The uncertainties in European intellectual and cultural life were paralleled by growing anxieties in European political life. The seemingly steady progress in the growth of liberal principles and political democracy after 1871 was soon slowed or even halted altogether after 1894. The new mass politics had opened the door to changes that many nineteenth-century liberals found unacceptable, and liberals themselves were forced to move in new directions. The appearance of a new right-wing politics based on racism added an ugly note to the already existing anxieties. With their newfound voting rights, workers elected socialists who demanded new reforms when they took their places in legislative bodies. Women, too, made new demands, insisting on the right to vote and using new tactics to gain it. In central and eastern Europe, tensions grew as authoritarian governments refused to meet the demands of reformers. And outside Europe, a new giant appeared in the Western world as the United States emerged as a great industrial power with immense potential.
In the 1830s, a number of women in the United States and Europe, who worked together in several reform movements, became frustrated by the apparent prejudices against females. They sought improvements for women by focusing on specific goals. Family and marriage laws were especially singled out because it was difficult for women to secure divorces and property laws gave husbands almost complete control over the property of their wives. These early efforts were not particularly successful, however. For example, women did not gain the right to their own property until 1870 in Britain, 1900 in Germany, and 1907 in France. Although the British legalized divorce in 1857, the French state permitted only a limited degree of divorce in 1884. In Catholic countries such as Spain and Italy, women had no success at all in achieving the right to divorce their husbands.
NEW PROFESSIONS Divorce and property rights were only a beginning for the women’s movement, however. Some middle- and upper-middle-class women gained access to higher education, and others sought entry into occupations dominated by men. The first to fall was teaching. Because medical training was largely closed to women, they sought alternatives through the development of nursing. One nursing pioneer was Amalie Sieveking (uh-MAHL-yuh SEE-vuh-king) (1794-1859), who founded the Female Association for the Care of the Poor and Sick in Hamburg, Germany. As she explained, “To me, at least as important were the benefits which [work with the poor] seemed to promise for those of my sisters who would join me in such a work of charity. The higher interests of my sex were close to my heart.” Sieveking’s work was followed by the more famous British nurse, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), whose efforts during the Crimean War, along with those of Clara Barton (1821-1912) in the American Civil War, transformed nursing into a profession of trained, middle-class “women in white.”
THE RIGHT TO VOTE By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement for women’s rights had entered the political arena with the call for equal political rights. Many feminists believed that the right to vote was the key to all other reforms to improve the position of women. The British women’s movement was the most vocal and active in Europe, but it divided over tactics. The liberal Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929) organized a moderate group who believed that women must demonstrate that they would use political power responsibly if they wanted Parliament to grant them the right to vote. Another group, however, favored a more radical approach. Emmeline Pankhurst (EM-uh-leen PANK-hurst) (1858-1928) and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, which enrolled mostly middle- and upper-class women. The members of Pankhurst’s organization realized the value of the media and used unusual publicity stunts to call attention to their demands (see the box on p. 736 and Images of Everyday Life on p. 737). Derisively labeled “suffragettes” by male politicians, they pelted government officials with eggs, chained themselves to lampposts, smashed the windows of fashionable department stores, burned railroad cars, and went on hunger strikes in jail. In 1913, Emily Davison accepted martyrdom for the cause when she threw herself in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby horse race. Suffragists had one fundamental aim: the right of women to full citizenship in the nation-state.
Although few women elsewhere in Europe used the Pankhursts’ confrontational methods, demands for women’s rights were heard throughout Europe and the United States before World War I. Nevertheless, only in Finland, Norway, and some American states did women actually receive the right to vote before 1914. It would take the dramatic upheaval of World War I before male-dominated governments capitulated on this basic issue (see Chapter 25).
EFFORTS FOR PEACE Women reformers took on other issues besides suffrage. In many countries, women supported peace movements. Bertha von Suttner (ZOOT-nuh) (1843-1914) became the head of the Austrian Peace Society and protested against the growing arms race of the 1890s. Her novel Lay Down Your Arms became a best-seller and brought her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. Lower-class women also took up the cause of peace. In 1911, a group of female workers marched in Vienna and demanded, “We want an end to armaments, to the means of murder and we want these millions to be spent on the needs of the people.”
THE NEW WOMAN Bertha von Suttner was but one example of the “new women” who were becoming more prominent at the turn of the century. These women renounced traditional feminine roles. Although some of them supported political ideologies such as socialism that flew in the face of the ruling classes, others simply sought new freedom outside the household and new roles other than those of wives and mothers.
Maria Montessori (mahn-tuh-SOR-ee) (1870-1952) was a good example of the “new woman.” Breaking with tradition, she attended medical school at the University of Rome. Although often isolated by the male students, she persisted and in 1896 became the first Italian woman to receive a medical degree. Three years later, she undertook a lecture tour in Italy on the subject of the “new woman,” whom she characterized as a woman who followed a rational, scientific perspective. In keeping with this ideal, Montessori put her medical background to work in a school for mentally handicapped children. She devised new teaching materials that enabled these children to read and write and became convinced, as she later wrote, “that similar methods applied to normal students would develop or set free their personality in a marvelous and surprising way.” Subsequently, she established a system of childhood education based on natural and spontaneous activities in which students learned at their own pace. By the 1930s, hundreds of Montessori schools had been established in Europe and the United States. As a professional woman and an unwed mother, Montessori also embodied some of the freedoms of the “new woman.”
Near the end of the nineteenth century, a revival of racism combined with extreme nationalism to produce a new rightwing politics aimed primarily at the Jews. Of course, anti-Semitism was not new to European civilization. Since the Middle Ages, Jews had been portrayed as the murderers of Jesus and subjected to mob violence; their rights had been restricted, and they had been physically separated from Christians in quarters known as ghettos.
In the nineteenth century, as a result of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews were increasingly granted legal equality in many European countries. The French revolutionary decrees of 1790 and 1791 emancipated the Jews and admitted them to full citizenship. After the revolutions of 1848, emancipation became a fact of life for Jews throughout western and central Europe. For many Jews, emancipation enabled them to leave the ghetto and become assimilated as hundreds of thousands of Jews entered what had been the closed worlds of parliaments and universities. In 1880, for example, Jews made up 10 percent of the population of the city of Vienna, Austria, but 39 percent of its medical students and 23 percent of its law students. A Jew could “leave his Jewishness behind,” as the career of Benjamin Disraeli, who became prime minister of Great Britain, demonstrated. Many other Jews became successful bankers, lawyers, scientists, scholars, journalists, and stage performers.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE AND GERMANY These achievements represented only one side of the picture, however. In Austrian politics, for example, the Christian Socialists combined agitation for workers with a virulent anti-Semitism. They were most powerful in Vienna, where they were led by Karl Lueger (LOO-gur), mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. Imperial Vienna at the turn of the century was a brilliant center of European culture, but it was also the home of an insidious German nationalism that blamed Jews for the corruption of German culture. It was in Vienna between 1907 and 1913 that Adolf Hitler later claimed to have found his worldview, one that was largely based on violent German nationalism and rabid anti-Semitism.
Germany, too, had its right-wing anti-Semitic parties, such as Adolf Stocker’s Christian Social Workers. These parties used anti-Semitism to win the votes of traditional lower-middle-class groups who felt threatened by the new economic forces of the times. These German anti-Semitic parties were based on race. In medieval times, Jews could convert to Christianity and escape from their religion. To modern racial anti-Semites, Jews were racially stained; this could not be altered by conversion. One could not be both a German and a Jew. Hermann Ahlwardt (HER-mahn AHL-vart), an anti-Semitic member of the German Reichstag, made this clear in a speech to that body:
The Jew is no German.... A Jew who was born in Germany does not thereby become a German; he is still a Jew. Therefore it is imperative that we realize that Jewish racial characteristics differ so greatly from ours that a common life of Jews and Germans under the same laws is quite impossible because the Germans will perish.
After 1898, the political strength of the German anti-Semitic parties began to decline.
PERSECUTION of JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE The worst treatment of Jews in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth occurred in eastern Europe, where 72 percent of the entire world Jewish population lived. Russian Jews were admitted to secondary schools and universities only under a quota system and were forced to live in certain regions of the country. Persecutions and pogroms (organized massacres) were widespread. Between 1903 and 1906, pogroms took place in almost seven hundred Russian towns and villages, mostly in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Jews decided to emigrate to escape the persecution. Between 1881 and 1899, an average of 23,000 Jews left Russia each year. Many of them went to the United States and Canada, although some (probably about 25,000) moved to Palestine, which soon became the focus for a Jewish nationalist movement called Zionism.
THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT The emancipation of the nineteenth century had presented vast opportunities for some Jews but dilemmas for others. Did emancipation mean full assimilation, and did assimilation mean the disruption of traditional Jewish life? Many Jews paid the price willingly, but others advocated a different answer, a return to Palestine. For many Jews, Palestine, the land of ancient Israel, had long been the land of their dreams.
During the nineteenth century, as nationalist ideas spread, the idea of national independence captured the imagination of some Jews. A key figure in the growth of political Zionism was Theodor Herzl (TAY-oh-dor HAYRT-sul) (1860-1904). In 1896, he published a book called The Jewish State (see the box on p. 740) in which he maintained that “the Jews who wish it will have their state.” Financial support for the development of settlements in Palestine came from wealthy Jewish banking families who wanted a refuge in Palestine for persecuted Jews. Establishing settlements was difficult, though, because Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman authorities were opposed to Jewish immigration. In 1891, one Jewish essayist pointed to the problems this would create:
We abroad are accustomed to believe that Erez Israel [the land of Israel] is almost totally desolate at present ... but in reality it is not so.... Arabs, especially those in towns, see and understand our activities and aims in the country but keep quiet and pretend as if they did not know,... and they try to exploit us, too, and profit from the new guests while laughing at us in their hearts. But if the time comes and our people make such progress as to displace the people of the country ... they will not lightly surrender the place.
Despite the warnings, however, the First Zionist Congress, which met in Switzerland in 1897, proclaimed as its aim the creation of a “home in Palestine secured by public law” for the Jewish people. One thousand Jews migrated to Palestine in 1901 , and the number rose to three thousand annually between 1904 and 1914; but on the eve of World War I, the Zionist dream remained just that.