Early 20th century female workers’ movement

The women who identified with labour movement demands had difficulty cooperating with the charity women who dominated early 20th century feminism. The symbol of the conflict was the domestic workers – then a very large professional group – whose simplest demands were difficult to find even the slightest hearing of bourgeois feminists. But they also often had difficulty cooperating with and finding an approach to the labour movement organizations.

Germany had the greatest success. There was a ban on women participating in political parties and for a long time both the Labor Party and trade unions were also banned. Therefore, the working women organized themselves separately in their own organization and thereby gained great cohesion and political clout. For example, this was where International Women’s Day first became a mass event when the women of the labor movement from 1907 arranged demonstrations and mass meetings for women’s suffrage. The ”bourgeois” women’s movement would had nothing to do with it - until women were allowed to participate in parties and the ”Female Workers’ Associations” were promptly abolished.

Relative success was also achieved in Italy, where the textile and agricultural workers’ unions were dominated and organized by women who gained the respect of the male rulers of the labor movement.

In France, on the other hand, one can speak of complete failure. There, socialist women saw the bourgeois feminists as their main enemies, which, among other things, led them to refuse to defend women’s right to work when they were thrown out of macho unions. They also refused to organize separately, citing the equal right of women to participate in the main organizations of the labor movement. The result was that no one mobilized the French women workers for any activity and women’s suffrage was delayed until 1947.

Similar conceptions were held in Russia, with similar results.

Reading
Charles Sowerwine, Sisters or citizens?, Cambridge University Press 1982
Richard Evans, Comrades and sisters, Wheatsheaf Books 1987
Bianca Beccalli, The modern women’s movement in Italy, in Monica Threlfall (ed), Mapping the women’s movement, Verso 1996