Therese Schlesinger: My Road to Social Democracy
[Although British feminists succeeded in uniting women of all classes behind the campaign for women's suffrage, many progressive women on the Continent grew impatient with what they saw as the careerism and elitism of prominent bourgeois feminists. In this document, the Austrian feminist Therese Schlesinger explains why she turned to Marxism in the 1890s, joining the Austrian Social Democratic Party.]
After the birth of my daughter, I was stricken with such a terrible case of child-bed fever that for almost two years I was either bedridden or in a wheelchair and I have never completely recovered from that terrible illness. About the same time my husband contracted tuberculosis and died; I became a widow after two and half years of marriage and at a time when I was only barely able to get around on crutches. Then six months after my husband's death, my child was afflicted with such a severe, complicated case of pneumonia that the doctor said she wouldn't live. She eventually got better but she was so sickly for a few years that caring for her took most of my time. Yet despite that I often heard or read about the suffrage demonstrations of the Viennese working class and how the workers were brutally attacked by the police. When I read about a young woman worker who had spoken at a mass demonstration, thoughts of the French Revolution rushed into my head as I remembered how excited I was when I read about it as a young girl. I longed to put away my own troubles as I was increasingly motivated to take part in one of the great struggles of my time.
Even [as a young girl] I thought it possible that I might one day play a role in the workers' struggle. I didn't have any idea how I might do that and was convinced anyway that I would be turned away since I was from a middle-class background. But as my own convalescence progressed and as my child grew stronger, I realized I could not escape the desire which I had cherished in my youth, namely, to help in the liberation of those deprived of their rights.
At that moment it was my friend Marie Lang who sought to interest me in the goals of the women's movement, which as she pointed out, were to raise women of all classes out of oppression and legal discrimination. The General Austrian Women's Association had just been formed shortly before this time [1893] and essentially based its principles on [socially progressive but not] social democratic foundations. It advocated the admission of women into the universities, the opening of the professions as well as the welfare institutions, the freeing of schools from clerical influence, women's suffrage and the abolition of state-regulated prostitution.
It was not difficult for my friend to get me excited about these and other goals and as soon as I was able to move about again I paid a visit to a meeting of the General Austrian Women's Association.
There I met Auguste Fickert, the distinguished champion of the bourgeois women's movement. From the beginning she expressed a lively interest in me just as I have held her in esteem for that gracious respect she has shown me. Once I took part in a couple of the discussions, they encouraged me to give a lecture and to work on the women's supplement in the People's Voice [Volkstimme]; the democrat Kronawetter had made that concession to the women's movement [in printing the supplement]. Shortly thereafter I was elected to the Board of the Association and for the next three years I spoke at most meetings and wrote for most issues of the supplement.
In the Association and especially from Auguste Fickert I heard a great deal about the goals of Social Democracy and was stimulated enough to read the Workers' Newspaper [Arbeiter-Zeitung] and the Women Workers' Newspaper [Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung] as well as the scientific publication of German Social Democracy, The New Age [Die neue Zeit]. I also attended the lectures on social ethics given by Dr. Emil Reich, a lecturer at the University of Vienna.
In the spring of 1896 the Ethical Society organized a comprehensive inquiry into the condition of women workers in Vienna. All political parties and many associations were invited to put representatives on the commission which conducted the hearings, and Mrs. Rosa Mayreder and I were chosen as the delegates from the General Austrian Women's Association for this commission.
The picture of misery and inhuman exploitation which came out of the testimony given to the commission by so many women workers from all branches of industry disturbed me terribly. I was moved to lead a fight against the oppression and exploitation of women on behalf of those so sorely oppressed.
I immediately decided to teach myself more about the principles and theories of Social Democracy. I wanted to read Marx's Kapital since I saw it was often referred to in articles of The New Age. I cannot describe how challenging it was for me. Many articles in The New Age had already prepared me for the difficulties but it still seemed like a sheer unscalable mountain. The contents of the first chapters were so difficult that for a long time I got terrible headaches if I even looked at the outside of the book. But I didn't give up, I read each paragraph over and over again and worked to write it down in my own words until it made sense. I was so happy when the other chapters went so much easier. Later I realized how inappropriate it was to begin with a book that was so difficult to understand. For the first time I was able to meet personally some Social Democrats at the sessions of the Inquiry. First some women comrades, Popp, Boschek and Glass, and then Dr. Adler, Pernerstorfer, Dr. Verkauf, Smitka and others who significantly increased my interest in the party.
The first International Women's Congress took place in Berlin in the late summer of 1896. It was organized by bourgeois women and I was sent as a delegate of the General Austrian Women's Association. I was to give two talks, first a report about the women's movement in Austria and then one on the Inquiry about working women which I have already mentioned. As I was making my first report-I had already talked about various facets of the bourgeois women's movement-and I turned to the subject of the social democratic women's movement and the Women Worker's Newspaper when the chairwoman, Lina Morgenstern, suddenly informed me that my time had run out despite the fact that those who had spoken before me had been given unlimited time. I saw in this action-whether I was right or not doesn't matter-an anti-working class bias and I let it be known that I wanted to leave the Congress and sought to take my second talk off the agenda. There was a storm. The co-chairwoman, Minna Cauer, and several other women, urged me to give up my protest, saying it was all a misunderstanding and trying to convince me that I could use my material on the women workers in my second talk. So I gave my talk on the Inquiry two days later. My description of the misery and privation to which the women workers were exposed which had been shown by the Inquiry shocked the audience, which was for the most part composed of teachers, officials and writers of both sexes. They had heard precious little before this about the living conditions of the industrial working class. I also spoke out during a discussion on the morality question and, amid vigorous protests, expressed my conviction, which was only in partial agreement with the speaker's moral preaching, that prostitution is directly connected to the capitalist system...
After I returned to Vienna from the Congress, Comrade Popp invited me to a meeting of women workers at which organizational matters and a report on the Berlin Congress were on the agenda. I was very pleased by this invitation and accepted it, never thinking that the talk at the meeting would be given by me. I was delighted and then surprised as comrade Popp so strongly praised my behavior at the Berlin Congress. I was called upon to speak but declined because I was very embarrassed-but finally did .....
I was now ever more frequently entrusted to give talks at social democratic meetings although I did not formally belong to the party. The decisive step was very difficult for me because the Board of the General Austrian Women's Association did not want to let me go at this time and Fickert, Lang and Mayreder sought in the friendliest way to convince me that I could serve the cause of women workers within the framework of their organization. They pointed out that the organization needed a newspaper and they were counting on me to found it. But because of that I felt compelled to bring this division of my allegiance to an end and so in 1897 when the Social Democrats took part in an election campaign for the first time, I became very involved in it. My friends in the bourgeois women's movement themselves realized that my place was rightfully in Social Democracy and they wished me all the best when I joined.
Source: E. Riemert and J. Fout, European Women (New York: Schocken, 1980), pp.95-99.