrainian women’s movement, whose lives and activism were in many ways intertwined with the city of Vienna. Their leaders formed the “Ukrainian Women’s Association” in Vienna in 1920 maintained active contacts with many Austrian women’s associations and represented Ukrainian women in transnational organizations.
Alexandra Ghiţ (University of Vienna) gave an overview of the goals and the direction of the activism of Romanian-speaking women in Transylvania from the second half of the 19th century onwards. In her research, she examined how women activists constructed the women’s cause and how it merged with the nationalist movement. These are absolutely relevant questions even in cases where women shaped their activism towards Hungary, or through connections within the Monarchy and beyond the Empire. Ghiţ also outlined the impact and significance of women’s activism after 1918. In doing so, she reflected on the challenges of researching women’s activism and the possible research practices related to it.
Alla Shvets, Julia Bavouzet, Isidora Grubački and Alexandra Ghiț
The third and final panel on Monday focused on the role of the press in the women’s movement. Marian Gladiš (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice) focused on the cooperation between women’s journals published in the Slovak and Czech regions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. His presentation revealed that until the end of the 19th century there was no press specifically dedicated to women, whose mother tongue was Slovak. In the Czech Republic, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, however, the first women’s periodicals appeared in the 1860s and 1870s. Gladiš analyzed in detail the first Slovak-language women’s periodicals, the monthly Dennica and Živena, named after the Old Slavic goddess of life and fertility. He pointed out that these periodicals played a key role in the increasing interest of Slovak women in the discourse on their emancipation from the turn of the century onwards. Shortly afterwards, Slovak women started to follow the example of international women’s activists and started to agitate for their emancipation.
Urška Strle (University of Ljubljana) interpreted the publishing of women’s magazines and the inclusion of women in the national reading public in the context of the modernization efforts at the turn of the century. As a starting point for the topic under consideration, she referred to the theory of Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Enker, according to which the women’s emancipation movement chronologically moved in concentric circles from Western and Central Europe to the inclusion of Northern, Eastern, and Southern Europe. She argued that it is very important to establish how women entered these national readerships and when they became authors and publishers of periodicals in the first place. In her view, to understand the issue in a broader context, it is also necessary to look more closely at the types of emancipatory strategies that have emerged from these relationships in less central or rather peripheral regions of Europe. In her presentation, Strle discussed these circles in a transnational perspective. In addition, she outlined how the experience of international networking has shaped the literary and publicistic activities of Slovenian women. As a source, she relied on the journal Slovenka, published in Trieste.
Urška Strle, Marian Gladiš and Márkus Beáta
On the second day of the workshop, following a plenary presentation by Judith Szapor, Lydia Jammernegg, former staff member of the Austrian National Library, spoke about the webpage and information system “Frauen in Bewegung”, a joint project of the Austrian National Library and the University of Vienna. Ariadne, the web portal of the Austrian National Library’s Women and Gender Documentation Centre, has been operating since 2009. It presents and documents activists and women’s associations from 1848 to 1918 in the Habsburg Empire, then in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and in Austria from the First Republic and the corporative state system until 1938, based on biographies, images, digitalized material, archival material, primary sources, and secondary literature. The history of women’s movements is made accessible and visible to researchers through historical documents. The growing database includes nearly 700 individuals and 400 associations, many of which are documented for the first time in this project. In this way, the database and its operators (who can be contacted by anyone) will be of considerable help to researchers of the women’s movements in the Monarchy and the successor states.
Plenary presentation by Judith Szapor
The last two panels of the workshop focused on women peace movement activists, psychoanalysts, and socialists. Peter Moser (Archiv für Agrargeschichte, Berne) presented the main intersections of the history of the Women’s Organization for World Order, established in 1935. This relatively short-lived but important association was founded by Anna Helene Askanasy Mahler, who lived in Vienna and later emigrated to Canada, and a few other women from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, England, and the Netherlands. Moser pointed out that in this international feminist organization, women activists from the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire worked closely with women activists from Western Europe and Scandinavia.
In her presentation, Lea Horvat (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena) gave an insight into the activism of women working in coffeehouses. As a starting point, she outlined how, by the turn of the century, more and more women were employed in coffeehouses and thus began to demand better working conditions. She argued that these women’s struggles for visibility and their participation in public life were closely linked. Like Agatha Schwartz, Horvat called for a broader definition of women’s activism. She proposed a way of understanding activism that goes beyond institutionalized organizing. A particularly interesting point of her research is that she has situated women in this field of work in a transnational context, drawing on archival sources, ego-documents and popular press products related to different cafés.
Anna Borgos (HUN-REN Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Budapest) examined the relationship between early 20th century feminism and psychoanalysis, and their rather “ambivalent alliance”. She pointed out the traces of the transition between the two movements, their tensions and interactions, and the references to psychoanalysis in feminist literature. She did this by focusing on the views and records of contemporary (Freudian and Adlerian) psychoanalysts on the women’s movements in Austria and Hungary. She explained that in Vienna there were many links between psychoanalysis and women’s movements. The Budapest school of psychoanalysis reflected most strongly on the female experience and the relationship between mother and infant. In Hungary, the ‘common denominator’ between the two movements seemed to be the issues of motherhood, sexual education, child-rearing, and coeducation.
Ingrid Sharp (University of Leeds) outlined the networks that Quaker women built up in the post-World War I period during their humanitarian aid work in Russia, Germany, Serbia, and Austria. In particular, she gave an insight into the activities of two British Quaker women, Ruth Fry and Marjorie Sykes, in Austria and Germany. She also described their networking with other women’s organizations involved in humanitarian aid. Fry’s work exemplifies the intersection of women’s activism and mobility, as she has crossed many borders in her travels to provide relief in war-torn regions. By examining her role and the contribution of Quakers to post-war relief and reconstruction, Sharp has illuminated another aspect of the multiple dimensions of women’s activism in the Monarchy and its post-dissolution period.
Ingrid Sharp at the closing discussion of the workshop
Therese Garstenauer (University of Vienna) gave an insight into a specific sector of the women’s movement, the associations of women government employees. As the development of infrastructure (such as railways, postal services, and telegraphs), increasingly run by the state, required a large workforce in the 19th century, a new type of public employee was created. In her presentation, Garstenauer described the professional organizations of women government officials from the early 20th century to the period between the two world wars. She described the situation of women in trade unions and compared it with that of men. She pointed out that, while the first women’s associations of postal workers were formed because the men’s unions refused to admit them, after the collapse of the Monarchy some of the women’s associations merged with those that were formed by men. In connection with this, she argued that although women’s associations of civil servants were considered “white-collar”, they were somewhere between the bourgeois and the labor movement. And although she had only just begun her research on the nationality of members and the international links of the associations, she presented the first results of this research.
Clara Anna Egger (University of Vienna) traced the one-week-journey of Emily Green Balch, international secretary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), through Central and South-Eastern Europe in 1921. It was at this time that the WILPF, the world’s first international women’s peace organization, founded in The Hague in 1915, held its third congress in Vienna. In her presentation, Egger highlighted Balch Green’s diplomatic efforts to win women’s participation in the Vienna Congress. The aim of the event was nothing less than to “reconcile and heal the wounds of the past”. Her hypothesis was that recruitment and reconciliation were intertwined in the ideas of women pacifists in the years after the First World War. In support of this, Egger drew on Green Balch’s personal papers and correspondence with the leaders of the Austrian and Hungarian sections of the WILPF, namely Yella Hertzka and Vilma Glücklich. Through Egger’s presentation, the arguments Green Balch used to convince women in Central and South-Eastern Europe of the importance of joining the WILPF became clearer.
A key aim of the organizers was to leave enough time for discussion after the panelists’ presentations. The audience proved to be very active throughout, with a number of questions and suggestions for future joint cooperation. Of course, the panel chairs also played an important role in coordinating the discussion. The sessions were chaired by eminent historians from Austria and Hungary: Peter Becker, Director of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung and Professor at the University of Vienna, Zsófia Lóránd, Lecturer at the University of Vienna and leader of the ERC project The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929–2001, Beáta Márkus assistant professor at the University of Pécs, Christa Hämmerle, professor at the University of Vienna and head of the Sammlung Frauennachlässe for 20 years before 2023, and Gergely Romsics, senior research fellow at the Institute of History of the HUN REN Research Centre for the Humanities.
It is very important to underline that the event was unique not only because of the speakers and the discourse between the participants. The ‘danger’ of women’s history workshops, in our experience, both in Hungary and abroad, is that the majority of researchers do not even attempt to connect with their colleagues. They accept only their own results as ‘true’, without attempting to approach and ‘build a common language’ with others. This time, however, it was truly uplifting to see world-renowned and respected researchers in the field reaching out not only to each other, but also to talented young people at the beginning of their careers, with understanding and support. It is therefore perhaps not unreasonable to be optimistic that the event will be an important step towards more intensive professional cooperation in the future, extending beyond the successor states of the Monarchy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Integration into foreign research and closer cooperation with scholars of women’s history in the successor states of the Monarchy are, in our opinion, essential for the Hungarian scholars in the coming years.
Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner–Beáta Márkus
