Socialisms, feminisms, and agency: A long view

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 73, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 603-616

  Quataert, Jean ^a  

^a BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749837090     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/339123     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. As labeled by David Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: Western European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), p. 730.
2. The term is Anthony Butler's in Transformative Politics: The Future of Socialism in Western Europe (Houndmills and London, 1995).
3. This critique is at the heart of epistemological debates about the production of historical knowledge, some of which still maintain the linkages between materialist context and historical inquiry. For a useful introduction into what is at stake, see Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (New York and London, 1997), pp. 1-30.
4. Sassoon, p. 190. For a more critical assessment of this accommodation, see Butler, p. 85.
5. Geoffrey Eley and Keith Nield, "Starting Over: The Present, the Postmodern, and the Moment of Social History," in Jenkins, ed., p. 371.
6. Norman Naimark, "The Soviets, the German Left, and the Problem of 'Sectarianism' in the Eastern Zone, 1945 to 1949," in B&W, pp. 421-41;
7. Eric Weitz, "Good-Bye to All That: The Passing of German Communism and the Rise of a New New Left," in B&W, quote on p. 552.
8. Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves, "Introduction," in G&G, p. 4.
9. Jean Howard, "Towards a Postmodern, Politically-Committed, Historical Practice," in Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester and New York, 1991), pp. 101-22.
10. Weitz, "Good-Bye to All That," p. 551.
11. See also his Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, N.J., 1997), p. 394.
12. This is true of Hermann Beck, whose ostensible interest in working-class politics really works to rehabilitate the liberalism that was so thoroughly dismissed in the Sonderweg arguments; see his "Working-Class Politics at the Crossroads of Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism," in B&W, pp. 63-85.
13. Sassoon (n. 1 above), p. 15.
14. For a "classic" formulation of the argument, see Beatrix Campbell, Road to Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the 80s (London, 1984).
15. Geoff Eley, "From Welfare Politics to Welfare States: Women and the Socialist Question," inG&G, p. 519.
16. Ralf Roth, "Bürger and Workers: Liberalism and the Labor Movement in Germany, 1848 to 1914," in B&W, pp. 114-15;
17. Toni Offermann, "The Lassallean Labor Movement in Germany: Organization, Social Structure, and Associational Life in the 1860s," in B&W, pp. 104-5.
18. For Perrot, it seems that the lifting of the silences around women's lives reaffirms their identity "as a single block" (p. 25), despite the complex ways gender combines with different variables. Her style of analysis contrasts with recent work exploring international feminisms. See, among others, Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates, eds., Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics (New York and London, 1997);
19. Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy, and Angela Woollacott, eds., "Special Issue: Feminisms and Internationalism," Gender and History, vol. 10, no. 3 (November 1998). The key here is the plurality of feminisms.
20. Warren Breckman, "Diagnosing the 'German Misery': Radicalism and the Problem of National Character, 1830 to 1848," in B&W, pp. 33-61.
21. Among other sources, see the essays in Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton, N.J., 1995);
22. Belinda Davis, "Reconsidering Habermas, Gender, and the Public Sphere: The Case of Wilhelmine Germany," in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997), pp. 397-426.
23. Peter Lösche, "Is the SPD Still a Labor Party? From 'Community of Solidarity' to 'Loosely Coupled Anarchy,'" in B&W, pp. 531-45, quote on p. 536;
24. Ulla Jansz, "Gender and Democratic Socialism in the Netherlands," in G&G, pp. 215-37, with specific reference to "people," p. 216.
25. Beck, p. 67; Offermann, pp. 102-3; Mary Nash, "'Ideals of Redemption': Socialism and Women on the Left in Spain," in G&G, pp. 349-50;
26. Hilda Romer Christensen, "Socialist Feminists and Feminist Socialists in Denmark, 1920-1940," in G&G, pp. 485-86; Sassoon (n. 1 above), pp. 7-8.
27. Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1993), pp. 10 and 22.
28. Her essay in B&W is titled "The Iron Front: Weimar Social Democracy between Tradition and Modernity," pp. 251-74.
29. Weitz, Creating German Communism (n. 9 above), p. 19.
30. Adelheid von Saldem, "Latent Reformism and Socialist Utopia: The SPD in Göttingen, 1890 to 1920," in B&W, quotations on pp. 195 and 196; Lösche, p. 533.
31. Von Saldern, "Latent Reformism and Socialist Utopia," p. 210.
32. She also emphasizes the point in her contribution to G&G, "Modernization as Challenge: Perceptions and Reactions of German Social Democratic Women," p. 98.
33. Mary Jo Maynes, "'Genossen und Genossinnen': Depictions of Gender, Militancy, and Organizing in the German Socialist Press, 1890 to 1914," in B&W, pp. 141-66.
34. Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1996), pp. 219-21 and 322;
35. also, Siân Reynolds, France between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London and New York, 1996), pp. 82-92 and 109-31.
36. Geoff Eley, "Cultural Socialism, the Public Sphere, and the Mass Form: Popular Culture and the Democratic Project, 1900 to 1935," in B&W, p. 336.
37. Helmut Gruber, "The 'New Woman': Realities and Illusions of Gender Equality in Red Vienna," in G&G, pp. 56-94;
38. Christensen, p. 481; and William Carl Mathews, "The Rise and Fall of Red Saxony," in B&W, pp. 293-313.
39. Part IV in G&G: Ida Blom, "Introduction," pp. 415-20,
40. and "A Double Responsibility: Women, Men, and Socialism in Norway," pp. 450-77;
41. Renée Frangeur, "Social Democrats and the Woman Question in Sweden: A History of Contradiction," pp. 425-49; Christensen. The careful empirical framing shows how gender differences actually dissolve the so-called Scandinavian pattern.
42. Sassoon juxtaposes the two concepts (see n. 1 above), p. 193.
43. Anna-Sabine Ernst, "The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Everyday Life in the DDR in the 1950s," in B&W, pp. 489-506.
44. Donna Harsch, similarly, rehabilitates the perspective of civil society under communism, in "Society, the State, and Abortion in East Germany, 1950-1972," American Historical Review 102 (February 1997): 53-84.
45. Weitz, Creating German Communism (n. 9 above), p. 387.
46. See Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, 2d ed. (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 255-60; this section details the difficulties for women in the recent transitions to market economies in Eastern Europe.
47. I want to thank my graduate student Jeffrey McFadden for these insights. He is exploring the international political culture within German Social Democracy before World War I in a dissertation on the transnational German Left.
48. Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy, and Angela Woollacott, "Introduction: Why Feminisms and Internationalism?" in Sinha et al., eds. (n. 15 above), pp. 345-46.
49. Eric Weitz has an interesting commentary on wars and communist style in his piece "Good-Bye to All That" (n. 6 above), pp. 550-51.
50. This is the point in Butler (n. 2 above).