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Feminism, Pragmatism or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism and the Woman Question, 1898–1914
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
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During a debate on the franchise reform bill in the Austrian Reichsrat on 12 September 1906, the Czech National Socialist Party deputy Václav Choc demanded that suffrage be extended to women as well as men. Otherwise, Choc asserted, the women of Austria would be consigned to the same status as “criminals and children.” Choc was certainly not the only Austrian parliamentarian to voice his support for votes for women during the debates on franchise reform. However, his party, the most radical of all the Czech nationalist political factions, was unique in that it not only included women's suffrage in its official program, as the Social Democrats had done a decade earlier, but also worked hard to change the political status of women in the Monarchy while the Social Democrats generally paid only lip service to this goal. Moreover, Choc and his colleagues in the National Socialist Party helped change the terms of the debate about women's rights by explicitly linking the “woman question” to the “national question” in ways entirely different from the prevailing discourse of liberalism in fin-de-siècle Austria. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers, whether German or Czech, tried to mold the participation of women in political life to fit the liberal view of a woman's “proper” role in society. By contrast, the radical nationalists who rose to prominence in Czech political culture only after 1900, attempted to recast the debate over women's rights as central to their two-pronged discourse of social and national emancipation, while at the same time pressing for the complete democratization of Czech political life at all levels, not merely in the imperial parliament. In so doing, and with the active but often necessarily covert collaboration of women associated with the party, these radical nationalists helped extend the parameters of the debate over the place Czech women had in the larger national society.
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1. Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Hauses der Abgeordneten des Reichsrates (Vienna, 1907), Franchise Reform Committee, 34th Sitting, 12 September 1906, p. 40. The Czech National Socialist Party had no connection to the later German party with the similar name.Google Scholar
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38. Derived from ÖeS. Radical Nationalists = National Socialists, States Rights Progressives, and Radical Progressives; Elite Nationalists = Young Czechs, Old Czechs, Moravian Peoples, and Realists.Google Scholar
39. German names are used in this table because those are the names used in the official statistical reports.Google Scholar
40. Derived from ÖeS. Excludes those employed in agriculture. Names in the table use spelling from the actual reports.Google Scholar
41. Derived from ÖeS.Google Scholar
42. C̆eské slovo, 11 March 1907.Google Scholar
43. Handbill in ANM, Hajn Collection, Carton 120, folder Volbý 1907.Google Scholar
44. Handbill in support of Karel Stanislav Sokol, contained in ANM, Hajn Collection, Carton 120, folder “Volbý 1907.”Google Scholar
45. MZA, B-26, 2205B, 12 April, 1897.Google Scholar
46. On this, see the previously mentioned electoral pamphlet, “Co Chce …,” and other similar ephemera from the 1907 election in ANM, Antonín Hajn Collection, Carton 120, folder “Volbý 1907.”Google Scholar
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49. See Zemínová, Kus Historie z̆enského hnutí. In this retrospective essay, she argues that from its earliest days the National Socialist Party did well where there were large populations of women working in older industries such as textiles and bookbinding.Google Scholar
50. See, for example, Starý-Chocen̆ský, Karel, “C̆tvrt stoleti …,” in 25 let práce c̆eskoslovenské strany socialistické, 1897–1922 (Prague: Melantrich, 1922), pp. 40–46.Google Scholar