Women in Europe between the Wars

Politics, Culture and Society

Angela Kimyongür

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351142946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The central aim of this interdisciplinary book is to make visible the intentionality behind the 'forgetting' of European women's contributions during the period between the two world wars in the context of politics, culture and society. It also seeks to record and analyse women's agency in the construction and reconstruction of Europe and its nation states after the First World War, and thus to articulate ways in which the writing of women's history necessarily entails the rewriting of everyone's history. By showing that the erasure of women's texts from literary and cultural history was not accidental but was ideologically motivated, the essays explicitly and implicitly contribute to debates surrounding canon formation. Other important topics are women's political activism during the period, antifascism, the contributions made by female journalists, the politics of literary production, genre, women's relationship with and contributions to the avant-garde, women's professional lives, and women's involvement in voluntary associations. In bringing together the work of scholars whose fields of expertise are diverse but whose interests converge on the inter-war period, the volume invites readers to make connections and comparisons across the whole spectrum of women's political, social, and cultural activities throughout Europe.

Chapter 1
Women in Europe between the Wars: a Culture of Contradictions

Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür

Griffin and Braidotti's Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women s Studies begins with an ironic challenge to the reader to name five feminists from the United States, five from Britain and five from other European countries.¹ An equally difficult challenge might be to ask readers about to embark on this book to name five women active in European politics, culture or professional life during the years between the two World Wars. The difficulty of such a task is unsurprising given the recurrence in the essays in this volume of motifs of exclusion and marginalization, experiences which characterized women's activities in all areas of public life during the inter-war period. Politics continued to be defined as a masculine sphere, even after the granting to women of the right to vote and to stand for election; in literature, women's writing was excluded from the canon and thereby from serious critical consideration; in professional life - journalism, public service or education, for example - women had to fight for recognition and resist discourses which often sought to relegate them to the private sphere.

And yet, it is not sufficient to approach the study of women in the inter-war period only from the perspectives of marginalization and exclusion. A wide range of research has already shown that inter-war women certainly were active in the cultural, political and social domains between the wars. Nonetheless, their activities and achievements are not necessarily familiar to readers today. In some cases, this is because adequate account was not taken of their activities by critics and commentators at the time.² In others, the process of marginalization has been retrospective: the names of many of the women who feature in the essays in this volume have fallen from memory, familiar only to a minority of specialists, despite the fact that they were well-known figures in their own time. Contemporary commentators who believed - or had a political motivation for making others believe - that the notion of female genius was a contradiction in terms and that women who pretended to an autonomous political or professional identity were acting against the best interests of the state, were unlikely to review their books or record their passage through hi story. And this has had its effect in terms of defining the object of research of later scholars: texts which were not reviewed at all, or were badly reviewed, which exist only in manuscript, or which were published in tiny print runs do not make it into the canon, and there has been an assumption that that which was not discussed at the time probably was not very important in any case. There has therefore been, and still is, a need for uncovering, for recuperation of women's past. Some of the essays in this collection are motivated precisely by this need and desire to recover something that has been lost, for example, Lesley Twomey's work on Victoria Kent, Jane Fenoulhet's and Sharon Wood's discussions of Dutch and Italian women writers respectively, Ailsa Wallace's recuperation of German literature for young girls, and Lisa Silverman's recovery of the activities and experiences of Austrian Jewish women. But equally, this volume seeks to acknowledge progress that has already been made, As Martine Antle argues, research must now seek to show the variety and intrinsic interest of women's activities and demonsüate how this might lead us to review and possibly revise our understanding of the period as a whole. Some of the writers addressed in these pages certainly have no need of recuperation or recovery: this is the case of British writers such as Storm Jameson and Rebecca West, analyzed here by Jennifer Birkett and Mary Anne Schofield. It is important to bear in mind that a female gender identity does not necessarily lead to erasure from our collective memory, and that other factors have caused the lives and works of women and men alike to be forgotten. However, women's history remains a legitimate area of inquiry, as the many studies which now exist, both archival and methodological, amply demonstrate.

For women's history, and women's studies more generally, has of course a history of its own, and that history is a particularly self-reflexive one, It is appropriate therefore that this introduction should briefly interrogate its own academic contexts. The present volume is intended as a collection of practical illustrations rather than as a theoretical work. Nonetheless, in presenting the life and work of an individual woman, or in analyzing the collective experience of a discrete group of women in a particular country, the authors of the chapters collected here seek to demonstrate how those lives, works or experiences are illustrative of wider phenomena and recurrent themes characteristic of the inter-war period in Europe. A collection such as this one cannot pretend to offer a comprehensive overview of its subject: its more modest aim is to complement existing research by bringing together in a single volume studies based on a range of European national jurisdictions, with the intention that readers will see points of contact as well as points of divergence so that further research will be stimulated. The authors of the chapters collected here were not required to confirm to a common theoretical framework or methodology; it is hoped, rather, that the range of approaches taken to the task of illuminating European women's experiences of, and responses to, the inter-war period will serve to reveal the richness and diversity of their contributions. Commenting on his approach to the study of the lives of 'eminent Victorians' in his book of the same title, first published in 1918, Lytton Strachey wrote that Ί have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand'.³ This eminently modernist approach to the investigation of past lives is appropriate to our period: this is not to say that the method or the result is arbitrary, any more than those of Strachey himself. It is rather to underline the impossibility of a totalized or homogenous account. Strachey is probably right that 'the direct method of a scrupulous narration' is not nearly so revealing as the selection of telling examples,⁴ however, it is of course necessary to present those examples such that their meaning and coherence become evident. Strachey suggests that the historian should 'row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with careful curiosity'.⁵ We have lowered our bucket into three distinct - though inevitably interrelated and overlapping - areas which, using a conventional shorthand, we have termed 'polities', 'culture'and 'society'. In Part I, we examine women's relationship to politics mediated through creative writing; in Part II, women's relationship to culture mediated through the notion of the canon, and, in Part III, women's relationship to society mediated through the structures of professional life, philanthropic work and voluntary organizations. By focusing our study on three broad but crucial domains of human activity and experience, we hope not only to illustrate, but also to elucidate something of the story of women between the wars in Europe.

It is not only Strachey's preference for the telling example that makes him an appropriate reference point for this volume, but also his interest in that fascinating oxymoron, the 'woman of action'. His account of Florence Nightingale as a maniacal, frenzied and power-crazed workaholic may not endear him to feminist historians. It nonetheless demonstrates a woman disrupting the gender conventions of her time, and shows the far-reaching and profoundly political implications of her all-too-feminine concern with cleanliness and health - an argument Lesley Twomey makes in this volume in relation to Victoria Kent's prison reforms. Strachey sets out to explore the space between the myth of the saintly, delicate and self-sacrificing 'lady with the lamp' and the determined individual whose experience of reorganizing medical provision in the Crimea ultimately led her to attempt to reorganize that bastion of British masculinity, the War Office. That Strachey's account oscillates between the poles of admiration and ridicule is illustrative of the gender anxieties of his own age, characterized by a culture at once convinced of, but unnerved by, female power and emancipation.

The authors of the chapters collected here have been free to choose from the wide variety of approaches available to them thanks to the fertility of the field of women's studies, fertility which has resulted from the continued development of the discipline. Women's history has passed through an initial (and, it should be said, most productive) phase which was separatist in approach and sought to illuminate that which had been previously obscured: hence the dominance of titles such as Hidden from History (Sheila Rowbotham, 1973), Becoming Visible (ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz, 1977), Retrieving Women's History (ed. S. Jay Kleinberg, 1988) and Joan Scott's essay on 'The Problem of Invisibility', included in Kleinberg's volume. The gradual extension of this work brought greater theoretical complexity. Michelle Perrot's collection on Writing Women's History remains an excellent introduction to the different directions in which the field began to develop.⁶ Perrot herself has pioneered both the theory and the practice of women's history in France: the History of Women in the West project, in which she played a major role, is a landmark.⁷ Since the publication of this work, historians have begun to address the 'ghetto-ization' of women's history by stressing the need for all history to be gender-aware, by advocating a gender-focused analysis of relationships and structures, and by using titles in which the concept of women in history or the gendering of history replaces that of women's history.⁸ The present volume seeks to understand both women's history and women in the history of the inter-war period, without pretending that the work of recuperation and recovery is over. It is, in a sense, unintentionally guilty of 'ghetto-ization' of another sort, in that all the contributors are women: this was by no means deliberate, but reveals yet again the gender imbalance which persists in academia as regards the analysis of women's lives and texts.

Contributors to this volume make it abundantly clear that the rehabilitation of women's voices in culture, politics and history is an ongoing task, since the neglect of decades cannot be remedied in a few years. It is also clear that, although women's inter-war voices may have been marginalized in their own time or forgotten in subsequent years, their contributions to contemporary debates about war, education, society and literature were far from being confined to a ghetto of 'women's issues'. The women who are the subjects of the various essays in this collection articulated views on the central issues of their time which, while revealing the specificities of their perspectives as women, are also of wider relevance. Jennifer Birkett and Mary Anne Schofield demonstrate how British women writers of the 1930s were committed to drawing attention to the looming prospect of a new war in Europe. Lesley Twomey and Martine Antle examine responses to Fascism in Spain, France and Germany, while Lisa Silverman considers the impact of anti-Semitism in Austria. Martine Antle and Laura Scurriati explore the roles of Claude Cahun, Hannah Hoch, Mina Loy and Valentine de Saint Point who were active in avant-garde movements. This is not to say that issues relating specifically to their female gender were disregarded in their work, or that they were peripheral, but to stress the point that women had relevant views to articulate on the mainstream issues of their day, and indeed their part to play in these issues. In that sense the notion of ghetto is redundant.

That marginalization and exclusion continued to dog women's position in interwar society might seem surprising, given the progress that had already been achieved. Strachey points out that, had Florence Nightingale been campaigning for reform of the institutions of government in 1918, she would have been part of the Commission.⁹ In the immediate post-war period, and certainly by the end of the inter-war years, women in the majority of European countries had gained the right to vote. During the conflagration of the First World War, they had taken on new responsibilities, both in the home and in the workplace. The new self-confidence which women thus had the possibility to acquire during the war has been seen as a defining moment in the development of the women's movement.¹⁰ The disruption to gender norms which resulted from this war was perhaps greater than had ever been seen before.¹¹ And yet, the end of the war was marked in many areas of Europe by a reassertion of traditional gender roles.¹² Some historians view such regression as normal, arguing that gains made by women during war are transient and pass when the disruption of war is over.¹³ Others have proposed an intimate link between progression and regression in gender relations: Margaret and Patrice Higonnet have suggested that it was the very disruption of gender norms which occurred during the war that paved the way for the backlash which was to take place in the 1920s and beyond.¹⁴

What were the gains made by women during the First World War and why were they only temporary in nature? Women's work was of course not new in 1914, but until then women had largely taken unskilled, domestic jobs. The mass mobilization of male populations in 1914 and the subsequent decline in the working population meant that there was an economic imperative for women to enter the workforce, often taking jobs which had before been restricted to men, and often for higher wages than those to which they had been accustomed. During the war, women worked in munitions factories, in public transport, in banks and in numerous other professions. They became nurses at the front; they took on responsibilities as heads of families. Such activities were double-edged since they were necessary from the point of view of the economy and the pursuit of the war, but they also helped to create a new set of expectations in the women whom they liberated from lives previously constrained by the domestic sphere. Such expectations contrasted with more traditional attitudes towards women's role in the war, attitudes neatly encapsulated in the War Office's reported response to Dr Elsie Inglis's plan for a series of overseas hospitals: "'go home and keep quiet'".¹⁵ Perhaps little had changed in practice since Florence Nightingale's attempts to reform military medical care in the 1850s during and after the Cri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Women in Europe between the Wars: a Culture of Contradictions
• Part I: 'The Spectacle of Europe': Women Writers and European Politics
• Part II: 'Is Anybody Listening?': Renegotiating the Cultural Canon
• Part III: 'Women and the Public Sphere': Women’s Professional and Voluntary Work
• Select Bibliography
• Index