ECONOMICS Transmit Feminist Thought across National Boundaries in the
Years before World War I?
__________________________
Introduction
1. For a detailed account of this ICW conference, see May Ogilvie Gordon, The International Council of Women and the Meetings of the International Congress of Women in Berlin, 1904 (n.p.: International Council of Women, 1904). Gilman also wrote an account of the event; see "The Woman's Congress of 1899," The Arena, Vol. 22 (July-September 1899), 342-61.
Back to Text
2. Aletta Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace, translated by Annie Wright, edited by Harriet Feinberg (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), 126.
Back to Text
3. Die economische toestand der vrouw: Een studie over de economische verhouding tusschen mannen en vrouwen als un factor in de sociale evolutie (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1900).
Back to Text
4. An earlier version of this project was presented at The Sixth International Charlotte Perkins Gilman conference at the Radcliffe Institute in June 1915.
Back to Text
5. Carl Degler, "Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman," Notable American Women, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:39-42. [LINK]
Back to Text
6. In Dutch, "Een merkwaardig boek," Belang en recht, 3:69 (August 14, 1900), 168-69, and 3:70 (September 1, 1900), 177-78.
Back to Text
7. Jacobs, Memories, p. 59.
Back to Text
8. Considerable information about all three and the context in which they were active is available in studies of the IAW, the IWSA, and other pre-World War I international feminist efforts. The official report of the 1899 IAW conference and the report of 1904 Berlin conference are in the WASI data base. On Jacobs (1864-1929), see especially Memories. Most Jacobs research including Mineke Bosch's masterful biography is available only in Dutch. See Mineke Bosch, Een onwrikbaar geloof in rechtvaardigheid: [An Unshakable Belief in Justice] Aletta Jacobs, 1854-1919 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2005). English-language articles include Harriet Feinberg, "A Pioneering Dutch Feminist Views Egypt: Aletta Jacobs's Travel Letters," Feminist Issues, 10:2 (Fall 1990), 67-78. Marie Stritt (1855-1928) was the head of the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein (Union of German Women's Associations). She contributed an article "Die Mutter als Staatsbürgerin" (The mother as citizen) to the wide-ranging European anthology, Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für de Probleme des Weibes als Mutter, ed., Adele Schreiber (Munich: A. Langen, 1912), pp. 688-703. On Schwimmer (1877-1948), see Beth Wenger, "Radical Politics in a Reactionary Age: The Unmaking of Rosika Schwimmer, 1914-1930," Journal of Women's History, 2:3 (Fall 1990), 66-99 and the entry about Schwimmer in Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006). See also Dagmar Wernitznig, "Rosa Manus, Rosika Schwimmer and the Struggle about Establishing an International Womens Archive," in Myriam Everard and Francisca de Haan, eds., Rosa Manus (1881-1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Dutch Jewish Feminist (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
Back to Text
9. On their friendship and subsequent estrangement, see Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloosterman, eds., Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902-1942 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), esp. 140-41, 160.
Back to Text
10. Jacobs and Carrie Chapman Catt went on a three-week lecture tour within the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1906, and then a much longer tour through Africa and Asia in 1911-12. During that trip Jacobs spoke to Boer and to British women in South Africa and to Dutch women in the Dutch East Indies about organizing for suffrage. Jacobs, Memories, 151-63 and Harriet Feinberg, "How Did Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs Interpret and Cope with Deep Differences among Women during Their 1911-12 Journey through Africa and Asia?" [LINK] WASM document project, March 2015. Schwimmer traveled to the United States in fall 1914 and, with British suffragist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and by herself, gave fiery speeches aiming to enlist U.S. women in the effort to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to initiate mediation among European leaders.
Back to Text
11. Information about Vernon Lee/Violet Paget research and conferences, including a conference about her salon, can be found at https://thesibylblog.com/, the blog of the Vernon Lee Society.
Back to Text
12. North American Review, Vol. 175 (July 1902), 71-90 and Gospels of Anarchy, and other contemporary studies (London: T.F. Unwin, 1908). The essay was republished separately in its Italian translation in 1912 as "Il parassitismo della donna," Citta de Castello, S. Lapi. Carolina Pironti's "Nota al proemio" is on pages 6-7.
Back to Text
13. Christa Zorn analyzes the article in Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 82-87.
Back to Text
14. Patricia Pulham, "A Transatlantic Alliance: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vernon Lee," in Feminist Forerunners: new womanism and feminism in the early twentieth century, ed. Ann Heilmann (Chicago: Pandora, 2003), 34-43.
Back to Text
15. A list of her published and unpublished writings, and where they can be found is at http://www.internetculturale.it/. She edited letters from two of her father's companions in the struggle and wrote about a notorious prison where he was held. The Pironti family archive is in Avellino, Italy.
Back to Text
16. "'La scuola e la societa' di John Dewey," Rivista Pedagogica 5 (1911), 193-203. Pironti met Montessori at a conference in 1904; when they chatted, Montessori recommended Gilman's book and was very surprised to learn that she was speaking with the translator. The typed text of Pironti's presentation on the 'scuoli navi' is in the Avellino archive. Thanks to Sole Alba Zollo and Gabriella de Martino for their assistance in obtaining documents and information.
Almost no information about Carolina Pironti is available in English. In Italian, there is Paola Picciocchi, "Carolina Pironti, un intelletualle 'conservatrice,'" L'Irpina illustrate, 2(19) 2205, 74-81, and a June 2016 unpublished, untitled biographical article by Aurelio Pironti, drawn from a range of sources, which he has kindly shared with me.
Back to Text
17. Pironti, "Nota al proemio."
Back to Text
18. Thanks to Japanese scholars Megumi Yamauchi and Rui Kohiyama for sharing their research on this matter. Naruse studied in Massachusetts, at Andover Newton Theological School and Clark University. Ukita graduated from Doshisha College, spent two years at Yale, and returned to Japan to become professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. Subsequently, Take Otawa taught at the high school attached to Japan Women's College and in 1928 attended the Pan-American International Womens Conference in Hawaii as one of the representatives of Japan. Junko Oyama became an English teacher and was on the staff of the magazine Life and Light published by Naruse and Ukita. Sadako Koide did a little translation but was otherwise, so far as is known, a homemaker.
Back to Text
19. Coit and his wife, suffrage leader Adela Stanton Coit, hosted Gilman, whom they had long admired, at their home during her 1905 speaking tour of England. Janice J. Kirkland, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Coits of London, and Suffrage," Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society newsletter, Vol. xii, No. 1 (Spring 2002), 4-5; accessible online at http://web.cortland.edu/gilman/newsletters/2002.pdf.
Back to Text
20. Biographical information about Marya Podlewska remains elusive. Polish women interested in social reform were already aware of Gilman's Women and Economics through Marie Stritt's 1903 German translation. That translation was mentioned in such publications as Maria Wiśniewska (ed.), Głos kobiet w kwestyi kobiecej [A Woman's Voice in the Women's Question] (Nakł. Stow. Pomocy Naukowej dla Polek imienia J. I. Kraszewskiego: Krakow, 1903). Podlewska's translation [Kobiety a stan ekonomiczny] was mentioned in the Warsaw-based newspaper Glos Warszawski [The Warsovian Voice] R. 2, 1909, nr 263 and appeared in the index of publications from the publishing house Biblioteka Dzieł Wyborowych for the year 1909. It was also mentioned in a 1930 women's encyclopedia, Cecylja Walewska, Walce o równe prawa. Nasze Bojownice. Kobieta Współczesna (Warszawa, 1930) and a publication from the Political Club of Progressive Women by Sylwja Bujak-Boguska (ed.), Na straży praw kobiety : pamiętnik Klubu Politycznego Kobiet Postępowych, 1919-1930 (Zakład Drukarski Jan Ulasiewicz i Syn: Warsawa, 1930). Thanks to Natalie Cornett for calling my attention to this information. However, these mentions do not throw light on the circumstances of the translation, which for now remain mysterious. The publisher's records from that era no longer exist.
It is possible that "Marya Podlewska" is a pseudonym, as several scholars have at my request searched Polish-language sources to no avail. Or she may be known under a married name.
Back to Text
21. For example, John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women appeared in several translations. Thanks to Olga Shnyrova for providing context for these two translations.
Back to Text
22. Kamenskii (1843-1913) was an engineer, mechanic, and inventor as well as translator. In 1891-92 he wrote six short biographies of noted Americans and Britons (Abraham Lincoln, James Watt, Thomas Edison and Samuel Morse, Daniel Defoe, W.H. Gladstone and Robert Owen) for a Russian compendium of lives of extraordinary people. His translations before 1902 include Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1894) and A Tale of Two Cities (1895), Henry Gibbons's The Industrial History of England, and Edward Channing's A History of the United States (1897). Interestingly, Kamenskii was also one of a series of translators into Russian of the Declaration of Independence. Mamurovskii, in contrast, has only one other translation listed in Russian sources, and it is in 1906: Herbert Samuel's Liberalism. Thanks to Jeylan Mammadova for consulting Russian biographical and bibliographical sources.
Back to Text
23. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; originally published, 1935), p. 272; also her letter quoted in A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897-1900, Mary A. Hill, ed. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 315: "And think of this--A Russian gent, Mr. Andrew Kamensky M.E. writes to inform me that he has translated my 'epoch making book'--to be published in Dec.--and will I kindly send on some autobiographical data for the preface!!"
Back to Text
24. Gilman stayed at Jacobs's home during her visit. Amsterdam was one stop on her 1905 European speaking tour, followed by travel to several cities in Germany.
Back to Text
25. These letters, spanning the years 1902-1905, show Gilman's personal connection with Jacobs. Gilman is open in sharing her health struggles with this woman physician she admires, asks for advice about her plans to tour as a paid lecturer promoting her works, and expresses a tender concern in her 1905 note of condolence to Jacobs on the death of her husband.
Back to Text
26. Translations are mine with the collaboration of Claire Whitner. For each article Kramers carefully indicates whether it appeared before or after the lecture, and what the political leanings of the publication were. She is very clear and thorough. She adds a personal note: "Dear Mrs. Gilman at last I send you the promised accounts. I hope you will not be angry at me, but I had so much else to do. 9 May 1905." Her report is in the Gilman archive in file #152, #28-35. Martina Kramers was an important and valued figure in Dutch and international feminism until in 1913 her personal life precipitated attacks by the leadership and she was shunted aside. Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship, 30-31, 125-29.
Back to Text