1896

THE WOMAN MOVEMENT IN GERMANY

'ASSOCIATIONS founded for political objects may not have women, scholars, or apprentices as members, nor may women, scholars, or apprentices be present at any meetings of such associations.' So runs. the Prussian Coalition Law, and the laws of Bavaria, Brunswick, and some of the smaller States impose the same limitations on women; while in Saxony, where the law allows women to be present at political meetings, they may not be members of political associations. These laws explain in a large measure why there is not in Germany; as in England and America, any strong and well-organised woman movement.

But besides the political there is also a social cause. While the legal restrictions effectually hinder women from carrying on any political agitation, they do not sufficiently explain the lack of a more powerful movement among women of the middle class to obtain equality of opportunity, a movement which has been so very strong in England, and which is only now passing into a new phase more social and less individualistic in its character. This is explained by the very limited income of the ordinary middle-class household, which is also responsible for the German social ideal of woman as Hausfrau. Germany is not a rich country, and only a very little observation is needed to see that the incomes of the professional and mercantile classes are much smaller than in England, and that German women are therefore obliged to devote a great part of their time and thought to household work. And just for this very reason, that the women's minds are absorbed in details, German housekeeping is both unscientific and inartistic, and, although it entirely occupies the Hausfrau, it seldom attains even its own uncomfortable standard. In this vicious circle, where want of system takes up the time which should be devoted to developing system, it is very hard for a German woman to leave her narrow household interests and to educate and develop her own individuality. All the more honour is due, therefore, to those few thoughtful women who have conceived and led a movement that, though lacking the great and powerful inspiration of a new conception of life, has undoubtedly done a great deal to overcome German prejudices, and to widen German ideas about women. These women

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have not been aristocrats, for aristocratic women in Germany have never, like the brilliant leaders of French and English society, taken any interest in politics, or influenced leading politicians. The present Empress is entirely absorbed in her children, her dress, the formal etiquette of German Court society, and the work of endowing and building churches. The Empress Frederick undoubtedly takes an interest in the women's movement, but her time of power was too short for her to do much more than help to establish elementary technical schools for girls. The women of the nobility have charitable interests which chiefly take the form of extravagantly arranged bazaars or concerts; and, though they have some societies for helping the poor and the sick, the hard-working committee of the English aristocratic woman is unknown to them. Their daughters have less freedom than girls of the upper classes in England, and are not expected to take any interest in public affairs; and it is very difficult for them to get time and opportunity to carry on thorough studies at home. The 'revolted daughter' who leaves home to work is almost unknown, as the Universities are practically closed to women, and nursing is not, as in England, a common occupation for ladies. Sometimes in later life, when a girl has not succeeded in marrying, and if she does not wish to lead the 'drone and dressing-gown life,' as one of them has described it, she becomes a deaconess, but she has even less independence under the strictly organised guardianship of the Church than in her own home.

If unmarried girls of the middle class, on the other hand, have revolted to some extent, the cause has been mainly economic. Just as the married women, absorbed in their assured, though not what we should consider comfortable position, have been economically bound down to their little narrow world, so the unmarried women, whose growing numbers now amount to one-fourth of the German adult female population, have been economically forced to think about an extension of the ways of earning a living. Forced more and more into competition with men, the saying 'Let each one have the work and the calling to which he is suited' has had for them an economic rather than a social meaning. Self-support rather than self-development was their aim, and though it was a narrow aim, for it applied only to a comparatively small class of women, the intellectual proletariat, it had in it the germ of a larger movement. Their first and most important question was that of higher education, and in this respect Germany was found to offer fewer opportunities to women than any other country in Europe except Turkey. German women could not attend the Universities, though, absurdly enough, foreign women were admitted, and they could not study or practise law or medicine. For years the Reichstag and Landtage of the different States were besieged with petitions from women's associations, and only now at last are women permitted to practise medicine, though

the training and degree for it must still be obtained abroad. There are about ten women doctors practising in different parts of Germany. German women may also now attend lectures in most of the German Universities, but only as 'Hospitirende' or 'guest students,' without being allowed to matriculate, and generally on the sufferance of the professors. In Berlin, for instance, where Dr. Adolf Wagner, the present Rector of the University, has this year for the first time made it possible for women to hear lectures, all sorts of difficulties are thrown in their way. When permission to attend has been obtained from the Kultusminister, the individual professor will not always grant it. One professor is said to have given his servant strict orders to tell all young ladies who might call on him that he was not at home, and that, were he to see them, he never gave permission to ladies to attend his lectures. According to the papers, the famous historian, Professor von Treitschke, on seeing a lady among his audience, suddenly interrupted his lecture and went up to her and led her out. He is said to have remarked to one of his colleagues afterwards, 'I can't bear women folk at my lectures, and I shall put the Great Beadle at the door to keep them out.' But even were women allowed to matriculate, it has been impossible hitherto for them to get the necessary preparation, except privately. The ordinary education of German girls is not very good. Literature is excellently taught, but in other subjects too many facts are insisted upon, and thinking is not encouraged. In religion, which forms a large part of the instruction, the girls are not allowed to express doubts, or to ask questions as to dogmas. But even this sort of teaching is better than that of governesses, and it is a fortunate thing for girls of the upper classes that, for economy's sake, their parents generally send them to school. Within the last few years, however, three Gymnasiums or High Schools have been established in Berlin, Leipsic, and Carlsruhe, exactly similar to those which prepare young men for the universities. Several girls in Berlin will be ready this year to finish the Gymnasium course, and the friends of women's higher education are anxiously watching to see whether the passing of these examinations will be allowed to constitute matriculation, as it does with men, and give women the right, instead of the mere privilege, of attending the universities.

In the course of all this agitation, for even these few concessions have not been won without very great efforts, the women of the middle classes began to realise that their work was not so purely and immediately a personal question as they had imagined. They found that the existing laws stood opposed to their wishes, and that no real improvement could be effected in their position without some change of the laws. German law hardly recognises the separate individuality of a woman, especially if she be a wife or mother. There is nothing corresponding to the Married Women's Property Act, so that a

woman is entirely under the guardianship of her husband, and her property and earnings are wholly at his disposal. After her children are four years old, she only has as much control over them as the law allows to those grossly immoral or inebriate fathers whose control has had to be supplemented by legally appointed guardians. And after the death of the father, his will or the law may appoint a third person as guardian, who will have equal control with the mother over the children. The father's will may appoint the mother or any other woman as guardian, but the law courts can never appoint a woman. If the mother marries again, she loses all control over her children.

More and more conscious of the injustice of these laws, the leading women, when they found that their deputations to Government were refused a hearing, and that their petitions were only thrown into waste-paper baskets, tried to organise associations for formal protest, but here again the law was against them, and dissolved their associations as having a 'political aim.' And finally, the younger and more active women, whose centre was in Berlin, were forced to see that the slow, cautious development of the earlier movement was accomplishing practically nothing, that their only weapon lay in the franchise, and that they must concentrate all their power on this one single object, agitating for it in every legal way. At about the same time many Christian women publicly joined the movement, and all the religious bodies, except the Catholic and the Jewish, began to show some interest in the advancement of women. It is a long time since the advanced woman necessarily meant an atheist and a free-thinker to the average Englishman, but public opinion in Germany is only now coming to believe that a woman may take an interest in social and political questions and yet still remain a Christian. Finally, last June, and this was a great triumph, a woman was allowed to read a paper on 'The Position of Women' at the Congress of Evangelical Socialists at Erfurt.

Up to this point, all that has been said might, with some exceptions, be taken as a description of the woman movement in England a quarter of a century ago, and it is only when we come to the working women that we find a striking difference, a phenomenon that is absolutely unique in history, that is to say, a woman movement which has originated with the working women themselves. The middle-class women of Germany, having once seen beyond the interests of their own class, have adopted towards working women an attitude which has hitherto been too much that of the medieval Church towards the poor, a service of love rendered cheerfully and willingly, but still condescendingly. Instead of going into social questions, they have taken up charity, and their party has justly been characterised as the ladies'' movement.

But that the working women regard them with a settled suspicion and determined distrust is much less the result of this condescending

attitude than of the point of view of the entire working class in Germany. Since the middle class in Germany did not awake to a full political consciousness until the year 1848, in which year the proletariat also developed a party with strong class interests and class antipathies, they have, at every period of their political activity, dreaded the working class, and withheld from it those political and civil rights from which Democratic Socialism must take its start. Similarly, the women of the middle class did not take up the battle of women's civil rights, and pave the way for the industrial fight of the working women, until the party of the working women themselves had grown conscious of the necessity and possibility of a change, and were ready to agitate for it in their own way. It is this principle of the Klassenkampf, according to which every political party is the party of a class, and every political movement the exclusive movement of a class, which forbids them to co-operate with the bourgeois women. It means nothing to them that the Universities should be open to both sexes, and that numbers of women of the needy middle class should force their way into the ranks of schoolmasters, doctors, or officials. Their goal of admission to the various branches of trade and industry has been practically reached, and, forced by necessity to the severest kinds of labour, they do not demand equality of opportunity, but ask for special legislation and protection. Their lot is thrown in with all other labourers, and they feel that, as the position of woman rises and falls with labour, so the woman question is only one side of the labour question.

The Social Democratic Party, which is the party of labour in Germany, and which includes nearly a quarter of the voters, has not always recognised the equality of women as a necessary part of its programme. At first the working men believed that by restricting the employment of women their own wages could be raised, and their authority in the home as the only wage-earners could be restored. But in spite of all efforts at restriction, and much as it was to be regretted, the employment of women increased rapidly from year to year, and when working men saw that five and a half millions of women were supporting themselves, and out of these over four millions belonging to the proletariat, they realised that women workers were no longer a negligible factor, and that equal duties towards society gave equal rights. At their Parteitag, or Annual Congress, held at Halle in 1890, the Social Democrats therefore passed a resolution demanding the full equality of the sexes in state and society; and the next year, at Brussels, the International Socialists' Congress adopted the same resolution unanimously. After 1892 women were permitted to choose delegates to the Annual Congress, and now the members of the working women's associations are an integral factor of the Social Democratic party, and their demands for equal rights with men are the necessary and logical completion of the democratic programme of the working men.