Marilyn J Boxer. American Historical Review. Volume 112, Issue 1. February 2007.
On Bastille Day 1889, German socialist Clara Zetkin announced to delegates from twenty countries assembled in Paris on the centennial of the French Revolution that “the emancipation of women, together with that of all humanity, will take place only with the emancipation of labor from capital.” Zetkin assured these founders of the Second International that they need not fear losing “proletarian” women to others who were claiming to advance their interests, especially the women’s rights groups who held their own international congresses in the French capital that summer. Despite her own comfortable origins as the daughter of a schoolteacher and a doctor’s widow who had herself co-founded a women’s rights organization, Zetkin denounced the nonsocialist “bourgeois women’s movement” as a vain effort “built upon sand … [with] no basis in reality.” While challenging her overwhelmingly male audience to recognize women’s need for paid work to ensure their economic independence, she emphasized in this speech that “bourgeois” women offered no solution to the “woman question.” Speaking at a women’s rights congress in Berlin in 1896, she startled participants by declaring herself their “adversary [Gegnerin].”
Zetkin’s message would reverberate far and wide and last into the twenty-first century, bolstered in its long life by New Left and feminist activists and scholars, including historians of the 1970s generation, In 2004, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, assessing the condition of women in postsocialist Eastern Europe, asserted that “not much has changed since 1907,” and quoted Zetkin’s speech at the First International Congress of Socialist Women, held that year in Stuttgart: “There cannot be a unified struggle for the entire [female] sex … No, it must be a class struggle of all the exploited without differences of sex against all exploiters no matter what sex they belong to.” Socialists must not, Zetkin had stressed, collaborate with “bourgeois feminists,” even on issues of common concern. Drawing on this speech, Ghodsee suggests that the development of educational and advocacy institutions modeled on those created by women in “the West” threatens postcommunist Eastern European women with a new kind of “cultural feminism” that, like the earlier “bourgeois feminism” to which she likens it, is inappropriate to their real interests. Other scholars attest to the persistence of this concept.
“Bourgeois feminism,” however, is a slippery term that relies on a notion of “class” that has been substantially “reworked” in light of cultural studies and gender analysis. Historians today point to multiple ways in which gender and class work together, showing, for example, how wives sans profession became in the nineteenth century a marker of upwardly mobile masculinity. The binary distinction between public and private that underlay both scholarly and popular notions of gender has similarly been challenged, and the “public sphere” itself is seen to have been constructed so as to exclude women. But no one has yet looked critically at how earlier, dichotomous notions of class and gender relationships have affected women’s movements and their historians.
The construct that Zetkin and socialists of her era developed to distance themselves from burgeoning women’s rights movements had its origins in European class politics at the turn of the twentieth century. That construct was redeployed by leftists in a later period of feminist militancy, and historians had a role in passing along the politics and rhetoric of the earlier age to a new generation of students and activists. In addition to questioning the class basis on which this long-accepted distinction rests, we need to create new histories of feminism that are no longer encumbered by problematic assumptions about women and putative class interests or by socialist politics of the past. Such a reinterpretation might also shed light on the limitations of the European Left and its lost opportunities in the long process that Geoff Eley has termed “forging democracy.”
The origins of the concept “bourgeois feminism” lie deep in the early history of Marxian socialism. Both Marx and Engels portrayed the working-class woman as a victim of (industrial) capitalism, Marx offering a detailed portrait of the death of a twenty-year-old milliner from overwork, and Engels reporting his observation in England that “most of the prostitutes of the town had their employment in the mills to thank for their present situation.” In his landmark book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels famously declared that “within the family, he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat,” but neither he nor Marx showed sympathy for organized feminism. For Marx, it represented “false women’s emancipation”; he declared that “German women should have begun by driving their men to self-emancipation.” Engels wrote to an American correspondent in 1891 that, thanks to efforts to organize socialist women, “the antiquated semibourgeois women’s rights asses will soon be ordered to the rear.”
The most widely read of the male socialists on the woman question, however, was the German leader August Bebel. In the introduction to his classic work Woman under Socialism (1883), Bebel noted that “tile hostile [feindliche] sisters have … a number of points of contact, on which they can, although marching separately, strike jointly [with socialists].” While the extent of Bebel’s support for nonsocialist women’s movements is disputed, early in his career he did assist his countrywoman Louise Otto-Peters in creating a women’s emancipation organization, and he also acknowledged that “working-class women have more in common with bourgeois women or aristocratic women than do working-class men with men of other social classes.” On women’s issues, however, the most influential socialist activist of the time was Zetkin, who articulated and strenuously maintained what became the orthodox Marxist-socialist position on women’s rights movements. Her 1889 Paris speech became what German women’s historian Ute Frevert terms “the manifesto of the proletarian women’s movement.” Although early in her career Zetkin expressed strong support for many goals of the women’s rights movement, she came to view it as a “serious, dangerous power of the counter-revolution” that must be stopped. She sincerely believed that the condition of women, to whom she once referred as “slaves,” would be remedied only through socialist revolution. Zetkin prescribed a “clean break [reinliche Scheidung]” between proletarian parties and other political movements. Despite continuing to advocate some feminist goals, she expressed “extreme animosity” toward the idea of sisterhood, using derisory language such as “stupid feminist dreams about harmony” to describe feminist politics, and calling feminists “muddle-headed, wishy-washy, weak.” By the mid-1890s, she had set in motion a worldwide movement to pillory nonsocialist women’s rights efforts. Her biweekly journal, Die Gleichheit [Equality], addressed to women workers and party members, “untiringly differentiated between socialist and bourgeois women, socialist and bourgeois tactics,” Jean Quataert has said. Her rejection of “bourgeois feminism” was “ostentatious,” commented her French contemporary, the socialist and feminist activist Madeleine Pelletier. Women’s historians have termed it “savage” and “vicious.” It was also enormously effective.
Who were these “bourgeois feminists” who posed such an alleged danger to working women? Prevailing marriage and property laws in late-nineteenth-century Europe ensured that bourgeoises rarely enjoyed the privileges and power of the capitalist bourgeois. Some rejected the values of the marketplace, and many continued women’s traditional philanthropic work to aid poor women. Increasingly, however, daughters of bourgeois families also worked for pay. As teachers, postal or sales clerks, and low-level administrators, they in no way fit the image of the socialist ideal, the laborers in “the great virile trades … heroes who brought about the second industrial revolution,” as Michelle Perrot puts it. Nevertheless, they were assumed by socialists to be, in Rosa Luxemburg’s inimitable phrase, “the parasites of the parasites of the social body.”
In linking the words “feminism” and “bourgeois,” socialists drew on a well-developed terminology laden with negative affect. Beyond “bourgeois classes,” myriad usages abound: bourgeois deviation, bourgeois family, bourgeois individualism, bourgeois morality, bourgeois respectability, and, of course, bourgeois feminism—but rarely bourgeois socialism. But what does “bourgeois” mean? An imaginary other, a negative stereotype, even a mod way to say passe—“so last year”? Once a marker of residence or legal order, by the late decades of the nineteenth century it had become merely a pejorative epithet. Heavily influenced by Marxist notions of a “bourgeois revolution,” it was (and is) used to denigrate not only individuals but, through a kind of conceptual and linguistic slippage, also the ideas and aims of a political movement, namely feminism.
But the term has long been contested. In 1968, Canadian historian Shirley Gruner, examining its usage in France in the 1830s, declared, “The word ‘bourgeoisie’ has never had the good fortune to be defined in any strict sense.” It was associated with several social theories, including Saint-Simonianism and Marxism, of course. Definitions at that time ranged from “a small capitalist elite” to “the immense majority of the population.” It was used confusingly by Fourierists “both to mean the mass of small craftsmen and artisans and to mean the neo-feudal capitalists.” Gruner wondered if it had any further usefulness. Two decades later, studying the “bourgeois experience” in nineteenth-century Europe, Peter Gay found “a Babel of definitions.” He points out that it could refer to the vast majority who were neither nobility nor peasants, but also that in mid-century, “Parisian proletarians used bourgeoise to designate respectable, sober working-class housewives whose husbands were afraid of them.” Penned by writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Schnitzler, and Emile Zola, the word became an insult. Flaubert, who named himself “bourgeoisophobus,” told George Sand, “Axiom: Hatred of Bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue.”
More recently, Sarah Maza has ascribed the French bourgeoisie to a “social imaginary.” After its prerevolutionary use as a legal category disappeared, she states, the “bourgeoisie” became a negative, a way to describe “what someone else was.” It carried a taint inherited from the old regime, implying both “unearned privilege and cultural deficiency.” Bourgeoisophobia persisted; generations later, some leftist students even initially “dismissed the civil rights movement as ‘bourgeois’; … since the blacks sitting in at Woolworth lunch counters were college students, it meant that they were middle class and not the workers or sharecroppers of revolutionary prediction.”
Today it appears that Zetkin’s position rested less on any clear socioeconomic distinction among women than on ideology, political strategies, and perhaps personal rivalries. It also depended, as Eley importantly points out, on relationships among labor, socialist, and liberal parties that, in each national context, set the parameters within which women could act. While many profound differences marked the lives of working-class and leisured women, Zetkin’s stance ignores the extent to which many members of the reviled bourgeois class stood closer in social background and political outlook to the socialists themselves than to the “parasites.” Her position reflected the socialist leaders’ fears of diverting attention away from class struggle and of alienating the artisanal core of their working-class support, who for the most part held traditional views about women. Zetkin adamantly refused all invitations to collaborate; in one notable incident in 1895, she even engaged in a published dispute with her socialist colleagues after declining to serve on a proposed cross-class commission—a “mishmash commission,” she said—to study working conditions for women factory workers, a project they thought she should support.
In her efforts to uphold her vision of class struggle and to avoid cross-class collaboration, Zetkin moved away from Bebel and his criticism of the limits imposed on women by motherhood, domesticity, and traditional gender roles. As the primary voice on women’s issues of German Social Democracy (the SPD), Europe’s largest and dominant socialist party; as founder and leader of the socialist women’s international; and as longtime editor (1891 to 1917) of the socialist women’s journal, Zetkin had broad and profound influence. Following her lead, working-class leaders everywhere were “haunted,” in Quataert’s view, by concern lest “their” women “be intimidated by their bourgeois sisters to pursue purely feminist goals.” They strove incessantly to repudiate those who sought to breach the class divide. Zetkin’s ideas recur in the works of well-known socialist women in several other countries, notably Eleanor Marx in England, Alexandra Kollontai in Russia, and Louise Saumoneau in France—the latter two of whom became Zetkin’s devoted younger followers, and each of whom exerted significant influence in her own country. All agreed on the importance, in Eleanor Marx’s words, of “organising] not as ‘women’ but as proletarians; not as female rivals of our working men but as their comrades in struggle.” (Still, less separatist than the others, Marx proposed that “where the bourgeois women demand rights that are of help to us, we will fight together with them.”)
Kollontai’s major contribution to the theory of “bourgeois feminism,” a lengthy 1908 “antifeminist polemic,” was written expressly to undermine potential class collaboration. Under her influence, socialist women attacked women suffragists aggressively, appearing at feminist meetings to harass speakers and disrupt proceedings. Although her personal history contradicted her words, the nobly born Kollontai exaggerated the feminists’ “selfish class character.” She wrote, “Between the emancipated woman of the intelligentsia and the toiling woman with calloused hands, there was such an unbridgeable gulf, that there could be no question of any sort of point of agreement between them.” One biographer describes Kollontai as the “scourge of the bourgeois feminists.” Ironically, she developed one of the most radical critiques of women’s roles in family and sexuality of her era, for which she was criticized by Lenin and rejected by many others.
In France, the first published call to establish a separate female constituency for Marxist socialism appeared in 1899. It initially expressed ambivalence toward feminism. The conveners, who termed themselves “socialist feminists,” acknowledged the “legitimacy of [feminist] claims, regarding them as reforms whose realization would improve the situation of women,” and declaring, “we will defend them as such.” This appeal reappeared without change for at least five years, but its authors, who included Saumoneau, soon dropped the f-word and increasingly emulated Zetkin’s strident opposition to “bourgeois feminism.” Aiming “to tear socialist and proletarian women away from feminist confusionism,” Saumoneau “adhered to the letter” of Zetkin’s caution against cross-class cooperation. Like her mentor, she attacked her opponents’ character, describing them as “naive, deranged and hysterical.” Historian Charles Sowerwine states that “Saumoneau not only broke with the feminist movement, but also prevented the socialist women’s movement from putting any emphasis on the struggle for equality between the sexes and even from taking into account the problems of women in recruiting them to the party. Women would come into the socialist party as citizens, like the men, or they would not come at all.” In France, even after World War I, “socialist women simply continued to repeat Saumoneau’s arguments,” says Paul Smith. “Saumonisme” prevailed, says Christine Bard, referring to 1936, when, with a socialist government in power, socialist women opted not to press for the right to vote. Saumoneau “continued as a destructive power behind the scenes,” says Helmut Gruber, ensuring that female participation was limited to those few willing to join the overwhelmingly male party and brave the inhospitable masculine ambience of local meetings.
A fourth socialist woman of this era who strongly voiced similar suspicion of nonsocialist feminists was the Dutch leader Henriette Roland Holst-Van der Schalk. In 1898, when Dutch feminists organized a national exhibition on women’s work, Roland Holst urged working-class women to boycott it, publishing a pamphlet in protest. In hostile language that vied with Zetkin’s invective, Roland Holst called the exhibition leaders “hypocritical, fork-torigued, cowardly … middle-class feminists.” At a preliminary meeting called to inform working women of exhibition plans, she expressed “great anger, the speaker stamping her feet and her eyes ‘ablaze with hatred and scorn,’ while she shouted insults at the president herself.”
How much influence these socialist women had outside leadership circles and beyond major cities is uncertain. What is clear is that, while maintaining many different positions on other issues, most other socialist parties adopted the Second International’s and the SPD’s party line of anathematizing “bourgeois feminism.” Some leaders, despite personal ambivalence, divorced themselves from nonsocialist feminist groups, although few expressed opposition in such vituperative language as Zetkin, Kollontai, Saumoneau, and Roland Holst. In fact, many socialist women distinguished between formal, organizational collaboration and cooperation among individuals. This point was recognized in 1900 at the first conference of German socialist women, where it was agreed to leave it to individuals to decide whether to “occasionally or temporarily work alongside ‘women’s righters’ and other bourgeois elements.” In many cases, especially at the local level, they did collaborate. The “clean break” policy advocated by Zetkin, and reinforced by the socialist leadership, however, forced many left-leaning women to choose. A Dutch internationalist lamented in 1911 that “the SD [Social Democratic] women refuse to take a leaflet from the hands of a woman with the badge of the suffragists, although it is an appeal written by Bebel … himself.”
Rivalry over organizational power and resources played a major role in shaping the conflict. Socialist parties had access to substantial resources unavailable to women’s groups. Lily Braun, who vied with Zetkin for leadership in Germany, noted that working-class women’s opportunity to ally with a large, powerful party meant that “proletarian women … had the potential of being politically effective; bourgeois women did not.” When a new socialist women’s group was formed in Paris in 1913,
Pelletier predicted sarcastically that “it will leave feminism behind to please the men in the party.” An Austrian socialist, describing her colleagues, noted, “Beginners in the class struggle, they were anxious to maintain their prestige vis-a-vis their male comrades.” Criticism by socialist women of “bourgeois feminism” was at the least a shrewd strategy.
The socialists’ ardent castigation of “bourgeois feminism” persisted through the interwar period, despite male socialists’ participation in so-called bourgeois governments during the Popular Front of the 1930s. It was most influential where socialist parties adhered closely to the principles and politics of the Second International, less so, for example, in Great Britain. It appeared as far away from its origins as China in the 1920s and Vietnam in the 1930s. It was, of course, affected by the rise of welfare states, with support from nonsocialists and socialists alike, and by changing communist policies. “Feminism,” however, had come to signify “bourgeois feminism.” The legacy of class division persisted, so that, as Mineke Bosch comments about the Dutch women’s movement, when feminism reemerged in the 1970s, conflicts between a “bourgeois” women’s movement and a “proletarian” movement were taken entirely for granted by activists.36 They soon made their way into the academy as well.
After World War II, claims for women’s rights on the left reemerged with the founding by French communists in 1945 of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, to pursue the fight against fascism and to represent working-class women. Caught up in Cold War politics, the WIDF, Leila Rupp states, “continued the well-worn socialist tradition of hostility to the bourgeois women’s movement,” contending with older international women’s organizations for representation at the United Nations. A short collection of excerpts from writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, published in 1951 as The Woman Question, offered as an appendix a selection by Zetkin from her famous 1920 interview with Lenin, including Lenin’s counsel to “draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and [bourgeois] feminism.” Reprinted in 1970, this publication appeared that year on the reading list for the first course in women’s history taught in the first women’s studies program in the United States.
By the time that feminism reappeared as a highly visible movement, many of its demands had been achieved in the countries where “first wave” feminists had been most active. Believing, mistakenly, that their predecessors had limited their quest to the vote, some “second wave” feminists distinguished between what they called “equal rights feminism” and “women’s liberation.” Their new demands included elimination of many restrictions on women’s lives that they associated with “bourgeois” society, including “bourgeois morality” and sexual repression. Given the experience of many new leaders in New Left movements, it is no surprise that dichotomous thinking about the relationship between feminism and socialism reemerged, along with criticism of the “bourgeois character” of the woman suffrage movement by activist author Kate Millett and others. The “bourgeois feminist movement” of the suffragists constituted a “trap,” wrote Robin Morgan in the emblematic text of 1970, Sisterhood Is Powerful.
Class issues infused the politics of women’s liberation from its beginnings. Many activists perceived capitalism as an obstacle to the equality of women as well as of the working classes. In Britain, the women’s liberation journal Red Rag, in its inaugural issue of 1972, announced its support for “revolutionary change in society, for ending capitalism and establishing socialism.” In France, where anti-bourgeois sentiment was particularly strong and feminism subject to “aggressive” ridicule, feminists of the 1970s were, in historian Florence Rochefort’s words, “profoundly anchored in the new left and the extreme left.” By linking feminism to socialism, activists could show their recognition that women’s liberation intended far more than relieving Betty Friedan’s unhappy housewives of “the problem that has no name.”
Two of the earliest and most influential activist-scholars, Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham, emerged from leftist groups in England, where the new feminism was closely related to the labor movement. The new women’s movement on the left is sometimes dated from the appearance in 1966 of Mitchell’s article “The Longest Revolution” in the New Left Review, which reminded readers of the Marxian legacy and the socialist failure to solve the problem of women’s subordination. What held women back, in Mitchell’s analysis, was the “traditional,” that is to say, the “bourgeois” family. But Mitchell also cautioned against too early a class division among the new feminists. “Perhaps in the future, the biggest single theoretical battle will have to be that between liberationists with a socialist analysis, and feminists with a ‘radical feminist’ analysis. But that future has come too soon. The conflict is premature because neither group has yet developed a ‘theory.’ The practice which is that theory’s condition of production has only just begun.” Mitchell avoided using the term “bourgeois feminism,” preferring instead to identify feminists who believed that equality could be won without a socialist revolution as “liberal.”
Sheila Rowbotham, a “worker student” in history whose pioneering 1972 book, Women, Resistance, and Revolution, linked women to the cause of socialist revolution, employed the term “bourgeois feminist” only in the final sentence of her introductory chapter. But she intended it in no derogatory sense, simply as an attribute of women who had very early challenged the status quo in women’s roles. She also offered a revisionist reading of socialist policy, arguing that feminist “changes will not follow a socialist revolution automatically but will have to be made explicit in a distinct movement now, as a precondition of revolution, not as its aftermath.” Writing retrospectively, Rowbotham noted the extent to which leftist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had caricatured feminists and made feminism into a “dreaded bogey.” These “over-simplified caricatures of ‘bourgeois feminism’ which concertina-ed several kinds of feminism into one grotesque creature … have been taken too much at face value by socialist women writing history.” She herself had failed, she said, to problematize the relationship between socialism and feminism sufficiently, or to challenge an “uncritical acceptance of a simple polarity between socialism and feminism.” “It was not,” she wrote in a subsequent book, “a simple question of reactionary middle-class feminists versus enlightened working-class socialists.”
The new women’s history was strongly influenced by developments in labor history. Both Mitchell and Rowbotham had studied with E. P. Thompson, the famous British activist-scholar who helped to bring about new perspectives on working-class and socialist history. But by neglecting women in his classic work The Making of the English Working Class (1963), he sensitized female activist-scholars to the “cult of masculinity” greatly admired by the left. In a perceptive account of Thompson’s influence and the difficulties arising from it, titled What’s Left?, Julia Swindells and Lisa Jardine state the problem: “What is admissible within the Thompson enterprise of retrieving working-class consciousness as a ‘suitable’ topic for historians is going to be a problem for subsequent radical history, particularly when social history belatedly remembers the women. The ‘value’ of working-class men’s experience is authorized by culture, and in that account the women provide the ‘virtue’ via the family. But in that case, the women will always appear in the account as bourgeois.” Similar problems arose in radical movements in North America, France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. As women turned “personal” into “political” issues in the politics of 1960s radical movements, they often found themselves shoved aside and belittled. “We are trashed as bourgeois feminists irrespective of the political position we take,” commented Dorothy E. Smith, a Canadian Marxist feminist activist-scholar. “If you are working-class they’ll humiliate you with your sex and class ignorances, if you’re middle-class they’ll call you a petty bourgeois deviationist,” complained Rowbotham. This rejection of leftist women’s perspectives contributed substantially to shaping the new women’s movement, in which women on the left played a formative role.
Two developments of the 1970s brought increased prominence to the assumption of a deep class division among activist women, in which use of the word “bourgeois” to castigate nonsocialist feminists continued. One was a self-identified socialist feminist movement whose adherents began a search for new theory to remedy flaws in the work inherited from nineteenth-century socialists. The second movement, also heavily influenced by nineteenth-century socialist thought, was the academic field of women’s studies. The terminology and the legacy of disdain for “bourgeois feminism” appear often in the literature of both movements.
Socialist feminists drew on Engels to legitimize women’s claims; some cited Mitchell; most assumed a socialist revolution essential to women’s liberation. While factional politics split women’s movements, numerous theorists tried to integrate socialism and feminism by developing materialist explanations that, unlike Marxism, included human reproduction and linked the systems of “patriarchy” that governed family life with relations of production. Others inveighed against “bourgeois feminism.” “Today we polemicize with ‘bourgeois’ and ‘petty-bourgeois’ feminists,” said Mary-Alice Waters in 1972. “Many of us are dissatisfied with a strict bourgeois feminism,” wrote Charnie Guettel in 1974. “Bourgeois and proletarian women confront each other in the labor market, and bourgeois women are one of the instruments used to undercut the wages of proletarian women … today [just as] in Clara Zetkin’s day,” wrote Marlene Dixon in 1977. Like their predecessors in the Second International, these women assured their male colleagues of their commitment to socialist revolution and of their rejection of nonsocialist feminisms.
Aiming to reduce the conflict, theorist Lise Vogel noted that Zetkin, in an 1896 speech, did not propose a simple dichotomy but divided women into groups, separating out the “ruling-class women of the Upper Ten Thousand” from the lower and middle bourgeoisie who constituted the core of the bourgeois women’s movement, and whose demands she then considered “entirely justified.” In Vogel’s view, Zetkin’s later intransigent opposition to nonsocialist women reflected her resistance to reformism within the socialist movement as well as her pragmatic politics. (“Most revisionists and at least some reformists in the SPD were, in fact, closely allied to bourgeois feminism,” as they more generally favored collaboration with liberals, states Richard J. Evans.)
During the later 1970s and the 1980s, as feminism faded from the public eye, it reappeared in rapidly spreading women’s studies programs, where, from the beginning, the influence of socialist thought was strong. Academic feminism drew heavily on the literature that informed the radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. Whatever the course discipline, many reading lists included works in which students encountered discussion of socialism’s relationship to feminism. Engels’s Origin of the Family appeared on many of the first syllabi in women’s studies, along with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1952) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), both of which rely on Engels. Essays by socialists Margaret Benston, Marlene Dixon, and Roxanne Dunbar that linked women’s liberation to socialist revolution appeared repeatedly. The first women’s studies textbooks, which generally included some effort to explain the origins of women’s “oppression” and concomitant proposed solutions, tended to define women’s movements using oversimplified terms. As Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips write, “1970s feminism assumed one could specify a cause of women’s oppression … [one that] lay at the level of social structure … In the taxonomies so beloved of the period-as of many commentators subsequently—feminisms were divided into their liberal, socialist, and radical varieties.” The notion of “bourgeois feminism” (sometimes identified as “liberal feminism”) found a place alongside socialist feminism and radical feminism as one of the “Big Three” frequently cited by historians and feminist theorists.
Not only did this practice confuse class origins and class outlook, it defied the reality that feminism’s constituency persisted in cutting across alleged class borders. It obscured the fact that feminism also transcended racial lines. Even though, as Zillah Eisenstein points out, “The ‘bourgeois’ woman has not really been identified yet in terms of a class analysis specifically pertaining to women,” she was readily targeted for dismissal. The founders of the women’s studies program at San Diego State chastised themselves and others associated with the university for their “petit bourgeois” biases. In 1974, when the African American Combahee River Collective, identifying its politics as socialist, published the first book on “black women’s studies,” it rejected support for a leading black feminist group, the National Black Feminist Organization, for its “bourgeois-feminist stance.” Introducing a reprint of Clara Zetkin’s work in 1984, activist Angela Davis opined that “bourgeois feminists today .. . have a great deal to learn from Zetkin’s analysis.”
Historians, meanwhile, set out to recover the heritage of socialist women and feminist socialists. As a research topic, the relationship between feminism and socialism offered several attractions. It provided entree for young historians into the popular subfield then dubbed the “new social history.” It offered attractively untrodden ground, including virtually untouched archival materials. It also offered a chance to contribute to the wider movement for social change. History, at least on the left, seemed to allow for “making a statement.” Perhaps it also offered what Virginia Woolf described as “the glamour of the working class and the emotional relief afforded by adopting its cause.” No one snickered at the idea of working-class history, and, of course, no one wanted to be “bourgeois.” Like earlier feminists who applauded the socialists for their stance on women’s rights, the new historians of women also appreciated the recognition that socialist parties had afforded women’s causes—“the first in all countries,” as the secretary-general of the National Council of French Women, Mme. Avril de Sainte-Croix, declared in 1907.
At that time, however, one could read basic texts about socialism without encountering a single reference to women. The focus was on ideology and organizations, political parties and trade associations, strikes and protest marches; the rhetoric was dominated by the language of class, and the working class was embodied in the artisan, factory hand, or miner, its “quintessential worker” clearly male.
Sources included organizational records, proceedings of party congresses, party platforms, personal papers of party leaders, and periodical publications supported by party funds. Labor history told of men and organizations. As Beatrix Campbell wrote (of Britain), “The socialist movement … [was] swept off its feet by the magic of masculinity, muscle and machinery,” and its historians failed to challenge this perception.
Despite New Left influences, the initial challenge to consensus history did not extend to women’s interests. French labor historian Michelle Perrot, who became one of the founders of French women’s history, tells a revealing story of resistance by Trotskyist, Maoist, and other radical students. In 1973, when sociologist Andree Michel introduced analysis of the family into the first women’s history course in France, she “was reproached … They said they did not want to hear about family models; the family was bourgeois.” The historiography also reflects the long dominance in the academy of structuralism. In this heyday of the “longue duree,” not only was biography all but banished from the historical profession, it was doubly suspect on grounds of elitism. The term “women worthies” took on a pejorative cast, while women workers and women on the left attracted disproportionate scholarly interest.
Rowbotham introduced her readers to Anna Doyle Wheeler, Flora Tristan, Eleanor Marx, Alexandra Kollontai, Angelica Balabanoff, Emma Goldman, and many other socialist women. Werner Thonnessen’s 1969 study (which appeared in English in 1973) of the SPD’s stance toward women brought prominence to Clara Zetkin and her German party. Thonnessen charged “the [bourgeois] women’s movement … [with its] problem-ridden aim of legal equality” with responsibility for society’s ability to “liquidate the proletarian women’s movement.” He credits “bourgeois feminism,” along with “proletarian anti-feminism” and the SPD’s turn to reformism (“revisionism”), for having “banished women’s liberation once and for all into the realm of utopia.” Another pioneer Of German women’s history, Amy Hackett, quoting Zetkin’s view of sisterhood as “sentimental simpering about harmony,” wrote in 1972 that “the deepest split in German feminism was between Social Democratic and bourgeois women.”
Although France occupied a much lesser place in the story, as the nation whose history had long attracted more Anglophone historians than any other non-English-speaking country, it also gained considerable notice in the 1970s. Russia’s revolutionary history and the prominence of its radical women likewise drew attention to links between socialism and feminism. Between 1975 and 1979, several unpublished dissertations and at least seven monographs and collections of essays appeared in English, focusing on socialist women and highlighting the division between “bourgeois feminism” and “socialist feminism.” Generalizations based on three national histories, featuring Zetkin, Saumoneau, and Kollontai, soon found their way into women’s history and women’s studies courses, and greatly affected interpretations and evaluations of women’s movements.
Important works of this period include Berenice Carroll’s 1976 anthology, offering two chapters on socialism and feminism, one on Engels (and Marx) and another on the “bourgeois” women’s movement in Germany and its association with liberalism. The same year, The Socialist Register published an aptly titled article, “Marxist Women versus Bourgeois Feminism,” that included in translation important primary sources by Bebel (including his reference to “the enemy sisters”) and Zetkin as well as Rosa Luxemburg, and also brought Eleanor Marx into the “war” fought by German Marxist women “to counteract the influence of bourgeois feminism.” That year also, Richard J. Evans published the first of a series of works through which he helped to establish Germany as the paradigmatic case of socialist relations with feminism. Taking as a starting date 1894, the year that marked the formation of a national federation of German women’s organizations and their (contested) vote to exclude socialist women’s groups (though not working women), Evans called attention to the class antagonism that made alliance “impossible,” despite what he calls their “wide agreement of aims.”
Studying the socialist-feminist connection in France, Sowerwine in 1978 also pointed to signal events in the early years of the two movements. During a struggle for dominance among socialist factions at a formative meeting of the French Workers’ Party (POF) in 1880, feminist leader Hubertine Auclert and her group chose to support a Proudhonist-influenced group that envisioned only traditional roles for women, over their Marxist-oriented, and theoretically more feminist, rivals. Sowerwine attributes the choice to the power Of private property over feminist claims in their scale of values (and generalizes from it to “bourgeois feminists”). Other possible readings of this event (including my own) suggest alternative explanations, including personal rivalries and loyalties as well as the differing definitions of socialism and feminism that divided factional leaders and their followers. Auclert’s biographer points out, importantly, that even before the contentious meeting, the collectivist group had already rejected allying with the advocates of women’s rights.
A second event that affected relations between socialist and feminist women occurred during the International Congress On the Condition and Rights of Women in Paris in 1900. In a debate over the scope of proposed labor legislation, a dispute arose over whether to include domestic servants, as socialist participants advocated. The controversy itself, while brief, led to an extended, bitter, and highly personalized argument between two founders of the newly formed “socialist feminist” group and a nonsocialist leader of the conference, and it supposedly soured relations between women’s groups permanently. Following Sowerwine, Robert Stuart, a historian of the POF, views the “notorious” conflict as “emblematic of the irreconcilable class conflict dividing militant French women.” But a rereading of the conference proceedings raises the question of whether this confrontation outweighs an important proposal, termed “minor” by Sowerwine, by the “bourgeois” journalist and conference convener Marguerite Durand. This plan called for minimum piecework rates, female labor inspectors, and extension of labor legislation to domestic workers and commercial employees (categories that included the vast majority of women workers). Without denying that some feminists did oppose socialism, this history could also be written to highlight the efforts of “bourgeois” women to improve conditions for working-class women.
“Bourgeois” women, for example, were not always dismissive of domestic servants. Just two years earlier, at the summer-long exposition on women’s work organized by Dutch “bourgeois” women at the Hague, servants were offered free entrance and were included as speakers in an extensive, embedded conference on domestic service. Lily Braun, cast out of German Social Democracy as too “bourgeois,” suggested that a domestic servants’ union be organized, and called on servants “to strike against the semi-feudal relationship under which they work.” In 1899, when she formally proposed the inclusion of female servants in labor legislation under consideration at the Reichstag, “her party comrades discouraged her, arguing that maids were not genuine proletarians.” Braun’s efforts on behalf of household workers elicited the charge that she was “deflecting the working class from its struggle for power.” In Russia, following the Revolution of 1905, feminists organized a union for domestic workers; they also encouraged peasant women to claim access to land and voting rights, and drew many working women into their suffrage efforts.
These complexities notwithstanding, in 1978, when Jean Quataert and I published a collection of essays about socialist women in five European countries, we inadvertently contributed to the revival of class-based categorical thinking about feminism. In our introduction, we defined the terms “socialist feminism” and “bourgeois feminism” primarily in terms of ideological heritages. Although we described many of the socialists as artisans or employees of small shops, even as intellectuals, rather than as prototypical “proletarian” factory workers, and noted that the feminists labeled “bourgeois” included teachers and white-collar workers as well as leisured women, we did not delve further into class identity. Nor did we criticize the solidly “bourgeois” (if not upper-class) origins of most of the socialist leaders. We tended to categorize our subjects just as the socialists of that era had done.
The unexamined definition of “bourgeois feminism” and the alleged gulf that lay between its adherents and the socialists found their way into women’s history also through textbooks. The first and for a decade the only text designed specifically for survey courses in European women’s history, Becoming Visible (1977), offered chapters on modern France, England, Russia, Germany, and Spain, all with a leftist slant; and in its second and third editions (1987,1998) it included a selection by Sowerwine on socialism and feminism that passed along the unexamined use of “bourgeois feminism.” While admirably summarizing the origins and significance of the socialist response to socioeconomic changes wrought in working-class women’s lives, this chapter also exaggerated the depth of the division between women’s groups, as well as the success of socialist parties in attracting women workers.
What, for instance, if the nonsocialists had been described by historians not as “bourgeois” but as “liberal” feminists or “suffrage” feminists; or, following German and Russian usage, as “equal rights feminists”; or, for the French case, as Karen Offen did some years ago and Carolyn Eichner and Florence Rochefort have done more recently, as “republican feminists”? Gisela Bock points to some feminists who avoided the ambivalent word “bourgeois,” which in German refers to citizenship as well as class status, by referring to the “civic women’s movement.” Jean Quataert now prefers “reform feminist” to her earlier usage. For socialists and some historians of the 1960s and 1970s, however, to borrow from Rochefort, “the [feminist] movement was just as pejoratively ‘bourgeois’ as it had been for their predecessors near the end of the nineteenth century.”
For the generation of activist-historians who began professional careers in the early 1970s, the emphasis on socialist women leaders and their opposition to “bourgeois feminism” served a political purpose. Claire Moses observes that these “constructions” of women’s history allowed the new feminists “to stake out a position more radical than that of [their] grandmothers … [and their] mothers.” “We therefore reclaimed the Socialist women for feminism, denying their self-naming,” she adds. “The dichotomies—Women and Labour, Sex and Class, Feminism and Socialism have been the intimate inhabitants of both my psyche and my intellectual work (if the two can be separated),” Sally Alexander recalls.
It seems curious now that, given the influence of E. P. Thompson, more studies of socialism and feminism in the 1970s did not emphasize the impact of culture on the formation of consciousness for socialist and feminist activists in the earlier period. By the mid-1980s, however, following Joan Scott’s influential challenge to apply gender analysis to historical studies and the flowering of cultural studies, new perspectives on individual identity and class consciousness began to dissolve old dichotomies. Where the 1982 English edition of Sowerwine’s book bears the title Sisters or Citizens?, Evans’s 1987 study of feminism, socialism, and pacifism in Europe features inclusion in its title, Comrades and Sisters. In this work, Evans notes that the doctrine of a sharp separation between working women and “bourgeois feminists” promulgated by Zetkin, Saumoneau, and Kollontai was “by no means an inevitable extrapolation of the fundamentals of Marxism.”
Evans’s point reappears with emphasis in a biography of Bebel that appeared in 2000. Examining Zetkin’s ascendancy over Bebel in shaping Marxist thought on collaboration with nonsocialist women, Anne Lopes and Gary Roth note, “Until Zetkin, no one had implied [that to ‘cross class’] was unmarxist. The marxian legacy, as it has come to be known in the subsequent historiography, is largely a fiction created by Zetkin herself … The social democratic outlook already included the gamut of bourgeois feminist interests and mostly did so with greater consistency and fervor.” In the eyes of these authors, historians who deemphasized Bebel’s feminism “merged the history and the historiography.”
In fact, there was a long history of efforts to link socialism and feminism. In the pre-Marxist era in France, the definition of the “feminine” that shaped romantic socialist conceptions encompassed all women. From the Saint-Simoniennes of the 1830s, through the revolutionaries of 1848 and the Communardes of 1871, “proletarian” women collaborated with “bourgeois” women. Many women identified as “bourgeois feminists” considered themselves socialist and participated in socialist organizations. Some socialist women, even in Zetkin’s own party, rejected her policy of absolute noncooperation. Some working-class women joined “bourgeois” groups, and many in the latter ranks worked to improve working-class women’s employment skills and educational opportunities. Indeed, in many instances, nonsocialist feminism grew out of women’s work to aid impoverished and abused women. Common goals, such as winning the vote, opposing militarism, or resolving the “motherhood dilemma,” sometimes elicited collaboration, sometimes “parallel wars.” Even the alleged “litmus test” of class loyalty, protective legislation, on close examination by historians from nine European countries as well as Australia and the United States, turns out to be anything but. Trade union women, fearing loss of employment, often opposed it, and division appeared in socialist and nonsocialist women’s groups alike. Rather than a clear-cut struggle between “bourgeois feminists” and defenders of women workers, positions on restricting female labor ran the gamut among adherents of all political persuasions.
Largely since the 1990s, new historical scholarship has emerged from Northern and Eastern Europe and far beyond that shows the global purchase of the concept “bourgeois feminism,” while also blurring the dichotomous lines it suggests. In Denmark and Sweden, where socialists collaborated with liberals to achieve democratic parliamentary institutions, barriers between “bourgeois” and socialist women’s groups were often breached. In Ukraine, the Galician leader Natalia Ozarkevych Kobrynska, portrayed by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, argued explicitly against Zetkin, advocating linkages between the two social movements and rejecting the socialist denigration of feminism as “bourgeois.” In Hungary, where in the early twentieth century socialists “nervously guardfed] their charges against any ‘bourgeois influence,’ ” Judith Szapor notes that some socialists nevertheless formed alliances with “bourgeois” feminists to campaign for the vote, and even tried to put into practice Lily Braun’s proposals to resolve domestic servants’ problems by creating communal households. Although Hungarian feminism later became what Andrea Peto terms “an isolated stream,” echoes of an antifeminist heritage persisted in post-1989 Hungary. “Feminists were considered aliens by conservative Christians, and bourgeois by the labor movement.” In Bulgaria, according to Krassimira Daskalova, ideological divisions over class collaboration split the socialists in 1903 and left “feminism” stigmatized as “bourgeois,” while also stereotyped as opposing “‘traditional Bulgarian values’ of love, marriage, and family.” In Poland, states Jill Bystydzienski, “State propaganda successfully managed to belittle the feminist cause and to plant almost unanimous disdain for western feminism presenting it as a bourgeois preoccupation of well-to-do, disaffected, mainly American women.” Any emerging feminism today must define itself as neither “Western” nor communist.
Disdain for feminism reached Asia as well. In China, Bebel was translated in the early 1920s, and the Chinese Communist Party adopted the advancement of women as a basic tenet. But despite party work undertaken to improve the condition of women, Chinese leaders found it useful to denigrate “feminism”; the word itself, as Wang Zheng shows, became a negative term, usually accompanied by the adjective “bourgeois” and often qualified as well by “Western.” Kumari Jayawardena writes that when feminism arose in South Asia in the 1970s, “The Left brought out the old quotations on the Woman Question, while dismissing feminism as a dangerous Western import.”
These examples serve to show that, as the editors of a 1989 collection of globally ranging essays on women and socialism state,
The enduring power of these early debates should be underlined. They have resonated through every socialist movement in the twentieth century without exception … From China to Nicaragua, this nineteenth-century model has been consciously adopted, even when its appropriateness was, at the least, open to question. While other aspects of the Marxist-Le- ninist program … have been adapted to national conditions, this element has remained remarkably unchanged, whether the country deploying the theory was Asian, Southeast Asian, African, European, or Latin American.
Phrases such as “capitulation to bourgeois feminism” and “knuckled under to bourgeois feminism” were commonly employed, and the term “bourgeois feminism” was used to label behavior deemed to favor “individualism” or to defy traditional strictures about female conduct.
The concept “bourgeois feminism” rested on reductionist constructions of class status and political interests that are a poor fit for the realities of women’s lives. In an era when level of skill and control over production served to define male workers’ identity, and in turn profoundly affected the ideology and language of class, women were assumed to have no work-derived identity. Instead, most women became “proletarian” or “bourgeois” on the basis of their relationships to men. But, as Rochefort concludes, “The women designated by socialists as ‘bourgeoises’ were for the most part situated well to the left on the political spectrum.” In her view, the socialist attack on feminism in the Second International “did not bring about a major schism within the [French] feminist movement; for feminists it remained possible to have a twofold commitment.” Studies from postcommunist Eastern Europe also show that “many women … seemingly identified as both feminists and socialists without much effort.”
Class ascription also reflected a gendered double standard. While socialists adopted working-class identities for themselves and ignored the “bourgeois” class origins of men whose views they approved, they labeled women of similar background with the term of opprobrium. This practice did not go unnoticed. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk cite a Dutch journalist who argued in 1898 that “the proletariat judged rich women more harshly than rich men, while capitalists victimized poor women more than poor men.” In 1907, French feminist Nelly Roussel said, “Two women of the opposite classes may have more common interests, more similar sources of revolt, consequently more terrain for entente than have a man and a woman belonging to the same milieu … There are no ‘managerial classes’ among us.” In her 1936 memoir, Jeanne Bouvier, a working-class Frenchwoman, also complained, recalling that “feminists are all treated as ‘bourgeoise,’ but the husbands of these feminists, if they are members of a political or philosophical party of the left, are not ‘bourgeois.’ ” In contrast, as Christine Bard points out, “Economically, teachers, especially when single, belong to the working-class … [But because] their educational level allowed them to participate in intellectual circles, voire ‘bourgeois,’” a designation they denied. Although historians and sociologists long ago recognized the nature and significance of the “new class” into which so many working women were drawn, these insights eluded most socialist leaders and early historians of socialist and feminist relationships.
Studies of the class backgrounds of socialist women and of nonsocialist feminists drawn from British, Bulgarian, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Swedish history of the early twentieth century suggest further confusion. Few socialist women worked for pay; they were socialists by sympathy but not “proletarian.” Fewer performed labor that produced “surplus value.” In Bulgaria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, most were stay-at-home wives of socialist men. Many British feminists came from working-class origins, but typically worked in service occupations, especially as teachers. In the British suffrage movement, those who held dual commitments to labor movements and to feminism tended to be undercounted. In the Netherlands, few feminists were wealthy women. It is not clear that the class backgrounds of socialist women and feminists were “very different,” as Sowerwine has alleged. Given a paucity of data, mixed reports, generational shifts, and national differences, as well as multiple varieties of socialism and of feminism, assertions about feminists’ and women socialists’ “class” backgrounds seem at best to be premature. In any case, Marxist class definitions and categories offer little insight.
Rhetoric masked the reality that party allegiance did not parallel class differences among women. As a political movement, feminism has never been “bourgeois” in the sense that Marxists proposed. “Bourgeois feminism” was invented by socialist women and did not exist as a discrete, identifiable, class-based women’s movement. Nor was there as absolute a class divide between women’s groups as socialist leaders and some of their historians asserted. This allegation allowed a strategic shift in socialist perspectives on the woman question to take place, from the more collaborative views of August Bebel and others to Clara Zetkin and her followers, who portrayed feminism as if it were the complaint of a special interest group. The socialists, says Quataert, “promoted their own gendered form of identity politics.” As a political strategy for rejecting feminism, it helped socialists claim “proletarian” values for themselves, while it masked the motivations of its formulators and their failure to create a woman-centered socialism that might effectively attract women workers.
If the purpose, conscious or unconscious, of the enemies of “bourgeois feminism” was to squelch any potential for unity among women’s movements, they succeeded, probably beyond what they could have imagined. The concept spread around the globe, and it persisted for a century as a means to discredit nonsocialist women activists. Feminism fell into a double bind. It was suspect as “bourgeois,” but also came to be rejected, especially in formerly communist countries after 1989, for its association with socialism. In the 1980s, as identity politics and the language of race and ethnicity replaced class as a central focus, “bourgeois” lost its place as the epithet of choice, but left behind a divisive residue. The dichotomizing concept also owes its long life to the scholars, myself included, who employed the term, and failed to challenge its validity. Today, however, received ideas and inherited dichotomies elicit criticism. Comparing nineteenth-century women’s emancipation movements, the editors of a 2004 volume conclude, “There was more crossing of borders between feminism and socialism than the long-established image of the ‘hostile sisters’ would lead us to suppose. Historiography has also exaggerated the rift between the two wings of the women’s movement for political reasons.”
Feminism is one of the most misunderstood movements of modern times, and historians have contributed to the misjudgment. The “most lasting legacy” of the socialist rejection of feminism as “bourgeois” was not, as Sowerwine asserted, “the development of separate organization for working-class women and a consequent articulation of their distinct concerns.” Whether the latter ever happened is debatable. What is certain, in my view, is that the most far-reaching legacy for women was the socialists’ success in spreading disdain for feminism, on the ideological grounds that to be a practicing feminist was to be “bourgeois.” The association between socialism and feminism was, as Karen Offen declares, “a lethal relationship … From a feminist perspective, organized socialism in Europe—and more broadly, the social democratic left—has a lot to answer for.” Geoff Eley states, “Socialist parties’ claims to be the vanguard of democracy, rallying all progressive causes to their banner, foundered on this gender neglect.” The socialist stance toward feminism hindered both movements in achieving mutually desired goals.
The history of the European Left’s relationships with women and feminism is an important part of political history that needs reassessment. Historians today might begin by opening previously closed categories and replacing organizational approaches with thematic, women-centered frameworks. With a reconceptualized question that employs gender as a category of analysis and redefines politics to include sexual politics, identifies the many positive contributions of nonsocialist feminists to the lives of women workers, and examines such neglected topics as the impact on socialist politics of concepts of motherhood and the population question, understanding of historical relationships between socialist and feminist movements and their consequences for democratic movements and society would be clarified and enriched. This revision would recognize the importance of feminism’s history to the history of the left and to modern history as a whole, with new appreciation for how categorical class thinking and political commitments affected both its history and historians.