First women's movement: Advice to go in days gone by

It is not uncommon that one discovery leads to the next. This also holds true for Corinna Oesch from the Institute for Contemporary History: While researching in archives as part of her project focussing on the German women's rights activist Käthe Schirmacher (1865-1930), Oesch discovered letters that Schirmacher had received from women unknown to the activist. "These women have approached Schirmacher with different, often very personal concerns. Since our previous project had a different focus, I could not take a closer look at these letters, but they always lingered in my mind," says the contemporary historian.

Her current Elise Richter-Projekt now focuses on these types of letters: Not only Käthe Schirmacher has received letters from women from the population. Estates of other activists of the women's movement hold many of these letters as well, as Corinna Oesch discovered. "They could be a very interesting source, and I do not know of any work that addresses this topic in more detail," said Oesch, "My research questions are primarily devoted to finding out if these letters are indeed a relevant source and how to conceptualise and describe this new type of source in the first place."

The Elise Richter project follows a transnational approach, i.e. Corinna Oesch and the project member Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner do not only study estates from Austria and Germany, but also from Hungary, England, the US, Poland and France for the historiography of women’s letters.
 

Publicly debated ‘women's issues’

The contents of the letters revolve around questions that moved women at the time and which were also partly debated publicly, such as women's education, paid employment, participation in public life, gender relations or self-determined life. "As a working title, I have called these letters 'women citizens’ letters', knowing that this term is quite problematic: At that time, before 1920, women were second-class citizens, who had no right to vote, were legally disadvantaged and excluded from the public sphere," explains Oesch.

‘Citizens' letters’ is a term from historical research and refers to letters from the population, both women and men to politicians (before 1920 exclusively men). Here, Corinna Oesch sees parallels to the letters that women wrote to activists of the women's movement, "Both usually contain autobiographical elements. People writing these letters briefly introduce themselves, describe their situation, their problems. Another parallel is that they describe a specific concern, of which the writer assumes that the recipient has the necessary power, relationships or knowledge to deal with it."

Prominent, influential women

The first women's movement also increasingly placed female activists in the public spotlight. Now that they had the knowledge required and numerous contacts, they were also regarded as influential, especially by women. "For the first time in history, the female activists are perceived as knowledgeable persons with expertise. In history, this is a really new phenomenon which occurs for the first time with the emergence of women's movements around 1900," explains the contemporary historian.

Often correspondents had very particular concerns: In a letter, a woman asked Käthe Schirmacher for advice on setting up her own company. "From today's point of view, it seems somewhat absurd to turn to an activist with such a special concern," says Oesch, "After all, Schirmacher was not an expert in all these things, but people still perceived her as such." In another letter, for example, a mother asked a women's rights activist about reasonable education opportunities for her daughter, as she could not afford university studies.

Tracing international correspondence

Of course, contemporary historians are not only interested in the concerns addressed in these letters but also in the responses of the respective women's rights activist, "We found some cases of follow-up letters – so there must have been correspondence. So many have responded and tried to help. In rare cases, we even have indications that they met in person." In the project, the contemporary historian Fedeles-Czeferner concentrates on the estate of Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian women's rights activist, who has kept all her correspondence letters. "This is, of course, a particularly valuable source for us."

"The first women's movement was also organised internationally and the activists exchanged ideas and travelled a lot for lectures, etc.," said Oesch. Since many of these women, such as Käthe Schirmacher, have also published in newspapers and magazines, they also enjoyed a certain degree of popularity among the general population. "I am specifically interested in letters written by unknown women who, as yet, were not active themselves, but were attracted to the women's movement."

Imperative to self-emancipation

The peculiarity of this type of letter is that the letters are "an expression and a reaction to an imperative of the women's movement for self-emancipation". Who were these women then? “Many authors of these letters were middle-class women who did not want to follow the ‘traditional path’, but wanted to lead a self-determined life," said Oesch, "Overall, the spectrum is broad, but these are mainly women with a certain level of education, who have also had the time and means to write such letters in the first place."