Women in Austria

Gunter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Erika Thurner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351299060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

The position of women in Austrian society, politics, and in the economy follows the familiar trajectory of Western societies. They were expected to accept their "proper place" in a male patriarchal world. Achieving equality in all spheres of life was a long struggle that is still not completed in spite of many advances. The chapters in Women in Austria attest to the growing interest and vibrancy in the area of women's studies in Austria and present a cross-section of new research in this field to an international audience. The volume includes with book reviews on Austrian business history, the Waldheim memoirs, Jews in postwar Austria, and political scandals in twentieth-century Austria. Women in Austria covers a plethora of significant social issues and will be essential to the work of women's studies scholars, sociologists, historians, and Austrian area specialists.

Topical Essays

Introduction

Social and historical studies reflect social realities. In our male-centered society, women were and are underrepresented in academia. As a result of male domination (androcentricity) within the academic fields, gender has not sufficiently been taken into account as a category of investigation. Only within the last decade have Women’s Studies and Gender Studies gained significant ground in universities and other scholarly institutions—in Austria even later than elsewhere. These gains coincided with the feminist engagement on the part of women in academia and in society as a whole.

In Austria, the number of women entering the ranks of political, historical, and social scientists is rising, but their academic publications—especially on topics relating to Women’s and Gender Studies—are often ignored by the mainstream (that is, the patriarchy). This is true despite the fact that gender, as a structuring characteristic and as an important category of investigation, enriches and differentiates scientific discourses and results.

These are the reasons for assembling this volume. These articles it contains provide a glimpse into historical and political events involving and affecting women. Thus, they offer insight into the conditions of life and the terms of existence for women in Austria during the twentieth century.

The first four articles, written by historians, were originally presented at the German Studies Association Conference in September 1995 in Chicago. For this volume, the papers have been expanded. The intention was to trace several threads running through the fabric of Austrian history form the First Republic to the post-World War II era, in order to illuminate previously neglected aspects of the roles played by women.

In the first essay, Helga Embacher examines the problematic question of the assimilation of Jewish women in Austria during the 1920s. By looking at the categories middle class, liberal, intellectual, and Jewish, Embacher shows that the year 1938 witnessed the expulsion from Austria of not only “masculine rationality,” but of the vast majority of female intellectuals and artists as well. Embacher also discusses the political involvement of these women in left-wing parties. She concludes that intellectual life in Austria came to a temporary end in 1938, and that the female role models present in the First Republic were largely absent in postwar Austria.

Doris Gödl provides an overview of “the contribution made by women to the political policies of National Socialism.” Gödl begins with the debate which originated during the 1970s in the field of Women’s Studies in Germany. This debate surrounded the question of whether women during the Nazi era could properly be considered solely as victims, or whether women must also be considered as collaborators, supporters, and enthusiastic advocates of this system. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Gödl discusses and analyzes “processes of seduction” which were targeted at women by National Socialist propaganda and policies.

The article by Erika Thurner sheds light upon “female resistance against Nazi fascism.” This study discusses the reasons why women and their commitment to the fight against National Socialism have remained generally ignored or accorded scant attention in the research of resistance movements and society. The specific topic of investigation is the work of anti-fascist Austrian women and girls who were living in Belgian exile. Belgium was not a major center of Austrian emigration, but this small and unattractive land of exile represents one of the rare cases where a specifically female form of resistance existed.

Ingrid Bauer investigates another—or an opposite—group of “insurgent women,” the “GI brides,” who were scorned as “choco-ladies,” “dollar floozies,” and “Yankee tarts.” As a topic for historical examination, the relationships, liaisons, and love affairs between Austrian women and girls and U.S. soldiers was taboo for a long time. In contrast, it was the leading conversational topic during the early postwar years. While analyzing the emotionally-charged, often irrational discussions of the “GI brides,” Bauer reveals the state of mind and unconscious fears of postwar Austrian society.

In accordance with the traditional approach of Contemporary Austrian Studies to look at broad questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, three other researchers (one historian and two political scientists) were invited to examine “Women and Politics” during democratic periods in twentieth-century Austrian history. Taken together, they analyze and comment on the discrimination against and equality of women in Austria during the First and Second Republics. In addition, they discuss the efforts of female (and male) politicians to gain equality for women and to restructure lifestyles and conditions for both sexes, in order to create a more equitable society. It is hardly surprising that, during the periods of dictatorship in Austria, there was no equality between the genders. Highly remarkable indeed are the continuity of and persistent tendency toward patriarchalism which remained dominant in the aftermath of these drastic political shifts. These authors show how the refusal to grant equal political and social rights to women have persisted through the era of democratic government as well.

The historian Gabriele Hauch sheds light upon the first generation of female members in the Austrian Parliament. These nineteen National Councilwomen—out of a total 408 representatives—shared one important stance in common: they defined themselves according to their gender as females and regarded the link between their gender and their political function as self-evident. Following this central thesis, Hauch develops a broad theoretical discourse around the so-called proso-graphical approach. She calls for a gender-oriented historiography as a corrective to a type of political science which, because of its limited points of departure, has failed to focus on women’s contributions as well as the nature of gender construction in research.

Once more, it becomes clear that a scholarly analysis, which acknowledges and takes into account gender as a structuring characteristic and as a category of investigation, delineates historical breaks and watersheds far differently than studies which presume to be gender-neutral. For example, in the following contributions which illuminate Austrian society (or its political culture) in the Second Republic, it becomes clear that the phase of stable democratic development proved to be resistant to a democracy of the genders. Viewed from this perspective, antiquated, “old-fashioned” laws “Gesetze aus der Postkutschenzeit,” such as the patriarchal marriage and family rights provisions, overshadowed the onset of economic upturn and modernization of a society emerging in the 1950s. Thus, stable democratic development, based on—or corresponding with—stable undemocratic gender discrimination, shaped modern Austria. Therefore, an historical break cannot be recognized earlier than in the 1970s.

In her survey, Erna Appelt reflects upon the conditions of women in Austria’s economy over the past five decades. Because of the importance of the “Social Partnership” as the basis for the Austrian economy since 1945, Appelt focuses her main investigation on this topic. In describing and analyzing the strict hierarchical manner and the paternalistic fashion of the male-dominated organizations involved in the Social Partnership, Appelt examines the ways in which women have reacted to their subordinate status in the realms of economy, politics, and society as a whole. She shows current changes and women’s responses to new challenges.

One reaction to current changes was the Women’s Referendum in April 1997, in which independent women demanded not less than “half of the money, half of paid jobs, half of political life.” This is the conclusion of Sieglinde Rosenberger in her contribution “Politics, Gender, and Equality.” She examines the activities and strategies undertaken since the 1970s to enhance female participation in politics. She then analyzes the legislation for social equality in the private sphere, anti-discrimination legislation and policies for working women, as well as controversial legislation and political efforts to reconcile the dual roles of women as mothers and as members of the work force.

In 1918, women were finally given the right to vote in the newly proclaimed Austrian Republic; this was the logical starting point in gaining equal rights. Almost eighty years later, real equality is still a goal, although gender relations have become less patriarchal over the past decades. What becomes clear in discussions about this broad topic are the restrictive conditions and specific limitations (including self-limitations) which are applied to women in this society whose structure is still essentially patriarchal.

Last, but not least, my thanks to an anonymous American reviewer. She is an expert on women in Austria. Her thoughtful suggestions were very important and useful to all the authors.

Salzburg, April 1997

Middle Class, Liberal, Intellectual, Female, and Jewish: The Expulsion of “Female Rationality” from Austria

Helga Embacher

Historical research in Austria has only recently turned its attention to the problematical issue of emigration and exile, or, to formulate it more concretely, the deportation of its Jewish population.¹ Whereas the “overthrow of masculine rationality” has been treated and gradually worked through since the 1980s, such that regret for the losses thereby occasioned for Austria has become an increasingly common sentiment even in the speeches of politicians, the expulsion and murder of Jewish women as well as the deep cleft produced by the loss of ‘female rationality’ has been generally ignored up to now even by feminist scholars.² One explanation for this phenomenon can be found in the fact that feminist scholars have desired to write a history of women during the time of National Socialism with which they themselves could identify. For far too long, they have proceeded from the assumption of woman as the eternal victim, so that not only the history of Jewish women, thus the history of the “true” victims, but also the problematical subject of complicity by women or the phenomenon female anti-Semitism had to be left out of consideration.³

The following article traces the path of intellectual Jewish women from bourgeois backgrounds to the Socialist or Communist parties. This may essentially be regarded as the effort to achieve assimilation within non-Jewish society by means of culture and politics.⁴ The term intellectual as used here is understood to include scientists, artists, physicians, and attorneys, as well as women active in politics. The source material is autobiographies, biographies, and life history interviews of women born between 1900 and 1925.⁵

German Kultur and Faith in Progress as a New Religion

In 1910, 46 percent of the female students at Viennese Lyzeum and 30 percent of those enrolled in Gymnasien in Vienna came from Jewish families. At the University of Vienna, which first began accepting women in 1900, the proportion of Jewish women quickly rose to 68.3 percent, a figure which does not include those with no denominational affiliation who came predominantly from the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie. In 1919, with the opening of the university’s School of Law to women, Jews made up 50 percent of the female students. During the course of the Austrian Fir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Topical Essays
• Forum: Austria and the Ghost of the New Europe
• Historiography Roundtable: Placing John Boyer’s Work in Austrian Historiography
• Review Essays
• Book Reviews
• Annual Review
• List of Authors