Between Pacifism and Militancy: Socialist Women in the First Austrian Republic, 1918–1934

ABSTRACT

The expansion of citizenship rights for women in the largely democratic Successor States followed the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the end of the First World War in 1918. Many women’s rights activists hoped that the participation of women in the political sphere would now lead to a more peaceful future. However, during the post-war period, revolutionary movements and persistent violent conflicts dominated Central and Eastern Europe. Some socialist women supported – and participated in – the region’s widespread violence. This analysis explores the tension between pacifism and militancy within the First Austrian Republic through an investigation of how this friction shaped socialist and feminist women’s political activism and writings. The question of political violence shaped gendered identities, distinguishing between the configurations of the “peaceful woman” and the “female revolutionary”.

“We believe that the path that dictatorship brings is a path of pain and heavy struggles. But, in any case, it is the way to freedom”.¹ Elfriede Eisler-Friedländer/Ruth Fischer had not yet reached her twenty-fourth birthday when she stepped up to the podium at the Austrian Parliament in Vienna as one of only eight female delegates in the Second Reich Conference of Workers’ Councils at the end of June 1919.² She gave a fiery speech calling for the establishment of a Bolshevik republic – at a time when Budapest was still under Bolshevik rule and the Austrian Communist Party agitated for a socialist society based on the Russian model.

Eisler-Friedländer’s words reveal the more violent aspects of the so-called Austrian revolution and serve as a starting point for contemplating the entanglements of gender, violence, and politics. Violence has multiple dimensions – including structural and symbolic forms³ – but the concept of political violence as “all forms of violence enacted pursuant to aims of decisive socio-political control or change” is especially pertinent here.⁴ Recent historical scholarship on political violence in Central Europe in the aftermath of the First World War has concentrated on paramilitary actions and revolutionary events mainly through the experiences of men.⁵ However, the perception of “political violence” as something that is shared by men, done by men, and suffered by men alone deserves interrogation.⁶ How did women experience political violence during the Austrian revolution? To what extent were they ready to participate in and promote political violence?⁷ Very few recent publications on Germany and Austria – especially on the questions of violence – reflect the male bias of their studies or incorporate gender historical perspectives.⁸ In this, they follow standard narratives. One analysis, for example, described the way the events of the revolution as mostly non-violent. This study only briefly mentioned social – and mainly female – protests, like hunger riots in 1919–1920, although they saw heavily injured and dead participants.⁹ Feminist scholars have challenged these narratives by documenting the involvement of women during – and especially at the end of – the war in hunger riots and social unrest in Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, and tsarist Russia, as well as their participation in the war efforts of the belligerent states as part of combat, medical, or supporting units.¹⁰

This analysis contributes to the historiography on Austrian women’s political participation, taking into account the intersection of violence and gender. Political violence produced binary gendered identities – the configurations of the “peaceful woman” (friedfertige Frau) and the “female revolutionary” (Revolutionärin) – which shaped the possibilities for the political inclusion or exclusion of socialist women. The term configuration borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who used it to emphasise both the interdependence and interplay of social and individual negotiation processes that shape human relationships.¹¹ These configurations informed socialist women’s political activism and their writings during the First Austrian Republic – a period characterised by the revolutionary events leading to its foundation and ever-increasing political conflicts until its dissolution and the establishment of the Ständestaat in 1933–1934. This analysis draws on the theoretical and political writings of activists like Eisler-Friedländer and Ilona Duczynska Polanyi, archival materials concerning the activities of socialist women and material from the Austrian Council’s Movement, including minutes, letters, and organisational writings. Sources for examining actions of both known and numerous unknown socialist women may be few, yet they provide key evidence of women participating actively in violent movements.¹²

To understand the relationship between gender, politics, and violence, a theoretical approach combines with the critical history of masculinities, feminist historiography, and insights from the history of emotions.¹³ Whilst the “peaceful woman” served as the dominant configuration for women’s political activism during the Austrian revolution, its counterpart of the “female revolutionary” deserves extended consideration. In what follows, the configuration of the female revolutionary is contextualised vis-à-vis a hegemonic model of militant masculinity and explores its manifestation in the case of Eisler-Friedländer. In this dramatic period, the intertwining of contemporary gender norms and violence as a pressing and acute reference for political participation led to the exclusion of women, but it also created opportunities for some activists to join the socialist project. Between pacifism and militancy, the analysis shows socialist women’s different answers to the increasing political violence in the Republic.

Violent Times – Peaceful Women?

On 11 November 1918, the Emperor Charles abdicated; the next day saw the proclamation of the Republic of German Austria – Republik Deutschösterreich. Mass demonstrations and an attempted violent coup accompanied the proclamation of the new state. The young mother and student, Eisler-Friedländer, who had just co-founded the Austrian Communist Party a few days earlier, was amongst those who occupied the editorial office of the daily Neue Freie Presse.¹⁴ Her son, then only one year old, recalled the events in his autobiography:

She published a ringing declaration addressed to the “workers and soldiers of Vienna” and laid down her unexpected office, only to be arrested and charged with high treason by the new government. But the charges were dropped after a few weeks and she was released. In the mean time [sic!], I had learned to walk, and came running along the corridor to meet her when she returned to our flat.¹⁵

Although some historians stress the experience of prisoners of wars and deserting soldiers as triggering the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Kaiserreich,¹⁶ the example of Eisler-Friedländer indicates that this story is incomplete without the experiences of women: “everyone has war experiences”.¹⁷ By the 1960s, Eisler-Friedländer – now Ruth Fischer and in exile in the United States and France – had a very pessimistic view on this period. She even called the events in Austria a Westentaschenrevolution – a revolution the size of a waistcoat pocket. Although the character of events in Austria remains contested amongst contemporaries and historians alike,¹⁸ they had significant consequences. One result was the founding of workers and soldiers’ councils, which lasted until as late as in 1924.¹⁹ Another result was the introduction of universal suffrage for all adult men and women over 20 shortly after the proclamation of the new Republic. In February 1919, women could cast their ballot for the first time.²⁰ Contemporaries considered this breaking point in the history of political participation of women important. On 17 December 1918, the bi-weekly Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung announced emphatically, “Women have become voters; this changes their value at a single blow”.²¹

The period following the end of the First World War was characterised by on-going territorial conflicts and economic problems: people, goods, and production needed reordering according to the new borders defined by the peace treaties. Famine and high unemployment rates marked the first years of the new-born state [German-]Austria.²² The years between 1927 and 1933 also experienced heightened political tension – a phase even called the “latent Civil War”.²³ After the violent clashes between participants of a demonstration and the police, which led to causalities and the burning of the Palace of Justice, the nationalist and proto-fascist paramilitary organisation, the Heimwehr, gained political power and public presence, as did the National Socialists. In 1933, the parliament collapsed. After the civil war in 1934, an authoritarian clerico-fascist regime emerged, which took Italian fascism as its example: the austrofascist Ständestaat.²⁴

During the interwar period, the question of violence as a means of politics occupied a large part of contemporary discourse. This applies equally to the immediate aftermath of the First World War as it does to the late 1920s and early 1930s. It comes as no surprise that socialist women positioned themselves in these political debates on a spectrum between militancy and pacifism – triggered by economic and political crises and their personal ideological convictions, but also as a way to show party affiliations.²⁵ The term “socialists” here refers to all political activists on the left – from either the Social Democratic Party [SDAP] founded in 1888, the Communist Party founded in November 1918, or one of the numerous short-lived radical left groups. At its peak in spring 1919, the Communist Party had only 40,000 members, a number that quickly declined the summer of that same year. It was therefore never a threat to the hegemonic position of the rather reformist SDAP. Nevertheless, considering the European context of attempted Republics of Councils in Austria’s neighbouring countries, Hungary and Germany, its importance is not to be underestimated.²⁶

The relationship between violence and politics shaped the agency of the actors, alongside gender and other categories of social inequality. Gender is a multi-relational category of historical analysis that intersects with other categories depending on the historical context,²⁷ like class and nationality. In other words, women’s rights activists and female socialists alike could not escape the contemporary hegemony of violence in political discourse; they themselves used violence to discuss – amongst other things – questions like what a political practice should or could look like, and which socio-political ideas and forms of equality could be implemented in the “new world”.²⁸

The covers of two women’s journals, published in the final years of the First Austrian Republic, are very instructive for illustrating the two different configurations of the “peaceful woman” and the “female revolutionary” that emerged during this period. They indicate a rising tension between the political left and right after the relatively peaceful years of the mid-1920s and demonstrate the extent to which violence as a political means was again a topic of public debate by the end of the decade.

The April 1932 cover of the Social Democratic women’s journal, Die Frau, was clearly a response to the World Disarmament Conference, which was taking place in Geneva at the same time.²⁹ It shows a woman holding back an aggressive man, who reaches for a bunch of rifles. She looks up to him – the text states “Keine Waffen mehr!” – no more weapons – pleading for the end of violence. It depicts a perfect allegory of the peaceful woman. The text on the cover page might be a reference to the 1889 novel Die Waffen nieder – Lay Down Your Arms – by the famous Austrian pacifist and Nobel prize winner, Bertha von Suttner.³⁰ The second cover is from the November 1929 issue of the Communist women’s monthly, Die Arbeiterin. It shows a different picture, with four armed women behind barricades. The text reads, “Russian women workers ready to defend their factories”, and “female combatants of the Heimwehr shoot workers in Wiener Neustadt. Austrian Woman Worker! Learn from them both!”. It represents the more marginalised but present configuration of the female revolutionary. These two covers help illustrate the agency of socialist women between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the fascist era.

Peaceful Women: The Cultural and Historical Mission of Women

The First World War mobilised many men and a smaller number of women. Nevertheless, war was considered exclusively a man’s job to such an extent that gender historians stressed the willingness to serve in armies as a core part of modern hegemonic masculinity.³¹ At the same time, certain ideas about femininity accompanied this norm of masculinity. A German study framed these hierarchical and dichotomous gender relations with the term “polarising gendered characters” – polarisierende Geschlechtscharaktere. These had been powerful norms in bourgeois society since the end of the eighteenth century. Qualities such as toughness, power, or assertiveness were men’s attributes, whilst their counterparts like softness, weakness, or empathy were naturalised as female characteristics.³² In accordance with these gender norms, it is not surprising that women deliberately chose peace activism as a field of political participation. Yet, it was also a field open to them on which women could defend their public appearances on the grounds of their gendered responsibility for society. This political activism was in line with their allegedly natural social role.³³

Peace activism was one of the central fields of political activity for women already before but also during and after the First World War. The international peace movement relied, amongst other things, on the co-operation and networks of the international women’s movement. However, most members of the two major international women’s organisations, the International Council of Women and the International Women’s Suffrage Association, supported their state’s respective war policies; consequently, they did not hold international meetings during the war.³⁴ It was thus outside of these organisations that 1,136 women – six from Austria – met in The Hague between 28 April and 1 May 1915 to pass a comprehensive resolution calling for peace-building measures.³⁵ This conference marked the end of a long-practised pacifist activism of the – international – left-liberal women’s movement based on a radical analysis of society.³⁶ Women like the Austrian women’s rights activist, Auguste Fickert, who stated in 1899 that establishing peace could only come once overcoming the “colonial fever” of the Great Powers, as well as the severe social inequalities within all nation states.³⁷ In contrast, the conservative branch of the bourgeois women’s movement in Austria, the League of Austrian Women’s Associations, decided against participating in the 1915 Peace Congress from which in 1919 the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom [WILPF] emerged.³⁸ Conservative activists embraced a nationalist political agenda, being loyal to the war efforts of the Habsburg Monarchy, and generally abstained from anti-war actions and resistant practices during the last two years of the struggle. Socialist women, however, started to claim a pioneering “historical role” in peace activism and in the workers’ movement declaring, “socialist women must be the precursor to the general mass movement for the end of the fratricide and signify an important step forward to the reconstruction of the one great workers’ international”.³⁹

However, no Austrian women participated in the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Berne in March 1915, as the Social Democratic women’s organisation still followed officially the party line of not endangering the war efforts of the Habsburg Monarchy. Adelheid Popp, born Dworak, one of the leading female Social Democrats and later a member of parliament in the First Republic, for example, was loyal to the party. The youngest of 15 children, she started to work at a very young age, first as a servant and then as a factory worker. She turned into a popular speaker in political assemblies, fighting for women workers’ rights and suffrage. Nevertheless, in 1914, she wrote, “We women would like to say: make peace. But we know that would make us appear childish and foolish. This call must be stifled in cool thinking, even though the hottest desire for peace lies in our hearts”.⁴⁰ Popp’s words demonstrate the dichotomy between presumed rational thinking that would subsequently lead to a patriotic stand and the desire for peace painted as an emotional and “childish” request. Her choice of words reveals how perceptions of pacifism and the peace movement were gendered “female”.⁴¹

Whilst the Social Democrats in the Cisleithanian part of the Habsburg Monarchy did not officially support the government’s course of war – the dissolution of the Reichsrat, the parliament of the Cisleithanian part of Austria-Hungary, occurred right after the war started – they also did not vehemently oppose it. Public opposition within the party only arose over time. Leading voices amongst them were women. The SDAP did not allow socialist women into the party itself prior to 1918, as the Austrian law on association prohibited women from joining political organisations in general. Therefore, it is possible that it was easier for – some of – them to promote pacifist opinions, since they lacked equal representation in the party organisation itself.⁴² But anti-war sentiments were also expressed by other groups: the so-called “left” within social democracy, and the “radical left” – a loose group already on the fringe of – or outside – the party. Popp was not one of them: in 1917, she opposed signing a declaration by the left-wing faction in favour of an immediate ceasefire offered by the Habsburg Monarchy alone and refused to publish openly pacifist articles in the Social Democrat women’s journal Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, which she headed as editor-in-chief since 1893.⁴³

Nevertheless, after the separate peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk between revolutionary Bolshevik Russia and the Central Powers began in December 1917, the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung greeted the “new time” in which “the rising sun of peace stands before our eyes”.⁴⁴ And in March – on the eve of the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire – the paper published a text dedicated to International Women’s Day. It demanded the right to vote in the face of devastating war, justifying female political participation with a more humane policy: “Give us the right to vote, allow us to have our say in the parliament, then let us, as wives and mothers, raise our voices to denounce what war has imposed on the world”.⁴⁵ The participation of women in the political arena was a basic condition for a peaceful, wealthy, and free society. Most of the actors involved in the women’s peace movement were convinced that the question of peace was at its core a women’s issue, “as wives and mothers”: achieving peace could only occur with the entry of women into institutionalised politics.⁴⁶

The configuration of the “peaceful woman” played an important role in political discourse.⁴⁷ It also resembled a deep-rooted Catholic tradition: Mary – the mother of Jesus – was the “Queen of Peace”. Talking about peace remained thus closely related to talking about the participation of women in politics. Not only bourgeois, but also socialist women used the powerful image of the “peaceful women”. Examples of its iconography emerged in the electoral campaign in the immediate aftermath of the war. Addressing women of broad political affiliation, this configuration deeply connected with the political concept of Social Motherhood – Soziale Mütterlichkeit⁴⁸ – that women from all political spectra, but especially conservative ones, used to justify public activities, as for example, nurses during the First World War.⁴⁹

Pacifism and the participation of women in the new world was thus inherently connected.⁵⁰ One of the most prominent and radical Austrian feminists, Rosa Mayreder, is another example. Expanding this consideration in an essay entitled “Gender and Social Policy” in 1923, she deconstructed the dichotomy of the differences between the sexes and stressed the importance of not defining individuals by their gender.⁵¹ On the other hand, she went on to explain the difference between men and women as grounded in the ability of women to give birth, which made them place a higher value on life.⁵² Because of this, she deemed pacifism a specific cultural mission of women – Kulturaufgabe der Frau. War was the most extreme consequence of absolute masculinity, as Mayreder put it. Achieving equality between men and women could only occur in a society without war; a society without war was therefore the absolute condition – and not merely the consequence – of the equality of women as citizens:

Yet, only when women in general understood that their mission in social life must be different from that of men, when they confronted the prevailing male values with their own values oriented towards the natural inequality of the sexes, will they open a new page in the book of world history when they enter political life.⁵³

The natural inequality – the possibility of women to become mothers – therefore needed to be the basis of a peaceful society that allowed women to have a political life that changes society – and “world history”. Consequently, Mayreder joined other women’s rights activists in the peace movement and became a founding member and vice president of the Austrian section of the new WILPF.⁵⁴

The First World War was a transformative event in the international women’s movement.⁵⁵ Many Austrian socialist women like Popp did not respond with praising statements in favour of the war, but they also did not advocate for peace until the last years of the fighting. When they did, they linked peace to political activity and the suffrage of women. The configuration of the peaceful women together with the “discourse of motherhood” was more than just a metaphor used in political debate⁵⁶; it offered progressive women a space in the public sphere and a counter-project to the virility of imperial politics that caused the war.

Female Revolutionaries: Fighting for a New World

When revolution broke out in Russia in February 1917, 20-year-old Viennese Duczynska, daughter of impoverished Polish and Hungarian gentry, was in Switzerland. Like other young women, she had enrolled at the Technische Hochschule in Zurich in autumn 1915 to study mathematics and physics. Nevertheless, Switzerland was not only the country to which women from all over Europe came to study from the end of the nineteenth century onwards; as a neutral state during the war, it was also an important place for peace and socialist activists. In this environment, Duczynska, already expelled from a “strongly idealistically-nationalistically oriented” school in 1914 “because of her own anti-war attitude”,⁵⁷ met several so-called Zimmerwald activists. The Zimmerwald Left was the name of a group of socialists who convened in September 1915 in Zimmerwald, Switzerland: 38 delegates from 11 countries who opposed the war policy of the social democratic parties.⁵⁸ Peace was not enough as a goal for this group: they wanted to transform the war into a revolutionary situation that would lead to the building of socialism. Although no Austrian participated, there were, of course, networks that kept them well informed. One of them was Duczynska. In Zurich, she met Katja Adler, the wife of Friedrich Adler, who very famously assassinated the Austrian prime minister, Karl Graf Stürgkh, in October 1916, and Angelica Balabanova, the former chairwoman of the Italian Socialist Party and secretary of the Communist International in 1919. Asked to bring Katja Adler’s greetings to Vienna, Duczynska smuggled a copy of the Zimmerwald Manifesto across the border. In Vienna, she met with a group of left-leaning socialists, amongst them Therese Schlesinger, her daughter, Anna Frey, Käthe Pick – later Leichter – Robert Danneberg, and Anna Ströhmer – later Hornik. But Duczynska’s hope for a revolutionary movement in Austria was disappointed. She left Vienna for Budapest, where she joined the anti-war movement. After agitating for a general strike and jailed shortly before the 1918 January Strike, she found herself convicted of high treason. Freed by the Aster Revolution that produced the brief first Hungarian Republic in late October 1918, she later became involved in its revolutionary successor, the communist Bela Kun’s Hungarian Councils’ Republic.⁵⁹

Duczynska’s experience provides one example of how socialist women negotiated between the configurations of the peaceful woman and female revolutionary. The Austrian SDAP’s passivism regarding the peace question became untenable for many other women witnessing the worsening conditions of war. Shortages of food and other necessary daily goods, like coal, arose soon after the beginning of the conflict and deteriorated towards its end.⁶⁰ The wartime economy was unable to cope with military and civilian needs and resulted in an increasing number of hunger riots and strikes, especially in cities like Vienna and Linz. The first mass strikes occurred in May 1917. News about possible failing peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk triggered an even larger strike in January 1918, which lasted more than a week. At its peak, more than 500,000 workers in the Austrian provinces of the Monarchy and 200,000 in the Hungarian ones laid down their tools. Probably one-half were women.⁶¹

The support, or non-support, of violent actions in the name of building a better future was a question of economic hardship, as well as political conviction and structured affiliation to political parties. On the political side, the Russian revolutions provided a utopian maelstrom for the European left fighting for a different society, a different state. Many socialist women saw Bolshevik Russia as being “at the forefront of democracy and progress with regard to women, [surpassing] the great French revolution, which gave freedom only to men, left the women unfree and restricted them to stove and family”.⁶² Whilst Social Democrats sought the parliamentary reform path, the Zimmerwald group and other radical leftists – either following Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik government leader and fountainhead of Marxism-Leninism, or organised in anarchist and syndicalist groups – thought that the time was ripe for militant action to change society. This inspired Duczynska and other women like Eisler-Friedländer to distance themselves from Social Democrats and speak in favour of violent actions. Eisler-Friedländer was one of those female actors in the Austrian revolution who also participated in its more violent moments; others were Hilde Wertheim, Berta Pölz, and Anna Ströhmer. Eisler-Friedländer’s address during the Reichs Conference of the Austrian Workers’ Councils in early summer 1919 directly challenged the pacifist notions of the Social Democrats. She exposed the aggression that lay within the Austrian peace settlement, the Treaty of St. Germain, signed at Paris by the Austrian delegation in September 1919, that many perceived as unfair, declaring that “peace under capitalist governments would be a complete enslavement of the vanquished and an absolute beginning of new wars”.⁶³

Despite the many socialist and feminist women writing about the radical notion of peace in the on-going violent aftermath of the First World War, female voices promoting violence as a political tool were rare. Duczynska, who married the renowned economist Karl Polanyi in 1922, became one. After returning to Vienna in 1920 and expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party, she joined the Austrian SDAP – from which she was later also expelled. This did not prevent her, however, from becoming a member of the resistance during the Austrian civil war in 1934. One of the reasons for her political dissidence was the combination of her belief in revolutionary activism and democracy as the only way to secure political participation.⁶⁴ This notion reflected in her texts on violence. In a 1922 article about the Hungarian Communist Party, Duczynska developed a “dialectic of evil” – Dialektik des Bösen – to explain developments within the party, which she described as misguided. Forty years before Hannah Arendt, the German-American political philosopher, published a similar idea in On Revolution,⁶⁵ Duczynska wrote, “The necessity of the revolution despite the moral sacrifices it requires is reinterpreted as the necessity of the revolution, precisely because of these sacrifices”.⁶⁶ She linked her criticism of party discipline, which prevented plurality and intellectual autonomy, with a criticism of the primacy of militarism. She did not reject violence as a means of achieving political objectives – later, under the shadow of Austria’s approaching civil war, she would even call militant defensiveness a moral duty. Still, this moral argument favouring violence warned of the danger of a centralised and hierarchical party structure abusing it.

As much as their male comrades, Bolshevik women in Russia supported violence.⁶⁷ The increasing importance of militarism, not so much during the revolutionary events in 1917 but during the Russian civil war lasting until 1921, marginalised Bolshevik women. That said, Duczynska did not argue based on gender when she analysed the role of militarism within communism. In the 1970s, she stated in an interview with the historian, Isabella Ackerl, that she accepted the idea of using violence “out of loyalty to the revolution”.⁶⁸ The dichotomy strongly defended by revolutionary socialist women was therefore not the one between violent action and the use of peaceful means; rather, it was between militancy as an autonomous and potentially pluralistic form of action versus militarism as linked to state power and oppression by armed forces. Participation in and support for war and political violence was a way for many socialist women to secure a space for themselves in the political arena, even if they held a minority position.

Contextualising the Rise of Female Revolutionary ConfigurationThe hegemonic configuration of the mail revolutionary worker

To understand better the perception of female militancy and the space of agency for socialist women, it is helpful to return to the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which defined military masculinity as hegemonic throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶⁹ A key characteristic of this concept is its consideration as relational – in relation to not only women or femininity, but also defined by diversely shaped relationships with other men and/or masculinities.⁷⁰ Moreover, its general political character typifies hegemonic masculinity, which manifests itself in the assertion of leadership in society and brings together the spheres of business, politics, and the military.⁷¹ Using violence signalled masculinity in many societies.⁷² In an important contribution to gender in society and science, the argument exists that since the French revolution, military capability and carrying weapons was one of the “four central areas that determine the gender relations sustained until today”.⁷³ In 1867, the Habsburg Monarchy introduced universal military service for men, thus forming the institutional basis for practicing discipline and defence of the fatherland and making a conceptual link between military capability and citizenship.⁷⁴ At least until the First World War, this military form of a hegemonic model was far from universal.⁷⁵ The enforcement of general conscription did not mean drafting all men of an age group for military service; and even the numbers of this drafted minority were reduced by a high incapacitation rate – between 12.7 and 27.7% from 1870 to 1910. The multi-ethnic composition of the Monarchy and the growing national tensions also reflected in the number of young men who defied the recruitment.⁷⁶

With this background in mind, the following analysis of the protocols of workers’ councils as institutions of the Austrian revolution as well as articles published by socialist men and women shows the depiction of the revolutionary worker. Accordingly, a revolutionary is characterised by qualities also found in ideas about soldierly masculinity and the organised labour movement.⁷⁷ Indeed, it is rooted in the intersections of the two discourses. Two publications shaped the narrative of the Austrian revolution, both published shortly after the war by the former officers of the Habsburg army and Social Democrat politicians, Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch.⁷⁸ They put soldiers on centre stage in their narratives: they were “the most passionate revolutionaries”.⁷⁹ The core characteristic was proletarian discipline – in contrast to military discipline. Henriette Roland-Holst, a Dutch council communist, defined it as “the counterpart of the compulsory discipline of military organization”.⁸⁰ Military discipline would weaken the will of the individual, whilst proletarian discipline would educate and enable the individual to achieve socialism. Social democratic writing on the 1918 January Strike interprets the end of the great strike movement as a victory of discipline and self-control. It had been “a remarkable example of self-control and prudent assessment of one’s own strength and limits in its course and at the same time a pattern of proletarian discipline in its conclusion”.⁸¹ Apart from discipline, the characteristics of the configuration of the revolutionary worker were solidarity with comrades, obedience, and submission to party principles. The expectation was that members of the Arbeiterwehr – workers’ militia – founded in the aftermath of the war, were to be steadfast, tough, and ready to make sacrifices for the revolution.

Within this bundle of qualities, it was also important to control one’s emotions and be prudent to assess situations correctly and not simply to rush into them. “It is essential to keep revolutionary discipline during as well as after shifts; offenders will be persecuted by all available means”⁸² explains, for example, one statute regarding the Arbeiterwehr published by the District Workers’ Council in Steyr, a small industrial town in the province of Upper Austria. Excluded on principle or only permitted in a reduced and controlled disciplined form, emotions and emotionality fell to women in the bourgeois gender dichotomy. This pragmatic rationality was an important aspect of revolutionary masculinity and in line with ideas of correct political behaviour that this analysis develops in terms of bourgeois modernity.

The configuration of the female revolutionary produced possibilities for inclusions and exclusions. A true revolutionary worker, in the sense of the hegemonic discourses in the workers’ council, constituted a defensive and disciplined official of the Social Democratic labour movement. It did not include Communist activists, who allegedly lacked prudence and discipline. Delegitimised as unemployed and “hotheads”, they had not been long-time members of the SDAP – something that applied to many women. Communists also appeared as suspicious “foreign” elements if they were from Hungary or Slovenia.

Women found themselves excluded as well. During the strike movements, especially the mass strike in January 1918 and the hunger protests in the First World War, women seemed non-disciplined elements that were a thorn in the flesh of Social Democratic functionaries. The discrediting of the protesting masses was largely also based on questions of emotionality and the lack of rational action, failing to work along the paths of the existing institutions of the organised labour movement. The notion of the mob or mass of people was a threatening phenomenon of the time, inherently connected with the bourgeois fear of the less fortunate fuelled by the Russian revolutions of 1917 – and often-gendered female.⁸³ Nonetheless, militancy and stamina excluded women from the configuration of the revolutionary: what kind of woman would she be if she were a true revolutionary? This erasure persisted despite – as already elaborated – the fact that the nineteenth century was full of revolutionary women, and they had sought to proclaim their affiliation with the revolutionary movement as much as they fought for inclusion in the historiography.

Heroines of past revolutions as precedents

The women who fought in the First World War – and especially during the Russian civil war – as well as female Bolsheviks, shaped the configuration of the female revolutionary as an alternative collective cultural imagery that disrupted gender norms and evoked both fear and hope.⁸⁴ Both contemporary examples and revolutionaries from the past offered role models. Austrian Social Democratic women referred to the examples of female revolutionaries from the French revolution, the “barricade brides” of 1848, and the 1871 Paris Commune, using them to legitimise their own actions.⁸⁵ Marianne Pollak, a leading SDAP member, and the Austrian journalist and writer, Emma Adler, published portraits of women like Olympe de Gouges, an eighteenth century French political activist, and “Louise [Michel], the martial”, a prominent figure in the Paris Commune.⁸⁶ Their portrayals of the French revolutionaries showed high respect for these women. De Gouges, for example, emerged as a martyr, guillotined “in the fight for the sacred rights of women”.⁸⁷ The French revolutionaries were described as heroines: they were extraordinary, exceeding the standards of behaviour of bourgeois gender norms. The communarde Michel fought – gun in hand – at the Parisian barricades. Ten years after the Austrian Revolution, Pollak commented in a book review on a biography of Michel: “Her daring borders on madness. In the midst of battle, she discusses on the barricades, in the hail of bullets she saves a kitten at mortal danger”.⁸⁸ Similarly, Adler characterised de Gouges as an emotional figure: “There was something strange and extravagant about her existence …. She was a mixture of greatness and ridiculousness, of virtues and mistakes”.⁸⁹ What is remarkable about these characterisations is the emphasis on emotion: rationality, reason, and decency were central aspects of political behaviour that women needed to follow when entering the political arena.⁹⁰

The European revolutionary year of 1848 was widely alive in the public memory, as commemoration ceremonies by the SDAP even during the war show. In 1918, the writer and women’s right activist, Helene Scheu-Riesz, for example published a novel about the 1848 revolution that saw a second edition in 1919.⁹¹ Karoline von Perin was the woman best known for her revolutionary activities in 1848; but Pollak emphasised women workers – “the avant-garde of the Amazons”, another mystic model of women warriors: “The glove-makers, the white-seamstresses, the cleaners, the silk weavers rebelled … . The women had awakened to freedom”.⁹²

The connexion between freedom and political expression follows the tradition of the Enlightenment characterised by an unresolvable contradiction: the French revolution declared universal freedom by putting only the male citizen at its centre. Pollak drew a direct line from the women who fought in the October uprisings of 1848 to the worker’s movement and the SDAP of her day. In 1928, the use of militarised language would not have occurred by accident in view of Austria’s critical political situation: “The ridiculed and slandered women’s cohorts of the revolution have become the women’s corps that stand with the red flag”.⁹³

Elfriede Eisler-Friedländer: Model of Inclusion as a Female Revolutionary

The choice of violence as a means of political participation reached a pronounced level in the political writing and activities of Eisler-Friedländer. To put it succinctly, she used the configuration of the female revolutionary as a means of activism within the Communist Party. When Austrian workers conducted the January 1918 major general strike, Eisler-Friedländer was recovering from the birth of her child. She had been politically active since her school days – together with her brothers Gerhart and Hanns, drafted into the Habsburg army in, respectively, 1915 and 1916. The brothers became Communists as well: Hanns was a famous composer working with Bertolt Brecht, and Gerhart a central functionary of the Comintern. Elfriede Eisler married Paul Friedländer in July 1915, who she had met – together with Käthe Leichter⁹⁴ – in a circle around the psychoanalyst and youth researcher Siegfried Bernfeld.⁹⁵ This Viennese youth movement consisted mainly of Jewish middle school and university students who were concerned with education, school reform, and women’s politics as well as psychoanalysis and social issues.⁹⁶ But Eisler-Friedländer was also involved in feminist circles, as in a group debating “women’s issues” – Gruppe zum Studium der Frauenfragen – of the Academic Women’s Association – Akademischer Frauenverein. In April 1914, a few months before the war started, she led a discussion with Sylvia Pankhurst then in Vienna for a lecture on the British suffragette movement⁹⁷: British suffragettes had gained Europe-wide attention through their strategy of attacks and violent actions and can be seen as another example of female militancy.

During the war, Eisler-Friedländer had begun engaging in political activity, printing leaflets and organising secret meetings – impressed by the Russian revolutions and inspired by Friedrich Adler’s assassination of Stürgkh, which had caused a sensation throughout Europe. Eisler-Friedländer participated in the more violent moments of the Austrian revolution and advocated for revolutionary actions throughout the country. At a long session of the Vienna Workers’ Council on 17 June 1919 surrounding a planned coup attempt of the Communist Party, she affirmed that only brute force could suppress capitalism: “This is the only stand a revolutionary can take on communism”.⁹⁸

In the newspaper, Revolutionäre Proletarierin, Eisler-Friedländer called women to take part in violent struggles in favour of the revolution and the “victory of humanity”. Her articles published on a bi-weekly basis in the first half of 1919 had a softer and subtler tone than the words used in addressing the Viennese Workers’ Council, where she stated that women must accept violence regardless of the experiences of the atrocious war, “if the way to salvation is only through this hell”.⁹⁹ She underlined enforcing the establishment of a Council’s republic in Austria “without bloodshed”,¹⁰⁰ since the popular army – Volkswehr – would not be on the side of the bourgeois state, like in Germany – the state would therefore have no weapons and would not be able to defend itself. By March 1919, the situation in Berlin had escalated. After a general strike and protests including riots, the minister of defence and Social Democrat, Gustav Noske, issued an order to shoot rioters. The ensuing battles in Berlin saw 1,200 people killed.¹⁰¹ Given this recent news, the assertion of a non-violent revolution was probably not accidental in the Revolutionäre Proletarierin, which explicitly addressed women to mobilise into a political movement dominated by men – they constituted around 90% of the Communist Party.¹⁰²

Eisler-Friedländer was very vocal about her support for the communist idea of erecting a Councils republic in Austria and the violence that might come with it. Promoting political violence in the first half of 1919 was, of course, problematic, as Austrian readers were well aware of the events in Munich or Berlin. Nevertheless, she travelled the country during the first months of the Republic to advertise their newly founded party and mobilise – unemployed – women workers. She must have been a charismatic speaker, something emphasised by her legendary reputation as a “role model” for other communist women.¹⁰³ In the conservative Austrian press, she was depicted as a seductive and dangerous revolutionary woman, especially after the publication of her famous and somewhat scandalous book, Sexualethik des Kommunimus – Sexual Ethics of Communism – in which she argued for a “spiritual revolution” – seelischer Umsturz: reproductive equality between men and women and sexual progressiveness, including impunity for homosexuality.¹⁰⁴ With her divorce in the early 1920s widely covered in the media,¹⁰⁵ Eisler-Friedländer was one of the rare communist women that put feminist questions in the foreground. That might have been one reason why in early summer 1919, she found herself pushed to the sidelines of the party that she had co-founded. Already ignored in the February election of the Central Committee, she immigrated to Germany via Vienna in summer 1919.¹⁰⁶ There she quickly made a career in the German Communist Party [KPD]: in 1921, she was head of the Berlin party organisation and became a close confidante of Paul Levi, a German communist leader, and finally met Arkadij Maslow, her partner until his death in 1941. Both won election to the Central Committee of the KPD and were the “leaders” of the left wing.

She was one of those socialist activists who, in the immediate post-war period and early 1920s, tirelessly spoke out in favour of a revolution carried out by force, as in the so-called German Märzaktion of 1923.¹⁰⁷ Even in 1959, she wrote in an idealised manner about the sacrifices of Russian workers during the revolution. As Ruth Fischer, she belonged to a group of German former communists who wrote as dissidents against Stalinism,¹⁰⁸ whilst in contrast to her fellow dissidents Susanne Leonhard, Babette Gross, or Margarete Buber-Neumann, she had remained a Communist in her self-image.¹⁰⁹ It was something that in crass contrast saw her take her brothers to court in a spectacular case in the United States. Eisler-Friedländer is certainly one of the more fascinating figures of the Austrian revolution because of the contradictions in her life. She successfully participated in a revolutionary movement that connected violence and politics, assuming the model of a female revolutionary and promoting it in her writings.

Militancy and Pacifism in the Divided Society

In 1927, Vienna saw massive unrest following the murder of two people by Heimwehr combatants during an SDAP march and their subsequent outright acquittal in trial. The end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s were characterised by economic crisis and creeping authoritarianism throughout Austria. The cover illustrations mentioned earlier in this analysis portray two different strategies taken by socialist women in the face of these political tensions: that of the peaceful woman and female revolutionary. The picture of the peaceful women on the cover of Die Frau was not only an expression of women as pacifiers in politics, like Social Democratic women had advocated – it was also a sign of uneasy truce. The Social Democratic paramilitary organisation, Der Republikanische Schutzbund, and some functionaries – both men and women – started to change their positions in favour of defending democracy from its enemies by force of arms. This found basis on a domestic political situation characterised by violence. This violence emerged in the immediate post-war period,¹¹⁰ but it led to open conflicts with fatalities only in the late 1920s.¹¹¹ Rising National Socialism in Germany and Austria worried socialist women like Popp, now a member of Austria’s parliament and head of the International Social Democratic Women’s Committee. She spoke in and outside of Austria about the dangers of a possible seizure of power by Adolf Hitler, as she warned in Munich in July 1932: “Today you are still equal women, tomorrow you may be lawless maids, good enough to raise cannon fodder for the arms industry”.¹¹²

The Communist women’s monthly, Die Arbeiterin, already had an answer to the smouldering question of how to react in this polarised situation: armed resistance – also carried out by women – had become a necessity and had a role to play on both sides of the political spectrum.¹¹³ Duczynska, a member of the SDAP in the 1920s, engaged in a more vigorous anti-fascist activism and published unauthorised leaflets calling for resistance against Heimwehr marches in Wiener Neustadt.¹¹⁴ She agitated in the name of an opposition group, the Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, within social democracy for more militancy and collaboration with communists in anti-fascist committees – Antifaschistenkomitees. Duczynska later estimated the effect of the activities to be minimal: “we were too foreign and too young”.¹¹⁵ Because of her co-operation with mainly communist women like Trude Kurz, she was excluded from the party in 1929.¹¹⁶

After the self-dissolution of the Austrian parliament and installation of the Austro-fascist regime in 1933, many Social Democrats turned to communist underground organisations in the resistance, amongst them Duczynska, who was active until 1936 in a group that operated a mobile underground radio.¹¹⁷ Women also participated in the armed fight, as some of them would get to tell afterwards¹¹⁸ – but comrades and historians alike neglected them. Works that are more recent show that they had been involved on all levels of the 1934 civil war, including positions of leadership. And as they never were accepted officially in organisations, at least not in the Social Democrat Republikanischer Schutzbund – the communist Arbeiterwehren accepted women – those women who partook in the struggle in 1934 often did so independently and spontaneously.¹¹⁹ It is unknown whether women participated in training for paramilitary combat troops – either Social Democratic or Communist – or what role they might have played in the Arbeiterwehren in the early 1920s.¹²⁰ However, it is clear that some socialist women wanted to join fully in what turned from a class struggle for a better world to an antifascist fight.¹²¹

Concluding Remarks

During the interwar period, militancy was not only a contested marker of political affiliation but also a contested marker of gender. The question of violence was a core question regarding the participation of women in politics and society. There were different responses, but after the Great War and in the shadow of future violent conflicts, women activists were called to define their positions – whether they regarded pacifism as the most important “cultural mission” [Kulturaufgabe] of women, like Mayreder, who located social grievances and injustice in warfare – or whether they claimed militancy a necessity for a better world. In Central and Eastern Europe, revolutionary movements and persistent, often violent struggles characterised the post-First World War period. The context of the debate between pacifism and militancy was therefore altogether different from that in Western Europe. For all socialist activists, the question of war and violence shaped the question of how women could – or should – participate in the revolution.

Although many actors were involved in the key events in 1918 and 1933–1934, the situation of Austrian society completely changed in these 15 years – and with it the reasons to fight. In 1918, socialists fought either on the revolutionary or reformist paths for a better future. From 1927 onwards, they had to witness a gradual erosion of their achievements and democracy, as well as in the end, the emergence of a battle for political and personal survival.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Marietta Blau-Stipendium, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Research, Science, and Economy; the Johanna Dohnal-Stipendium, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Women’s Affairs; the Theodor Körner-Preis; and the Abschlussstipendium, University of Vienna. This publication is part of a project that has received funding from theEuropean Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 833691 - ZARAH).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Veronika Helfert

Veronika Helfert is a postdoctoral fellow in the research project (ERC Advanced Grant) ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century (Central European University Budapest/Vienna). She defended her PhD dissertation, “'Women, wake up!' A Women’s and Gender History of Revolution and Council’s Movement in Austria, 1916/17–1924”. From 2012 to 2016 she was an Assistant Professor (pre doc) in Modern History/Women’s and Gender History, and a postdoctoral Researcher (2018/19) at the University of Vienna, Austria. In addition, she curated the exhibition Political We Will be! 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage in Austria, at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in 2019.

Notes

1 “Wir glauben, daß der Weg, den die Diktatur bringt, ein Weg der Schmerzen und schweren Kämpfe ist. Aber er ist jedenfalls der Weg ins Freie ….”; Elfriede Friedländer and Karl Tomann, Ist Deutsch-Österreich reif zur Räterepublik? Reden von Karl Tomann und Elfriede Friedländer auf der 2. Reichskonferenz der Arbeiterräte Deutsch-Österreichs am 30. Juni 1919: Mit einer Einleitung (Vienna, 1919), 36. All translations from German into English are my own. Originals significant to my argumentation are in square brackets following the translations.

2 Mario Keßler, Ruth Fischer. Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895–1961) (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2013).

3 Cf. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris, 1997), 195–244.

4 Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, “Introduction,” in Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. idem. (Cambridge, 2011), 2.

5 Cf. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2013); Mark Jones, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 (Cambridge, 2016).

6 For example, Katharina von Hammerstein, Barbara Kosta, and Julie Shoults, eds., Women Writing War: From German Colonialism through World War I (Berlin, Boston, MA, 2018) have done so – partly – regarding the First World War.

7 The insights presented here devolve from Veronika Helfert, “‘Women, wake up! A women’s and gender history of Revolution and Councils’ Movement in Austria, 1916/17–1924” (PhD Dissertation, University of Vienna, 2018).

8 Jones, Founding Weimar; Robert Gerwarth, Die größte aller Revolutionen: November 1918 und der Aufbruch in eine neue Zeit (Munich, 2018); Julian Aulke, Räume der Revolution: Kulturelle Verräumlichung in Politisierungsprozessen während der Revolution 1918–1920 (Stuttgart, 2015); Benjamin Ziemann, “Germany 1914–1918: Total War as a Catalyst of Change,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford, 2011), 378–99.

9 Cf. Gerhard Botz, Gewalt in der Politik: Attentate, Zusammenstöße, Putschversuche, Unruhen in Österreich 1918 bis 1934, 2nd ed. (München, 1983), 25–28.

10 Cf. Angelique Leszczawski-Schwerk, “Zwischen Frieden und Krieg? Die internationale Friedensbewegung in den Diskursen und Visionen der polnischen Frauenrechtlerin Zofia (Emilia) Daszýnska-Golińska,” Ariadne, 66 (November 2014): 6–14; Christa Hämmerle, Heimat/Front: Geschlechtergeschichte/n des Ersten Weltkriegs in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2014); Libby Murphy, “Trespassing on the ‘Trench-Fighter’s Story’: (Re)-Imagining the Female Combatant of the First World War,” in Gender and Conflict since 1914, ed. Ana Carden-Coyne (Basingstoke, 2012), 55–68.

11 Cf. Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems (London, 1965), 150 passim.

12 As for newer research on the participation of Women in the 1934 civil war and the subsequent resistance, see Veronika Duma and Hanna Lichtenberger, “Geschlechterverhältnisse im Widerstand: Revolutionäre Sozialistinnen im Februar 1934,” in Abgesang der Demokratie: Der 12. Februar 1934 und der Weg in den Faschismus, ed. Michaela Maier (Vienna, 2014), 55–83; Florian Wenninger, “‘Die Zilli schießt!’ Frauen in den Februarkämpfen 1934,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 27, no. 3 (2016): 117–44; Matthew Stibbe, Olga Shnyrova, and Veronika Helfert, “Women and the Socialist Revolution, 1917–1923,” in Women Activists Between War and Peace. Europe, 1918–1923, ed. Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (London, NY, 2017), 123–72; Gabriella Hauch, “Sisters and Comrades: Women’s Movements and the ‘Austrian Revolution’: Gender in Insurrection, the Räte Movement, Parties and Parliament,” in Aftermaths of war: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923, ed. Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (Leiden, Boston, MA, 2011), 221–43.

13 Joan W. Scott, “Gender. A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in The Feminist History Reader, ed. Sue Morgan (London, 2006), 133–48; Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambrigde MA, 1994); Karen Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’: Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1976), 363–93; R.W. Connell, Masculinites, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA, 2005); R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–59; Martina Kessel, “Gefühle und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Emotionen und Sozialtheorie: Disziplinäre Ansätze, ed. Rainer Schützeichel (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 29–47; Christian Koller, “‘Es ist zum Heulen’: Emotionshistorische Zugänge zur Kulturgeschichte des Streikens,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft 36, no. 1 (2010): 66–92; Susan J. Matt, “Current Emotion Research in History. Or, Doing History from the Inside Out,” Emotion Review 3, no. 1 (2011): 117–24.

14 Cf. Keßler, Fischer, 45–46; Ruth Fischer, Autobiographical Notes,HOU [Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA] Fischer [Ruth Fischer Papers] B MS Ger 204 (2507).

15 Gerard Friedlander, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London: growing up in interesting times, HOU MS., 1997? 1, B 97m-21.

16 Cf. Ziemann, “Germany 1914–1918,” 387 ff.

17 Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (London, 2013), 5.

18 Cf. Ernst Hanisch, Der lange Schatten des Staates: Österreichische Gesellschaftsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Wien, 1994), 263–78.

19 Ruth Fischer, “Westentaschenrevolution in Wien: Die Erinnerungen Ruth Fischers über die Entstehung der Kommunistischen Partei Österreichs,” HEUTE. Die österreichische Wochenzeitschrift 4, no. 13 (1961): 4. Cf. Hans Hautmann, Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918–1924 (Vienna, Zurich, 1987); Hauch, “Sisters and Comrades”; Stibbe, Shnyrova, and Helfert, “Socialist Revolution,” 123–71; Peter Haumer, Julius Dickmann. “ … daß die Masse sich selbst begreifen lernt”: Politische Biografie und ausgewählte Schriften (Vienna, Berlin, 2015).

20 However, this new right explicitly excluded sex workers. Cf. Elisabeth Greif, “Zum Zusammenhang von Sexualsubjektivität, sexueller Devianz und Bürger*innenrechten,” in Regulierung des Intimen, ed. Ulrike Lembcke (Wiesbaden, 2017), 161–75.

21 “Das Wahlrecht zur konstituierenden Nationalversammlung,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (December 17, 1918), 1.

22 Cf. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA, London, 2016); Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Die eigenartige Größe der Beschränkung. Österreichs Revolution im mitteleuropäischen Spannungsfeld,” in … der Rest ist Österreich: Das Werden der Ersten Republik, ed. Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner, Vol. 1 (Vienna, 2008), 187–206; Hanisch, Der lange Schatten.

23 Botz, Gewalt in der Politik, 161.

24 Cf. Ibid., 161–225; Emmerich Tálos, “Das austrofaschistische Herrschaftssystem,” in Austrofaschismus: Politik – Ökonomie – Kultur 1933–1938, ed. Emmerich Tálos and Wolfgang Neugebauer, 5th ed. (Vienna, 2005), 394–417; Florian Wenninger and Lucile Dreidemy, eds., Das Dollfuß/Schuschnigg-Regime 1933–1938: Vermessung eines Forschungsfeldes (Vienna, 2013).

25 Cf. Stibbe, Shnyrova, and Helfert, “Socialist Revolution.”

26 The SDAP survived the First World War without a major split – unlike the German Social Democrats.

27 Andrea Griesebner, “Geschlecht als mehrfach relationale Kategorie: Methodologische Anmerkungen aus der Perspektive der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Geschlecht hat Methode: Ansätze und Perspektiven in der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte. 9. Schweizerische Historikerinnentagung, 13. und 14. Februar 1988 in Bern, ed. Veronika Aegerter, Nicole Graf, Natalie Imboden et al. (Zurich, 1999), 129–38; Ina Kerner, “Questions of intersectionality: Reflections on the current debate in German gender studies,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, no. 2 (2012): 203–18; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139–67; bell hooks, “Feminism and Militarism: A Comment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 23, no. ¾ (1995): 58–64.

28 Cf. Hauch, “Sisters and Comrades.”

29 Cf. Karen Garner, “Global Visions: The Women’s Disarmament Committee (1931–1939) and the International Politics of Disarmament in the 1930s,” in Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, ed. Myriam Everard and Francisca de Haan (Leiden, Boston, MA, 2017), 128–59.

30 Cf. Shelley E. Rose, “Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and the Gender of German Pacifism,” in Women Writing War, ed. von Hammerstein, Kosta, and Shoults, 143–61.

31 Cf. Christa Hämmerle, “‘ … dort wurden wir dressiert und sekiert und geschlagen ….’ Vom Drill, dem Disziplinarstrafrecht und Soldatenmisshandlungen im Heer (1868 bis 1914),” in Glanz – Gewalt – Gehorsam: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918), ed. Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle, and Martin Scheutz (Essen, 2011), 31–54.

32 Cf. Hausen, “‘Geschlechtscharaktere’”; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (NY, London, 1995), 118–20, 365–68.

33 Cf. Scott, “Gender” offers one way in which politics is deeply gendered.

34 Cf. Laurie R. Cohen, “Courage, Conflict and Activism: Transnational Feminist Peace Movements, 1900 to the Present Day’,” in Gender and Conflict, ed. Carden-Coyne, 69–82.

35 Cf. Leszczawski-Schwerk, “Zwischen Frieden und Krieg?” 6–14; Susan Zimmermann, “Die österreichische Frauen-Friedensbewegung vor und im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Widerstand gegen Krieg und Militarismus in Österreich und Anderswo, ed. Forum Alternativ (Vienna, 1982), 88–96.

36 Zimmermann, “Frauen-Friedensbewegung,” 88.

37 “Die internationalen Friedenskundgebungen der Frauen,” Dokumente der Frauen 1, no. 6 (June 1, 1899): 162–63.

38 Cf. Corinna Oesch, Yella Hertzka (1873–1948): Vernetzungen und Handlungsräume in der österreichischen und internationalen Frauenbewegung (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bolzano, 2014), 100–48.

39 “Die Friedensaktion der sozialistischen Frauen muss Vorläuferin der allgemeinen Massenbewegung für das Ende des Brudermordes sein und einen wichtigen Schritt vorwärts bedeuten zum Wiederaufbau der einen grossen Arbeiterinternationale”. Draft statement of the Extraordinary Conference of Socialist Women, 1915, VGA [Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Social Democratic Party Archive, Vienna] M (Folder) 109/3, 1. Weltkrieg. Div. Sozialdem. Stellungnahmen.

40 Adelheid Popp, Der Weg zur Höhe: die sozialdemokratische Frauenbewegung Österreichs; ihr Aufbau, ihre Entwicklung und ihr Aufstieg, 2nd ed. (Vienna 1930), 146.

41 Cf. Rose, “Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder!.”

42 Cf. Birgitta Bader-Zaar, “‘ … der Forderung nach dem Frauenwahlrecht erhöhte Kraft und Lebendigkeit zu verleihen’: Der Internationale Frauentag in der Habsburgermonarchie 1911–1918,” in Frauentag!: Erfindung und Karriere einer Tradition, ed. Heidi Niederkofler et al. (Vienna, 2011), 37–59.

43 Regina Köpl, “Popp, Adelheid (1869–1939),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th centuries, ed. Francisa de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi (Budapest, 2006), 447–49.

44 “Eine neue Zeit,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (January 1, 1918), 1.

45 “Zum Frauentag 1918,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (March 12, 1918), 2.

46 Cf. Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin and Kerstin Wolff, “Unterschiedliche Ziele – aber ein Ziel! Die friedenspolitischen Netwerkerinnen Anita Augspurg, Lida Gustava Heymann und Helene Stöcker,” Ariadne (November 2014): 16-17.

47 Cf. Ines Rebhan-Glück, “Die Idee von der ‘friedfertigen Frau’,” Der erste Weltkrieg und das Ende der Habsburgermonarchie: http://ww1.habsburger.net/de/kapitel/die-idee-von-der-friedfertigen-frau.

48 Cf. Gabriela Czarnowski and Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, “Geschlechterdualismen in der Wohlfahrtspflege: ‘Soziale Mütterlichkeit’ zwischen Professionalisierug und Medikalisierung, Deutschland 1890–1930,” L'Homme Z.F.G. 5, no. 2 (1994): 121–40.

49 Cf. Christa Hämmerle, “‘Mentally broken, physically a wreck ….’: Violence in War Accounts of Nurses in Austro-Hungarian Service,” in Gender and the First World War, ed. Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger, and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (Basingstoke, 2014), 89–107.

50 Cf. Hauch, “Sisters and Comrades.”

51 Rosa Mayreder, “Geschlecht und Sozialpolitik,” in Zivilisation und Geschlecht: Ein Lesebuch, ed. Eva Geber (Vienna, 2010), 128–53.

52 Simone de Beauvoir argued similarly 30 years later. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe (Paris, 1949).

53 Mayreder, “Geschlecht und Sozialpolitik,” 153.

54 Ulrike Tanzer [Judith Beniston, translator], “Feminism and Pacifism: Rosa Mayreder’s Writings against War,” Cultures at War: Austria-Hungary 1914–1918, Austrian Studies 21 (2013): 59–60.

55 Cf. Ingrid Sharp, “‘A foolish dream of sisterhood’: Anti-Pacifist Debates in the German Women’s Movement, 1914–1919,” in Gender and the First World War, ed. Hämmerle, Überegger, and Bader-Zaar, 195–213.

56 Ibid., 199.

57 Ilona (Helene) Polanyi, born Duczynska, Resume [machine and personally signed], 4 January 1971, three pages, Pickering, Ontario, 1, VGA NL ID [Ilona Duczynska Papers], M 18.

58 Cf. Hautmann, Geschichte der Rätebewegung, 137–52.

59 Cf. Veronika Helfert, “Eine demokratische Bolschewikin: Ilona Duczynska Polanyi (1897–1978),” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 26, no. 2 (2015): 166–89.

60 Cf. Andreas Weigl, Mangel, Hunger, Tod: Die Wiener Bevölkerung und die Folgen des Ersten Weltkriegs (Vienna, 2014); Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004).

61 Cf. Veronika Helfert, “‘Unter Anführung eines 13jährigen Mädchens’: Gewalt und Geschlecht in unorganisierten Protestformen in Wien während des Ersten Weltkrieges,” Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 13, no. II (2014): 66–82; Healy, Vienna; Hautmann, Geschichte der Rätebewegung; Axel Weipert, “Widerstand im Zentrum der Macht: Antikriegsaktionen in Berlin und Wien im Vergleich,” in “Maschine zur Brutalisierung der Welt:” Der Erste Weltkrieg – Deutungen und Haltungen 1914 bis heute, ed. Axel Weipert, Salvador Oberhaus, Detlef Nakath, and Bernd Hütter (Münster, 2017), 200–26.

62 “Eine neue Zeit,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (January 1, 1918), 1.

63 Cf. Stenographic Minutes, Reich Conference of Workers’ Councils of German Austria, Third Session, 2 July 1919, 152-53, VGA Pav34 [Party Archive before 1934] M 22/II Reichskonferenz der Arbeiterräte 30 January–3 July 1919.

64 Cf. Helfert, “Eine demokratische Bolschewikin.”

65 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (NY, 1963).

66 Ilona Duczynska, “Zum Zerfall der K.P.U.”, Unser Weg no. 4/5 (1922): 100.

67 Cf. Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge, 1997), 191–92.

68 Cf. Interview of Isabella Ackerl with Ilona Duczynska (30 December 1976–31 January 1977), Part 2, Minute 18, ORF-Archiv [Archive of the National Radio and Television Broadcasting Company, Vienna].

69 Cf. Louis S. Bibbings, “Men Refusing to be Violent: Manliness and Military Conscientious Objection, 1914 to the Present Day,” in Gender and Conflict, ed. Carden-Coyne, 41–54.

70 Cf. amongst others Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity.”

71 Cf. Christa Hämmerle, “Zur Relevanz des Connell’schen Konzepts hegemonialer Männlichkeit für Militär und Männlichkeit/en in der Habsburgermonarchie (1868–1914/18),” in Männer, Macht, Körper: Hegemoniale Männlichkeiten vom Mittelalter bis heute, ed. Martin Dinges (Frankfurt am Main, NY, 2005), 103–21.

72 Cf. Hanna Hacker, Gewalt ist: keine Frau: Der Akteurin oder eine Geschichte der Transgressionen (Königstein am Taunus, 1998), 18–20.

73 Gabriella Hauch, “Gender in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft: Von der Nützlichkeit einer Kategorie und ihrer nachhaltigen Wirkung,” in Festschrift für Roman Sandgruber zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Michael Pammer (Stuttgart, 2007), 491–501.

74 Cf. Ute Frevert, “Männer (T)Räume: Die allgemeine Wehrpflicht und ihre geschlechtergeschichtlichen Implikationen,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 11, no. 3 (2000): 111–23; Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, eds., Heimat-Front: Militär und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Frankfurt am Main, NY, 2002); Ute Frevert, “Soldaten, Staatsbürger: Überlegungen zur historischen Konstruktion von Männlichkeit,” in Männergeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, ed. Thomas Kühne (Frankfurt am Main, NY, 1996), 69–87; Wolfgang Schmale, Geschichte der Männlichkeit in Europa (1450–2000) (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2003).

75 Cf. Hämmerle, “Zur Relevanz.”

76 Cf. Ibid.

77 Cf. Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000).

78 Otto Bauer, Die Österreichische Revolution (Vienna, 1923); Julius Deutsch, Aus Österreichs Revolution: Militärpolitische Erinnerungen (Vienna, 1921).

79 Deutsch, Aus Österreichs Revolution, 54.

80 Henriette Roland-Holst, Generalstreik und Sozialdemokratie: Mit einem Vorwort von Karl Kautsky, 2nd and Revised Edition (Dresden, 1906), 116.

81 Um Friede, Freiheit und Recht! Der Jännerausstand des innerösterreichischen Proletariats (Vienna, 1918), 3.

82 Draft, Organisation Statute for Workers’ Militia, District Workers’ Council Steyr (20 September 1920), 2, VGA Pav34, M 27 (1).

83 Cf. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 118–20.

84 Cf. Murphy, “Trespassing.”

85 Cf. Marianne Pollak, “Barrikadenbräute,” Arbeiterzeitung (March 11, 1928), 18.

86 Marianne Pollak, “Die Ballade von der roten Jungfrau: Ein neues Buch über Louise Michel,” Arbeiterzeitung (April 1, 1928), 17–18.

87 Emma Adler, “Olympe de Gouges,” in Die berühmten Frauen der französischen Revolution: 1789–1795: Mit 9 Porträts, ed. idem. (Vienna, 1906), 182–97.

88 Pollak, “Die Ballade.”

89 Adler, “Olympe de Gouges.”

90 Cf. W. Lembcke and Florian Weber, “Emotion und Revolution. Spurenlese zu einer Theorie der affektiven Grundlagen politischer Ordnungen,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 39, no. 2 (2010): 171–86; Alexia Bumbaris, “Das Aufbrechen hegemonialer Raumordnungen? Lesarten städtischen Raumes und der Demonstrationszug zum Wiener Frauentag 1911,” Ariadne 61 (2012): 14–21.

91 Cf. Helene Scheu-Riesz, Der Revolutionär: eine Lebensgeschichte (Vienna, 1918).

92 Pollak, “Barrikadenbräute.”

93 Ibid.

94 Cf. Jill Lewis, “Mobilising Working Women in Red Vienna: Käthe Leichter and the Vienna Arbeiterkammer,” L’Homme Z.F.G. 26, no. 2 (2015): 151–59.

95 Cf. Keßler, Fischer, 36-37.

96 Cf. Vgl. Gabriella Hauch, “Käthe Leichter (geb. Pick),” in Wir sind die ersten, die es wagen: Biographien deutschsprachiger Wissenschafterinnen, Forscherinnen, intellektueller Frauen, ed. Bundesministerium für Unterricht und Kunst (Vienna, 1993), 73–76; Karl Fallend, Sonderlinge, Träumer, Sensitive: Psychoanalyse auf dem Weg zur Institution und Profession: Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung und biographische Studien (Vienna, 1995), 271–90.

97 Cf. Karl Fallend, “Von der Jugendbewegung zur Psychoanalyse,” in Siegfried Bernfeld oder Die Grenzen der Psychoanalyse: Materialien zu Leben und Werk, ed. Karl Fallend and Johannes Reichmayr (Basel, 1992), 58.

98 Stenographic minutes of the district conference of the Vienna Workers’ Council, 17 June 1919, 139 sheet, 116, VGA Pav34, M 21A Kreisarbeiterrat Wien 1919 ff (1 und 2) Kreiskonferenz des Wiener Arbeiterrates.

99 “Klassenkampf,” Die revolutionäre Proletarierin (February 22, 1919), 2.

100 “Die Revolution in Deutschland,” Die revolutionäre Proletarierin (March 15, 1919), 1.

101 Cf. Jones, Founding Weimar, 251–85.

102 Cf. Paul Pasteur, Femmes dans le mouvement ouvrier autrichien 1918–1934, Vol. 2 (PhD Dissertation, Université de Rouen, 1986), 270–304.

103 Keßler, Fischer, 67.

104 Elfriede Friedländer, Sexualethik des Kommunismus: Eine prinzipielle Studie (Vienna, 1920), 48.

105 Cf. for example, “Aus dem Gerichtssaale,” Linzer Volksblatt (March 19, 1922), 5.

106 “Wahl des Vorstandes (Zentralkomitee),” in Kommunistischen Partei Deutschösterreichs, Der erste Parteitag der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschösterreichs (Vienna, 1919), 43. Cf. Friedlander, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, 1 ff.

107 Stibbe, Shnyrova, and Helfert, “Socialist Revolution,” 144–52.

108 “Die russische Konterrevolution 1917–1921,” Paris, 12 February 1959, 13, HOU Fischer MS Ger 204, M. 2684.

109 Cf. Sabine Hering, “Das Exil als Falle. Vier Frauen auf der Flucht vor Hitler und Stalin,” Ariadne 32 (November 1997), 54–59.

110 There were occasions of right-wing violence after the war, too, like an attack on the Christian Social politician and twice chancellor of the First Republic, Ignaz Seipel, or the murder of the author Hugo Bettauer. Symbolic actions, like marches, however, were the dominant form; they intended to instil and spread fear. Cf. Klaus Weinhauer and Jörg Requate, “Terrorismus als Kommunikationsprozess: Eskalation und Deeskalation politischer Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert,” in Gewalt ohne Ausweg? Terrorismus als Kommunikationsprozess in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Klaus Weinhauer and Jörg Requate (Frankfurt am Main, NY, 2013), 24.

111 Robert Gerwarth, “‘Krieg im Frieden’: Der ‘weiße Terror’ in den Nachfolgestaaten des Habsburgerreiches,” in Gewalt ohne Ausweg? ed. Weinhauer and Requate, 123–36.

112 Poster with the announcement of a women’s rally of the Social Democratic Association [Sozialdemokratischen Verein München], 1 July 1931, Kreisky [Stiftung Bruno Kreisky Archiv, Vienna] 1000/11.

113 “Unsere proletarische Sanitätskolonne,” Die Arbeiterin 5, no. 7 (July 1928): 7–8.

114 Leaflet, “Unser Flugblatt nach d. 15. Juli,” VGA NL ID, Box 4, M “Gemischt, klassifiziert.”

115 Magrit Frischauer, “Auseinandersetzungen und Kontakte zwischen Sozialdemokraten und Kommunisten vom 15. Juli 1927 bis zum 12. Februar 1934” (PhD Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1976), 28.

116 Cf. Helfert, “Die demokratische Bolschewikin.”

117 Cf. Barbara Striker, “This is the Voice of Radio Schutzbund!,” in Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, ed. Kenneth McRobbie and Kari Polanyi-Levitt, 2nd ed. (Montréal, 2006), 272–74.

118 See for example, the recent biographies of the Social Democrat Rosa Jochmann and the Communist Tilly Spiegel, who were active resistance fighters: Veronika Duma, Rosa Jochmann: politische Akteurin und Zeitzeugin (Vienna, 2019), 143–201; Ina Markova, Tilly Spiegel: Eine politische Biografie (Vienna, Hamburg, 2019), 48–80.

119 Cf. Wenninger, “Die Zilli schießt!.”

120 Cf. Helfert, “Women, wake up!,” 237.

121 Many Austrian women went to fight in Spain, after the lost civil war in Austria. In the Spanish civil war, women on the Republican side not only participated in paramedical units, but on all levels. Vera Bianchi, “Geschlechterverhältnisse im Spanischen Bürger*innenkrieg: Milicianas (Milizionärinnen) zwischen Heroisierung und Schützengraben,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 27, no. 3 (2016): 145–59; Renée Lugschitz, “Pressebüro und Zensur im Spanischen Bürger*innenkrieg: Reporterinnen zwischen Journalismus, Propaganda und Überwachung,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 27, no. 3 (2016): 160–71.