Criminals and Children?

Introduction: The title of this bloc of material comes from a speech in the Austrian parliament in 1905 by a Czech radical deputy, Václav Choc, who argued strenuously (and in vain) for women to receive the right to vote as part of the electoral reform law being debated at that time in the Vienna parliament. Under the terms of the new law, all adult males (except those who were convicted criminals or who were younger than 25) were going to receive the right to vote in direct parliamentary elections.  Choc argued that denying adult women the vote at this historic moment would be to consign them the ranks of "criminals and children."

In the late 19th century, gaining the right to vote became the premier issue for campaigners for women's rights, most commonly known as feminists.   However, the struggle for equal status in society for women was much more than the campaign for the vote.  Issues such as the right to own property outright (without a man's participation), the right to initiate divorce proceedings, the right to attend universities, and the right to purchase birth control were among the many questions that animated the struggle for women's rights.

It is important to remember that not all of those who campaigned for greater rights for women in Europe were female...without the agreement by men who controlled the strings of power in every European government, any change in the status of women would have taken much longer than it did.

Over the next two weeks we will examine the changing status of women in Europe from the early modern period to the present, using a variety of primary source materials.  Your task is to read these sources (and the textbook pages assigned for this week), determine as much as you can about why the status of women changed when it did and in the ways that it did, and to draw conclusions about why the various actors took the positions or made the choices that they did.

Assignments: During the first week of this segment of the course you should read the documents in the left-hand bloc below.  For our discussions in class, you will be broken up into groups, each of which has one or more documents to discuss and later present to the entire class.  In the second week, you are to investigate the life of one particular feminist, Milada Horaková, using the documents available to you here.  You will then construct a very brief--one page--biography of her from these materials.