labrys, études féministes

numéro 1-2, juillet/août 2002

Sexuality And Politics In The early Twentieth Century:

The Case Of The International Women's Movement*

Leila J.Rupp,

Abstract

As the barriers between women's and men's public worlds began to break down in the decades on either side of 1900 and young women in Chicago and Harlem, London and Copenhagen, laid assertive new claims to their own sexuality, increasingly rigid definitions of heterosexuality and homosexuality cast more and more suspicion on a whole range of women's relationships and forms of organizing. 

Women might step over the line of respectable heterosexuality by cavorting with men outside of marriage, but women without men-whether "spinsters" or women in same-sex couples-came more frequently to earn the label "deviant." And, as I argue here, these moves had consequences for the politics of women's single-sex organizing.

key-words:

heterosexuality ,homosexuality ,Women´s International Mouvement, sexuality and politics.

In her autobiography, Lena Madesin Phillips, U.S. founder of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, who lived for thirty-three years with a woman to whom she "lost her heart," reported that an Austrian colleague had once asked her about the large number of unmarried women in the organization. "You women seem quite content to have meetings without men present; to be happy though unmarried.... American women told us they had a splendid banquet where women had a fine meal, some speeches, and no men," the Austrian woman remarked with evident astonishment. [1]

Within the same international women's movement circles, Brazilian International Alliance of Women member Bertha Lutz expressed her disgust at the lobbying tactics of Inter-American Commission of Women head Doris Stevens, an American "emancipated woman" who worked for an international equal rights treaty by seeking the support of male government representatives to the Pan American Union. Lutz called Stevens a "nymphomaniac" and accused her of "paying the Mexican delegates in kisses ... [and] luring the Haitians with a French secretary she has." [2]

These contrasting observations-about a surprisingly happy female world and a disturbingly (hetero) sexual one-alert us to some of the tensions that simmered beneath the seemingly placid surface of early-twentieth-century international women's organizations. In the industrialized societies of the Euroamerican arena, the first decades of the century marked a critical transition, sometimes graced with the label of "sexual revolution," from a world of privatized to a world of more public and commercialized sexuality. As the barriers between women's and men's public worlds began to break down in the decades on either side of 1900 and young women in Chicago and Harlem, London and Copenhagen, laid assertive new claims to their own sexuality, increasingly rigid definitions of heterosexuality and homosexuality cast more and more suspicion on a whole range of women's relationships and forms of organizing.[3]

Women might step over the line of respectable heterosexuality by cavorting with men outside of marriage, but women without men-whether "spinsters" or women in same-sex couples-came more frequently to earn the label "deviant." And, as I argue here, these moves had consequences for the politics of women's single-sex organizing.

Sexual respectability was not a new concern in the women's movement of the early twentieth century-one has only to think of the scandals that surrounded Mary Wollstonecraft or Victoria Woodhull-but heightened attention to the deviant lesbian subject did transform the context in which women gathered in single-sex organizations. Before the categorization of the "female invert" or "lesbian" at the end of the nineteenth century, women in the women's movement could more easily form intense and passionate relationships as "romantic friends" or choose to live out their lives as single women without a diagnosis of abnormality. [4] Scholarship has long emphasized the importance of supportive relationships among women for the strength of the women’s movement. [5] Although recent work has opened our eyes to the ease with which romantic friends in the nineteenth century and earlier could transgress what the counsel for the defense in the famous case of Miss Woods and Miss Pirie against Dame Helen Cumming Gordon called "ordinary female friendship," there is no question that coupled women had to trod ever more carefully as time wore on. [6]

The organizations making up the international women's movement provide a particularly interesting case study of such tensions, because these bodies came to life as shifts in the conceptualization of women's relationships proceeded. They also brought together women from a variety of cultures, if primarily middle- and upper-class women of European origin from the countries of Western Europe and North America. As we shall see, not only affectional but generational, class, and national differences-and their complex interplay in the lives of women-shaped responses to the practice of single-sex organizing.

My research concentrates on the three major transnational women's groups-the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women, and  the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom-and the more narrowly focused bodies with which they interacted on a regular basis in the years between the emergence of international organizing in the 1880s and the conclusion of the Second World War, which marked the end of the first wave of the international women's movement and the lull before the swell of the second. In this period all three organizations remained heavily elite and Euroamerican in composition and leadership. Not only did Europe and what have been called the "neo-Europes" contribute all but one of the national sections until 1923 but women from the United States, Great Britain, and Western and Northern Europe also served as the founders and leaders. This pattern perpetuated itself through the choice of official languages-English, French, and German-and the location of congresses primarily in Europe, with a  few excursions to North America. [7] Although women from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa increasingly found their voices within the international organizations after the First World War undermined European dominance of the world system, their relative silence in the recorded debate about sexuality is testimony to their marginality in the organizational friendship circles. [8]

The International Council of Women (ICW), the most vaguely defined group, came together in 1888 and welcomed all women's organizations with whatever purposes, bringing in a huge number of members but forestalling commitment to controversial goals.[9]

The International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), later known as the International Alliance of Women (IAW), split off from the ICW in 1904 in order to take a position in favor of suffrage and remained a strongly feminist-identified body, even after the increasing extension of the vote to women in the years after the First World War undermined the group's  original rationale. [10] The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), founded in 1915 by IWSA members who insisted on meeting  despite wartime hostilities, consistently took quite radical positions on a range of issues. [11] These three groups, in conjunction with a wide array of bodies organized on a regional basis, or comprised of particular constituencies of women, or devoted to single issues, formed coalitions in the years between the wars to coordinate international collective action, especially lobbying at the League of Nations.

The transnational women's groups focused on issues of women's rights, peace, and women's work, paying minimal attention to questions of sexuality, with the exception of what they called "the traffic in women." The dialogue about sexuality and politics, then, must be ferreted out of the sources, read from assumptions and associations. As I explored discussions of difference between women and men, arguments about the appropriateness of single-sex organizing, and correspondence about personal relationships, I began to perceive tensions within the international organizations and patterns linking women’s personal lives and cultural contexts to their political choices.

Same-sex love, Homosociality and Separatism

Within the international women's organizations, some women coupled with women in what seem to have been "lesbian" relationships or as "romantic friends," sometimes in relationships in which one woman served as a kind of caretaker for the other. Some women never formed intimate relationships with either women or men. None of these women can be easily categorized, but in one way or another all made their lives with other women.

We have no direct evidence that any of the women involved in the international women's movement identified as lesbians, but the concept of lesbianism was not unknown in their intellectual world. As early as 1904, in a speech to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the pioneering German homosexual rights group, Anna Ruhling associated lesbians ("Uranian women" in the terminology of the time) with the international women's movement, asserting that  the homosexual woman is particularly capable of playing a leading role in the international women's rights movement for equality[12]. And indeed, from the beginning of the women's movement until the present day, a significant number of homosexual women assumed the leadership in the numerous struggles and, through their energy, awakened the naturally indifferent and submissive average women to an awareness of their human dignity and rights. [13]

According to Mineke Bosch, Ruhling most likely had in mind German activists Kathe Schirmacher, Anita Augspurg, and Lida Gustava Heymann when she identified lesbians in the international women's movement. Schirmacher and her partner, Klara Schleker, were, says Ilse Kokula in her anthology on female homosexuality in Germany, "the only known lesbian couple in the first German women's movement." [14] Yet Dutch IWSA member Martina Kramers referred in 1913 to gossip about Augspurg's as well as Schirmacher's homosexuality. [15]

That women in the international women's movement had some familiarity with the discourse of "homosexuality" as it emerged in the late nineteenth century is clear. Dutch IWSA leader and WILPF founder Aletta Jacobs can be counted among the more sexually progressive members who recognized not only women's sexual nature but also the possibility of lesbianism. She wrote to Rosika Schwimmer in 1905 about Schwimmer's use of morphine in connection with her suppressed sexual desires and hoped that Schwimmer would one day tell her "that you have found a good friend, and then you can say whether you are sexually normal or abnormal." [16]

The Danish physician J.A. Leunbach discussed with Jacobs the World League for Sexual Reform, founded by homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, and sought "her valuable name" for the organization. [17] Discussion within international women's movement circles of "fairies," use of the terms "queer" and "perverse from a sexual point of view," references to "Manly-Looking" women and women who "went about together at the Hague, hair cropped short and rather mannish in dress," and a description of a school-girl crush as "hero-worship ... but there was nothing sordid or exaggerated about it," suggest that at least the European women had some familiarity with the work of the sexologists. [18]

Despite such derogatory usages, women within the movement accepted women's couple relationships, conceptualizing them as romantic friendships or "Boston marriages" rather than lesbian love affairs. Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann formed one such couple within the circle of internationally  organized women. Augspurg, leading member of the radical wing of the German women's movement and the country's first woman lawyer, met Heymann,   who had freed herself from the life of a daughter of a rich Hamburg merchant to become a social worker and trade union organizer, at an 1896 international women's conference in Berlin. In their memoirs, Heymann described her first vision of the woman she came to live with for over forty years. Arrested by Augspurg’s powerful voice, she saw her at the lectern, dressed in a brown velvet dress. "Already graying short hair framed a high forehead, under which two clear-sighted eyes sparkled. A sharp profile contrasted markedly but not inharmoniously with a delightful small mouth, chin, and small ears." [19]

Obviously it was a momentous meeting, and the physical description smacks of a "love at first sight" genre.

Although early on the two women decided not to live together, they happily broke that promise. "Every year brought us closer," Heymann wrote, "deepened our friendship, let us know that not only in questions of Weltanschauung ... but also in all the events of daily life ... we stood in exquisite harmony." They moved to the country where they launched a series of ambitious, and successful, agricultural enterprises, a quite unusual undertaking for two women. As a result, they reported that their Upper Bavarian peasant neighbors viewed them with some suspicion. In the section of their memoirs entitled "Private Life," Heymann recounted that "it excited the envy and anger of the farmers that two `vagabonds in petticoats' were successful, creative, and happy to organize their lives according to their own desires and inclinations." One day a cattle dealer came to call with proposals of marriage for both women, explaining that the farm was splendid and lacked only a man. "It took all our effort to remain serious and make clear to the man the hopelessness of his desire. As he left, we shook with laughter," Heymann commented. [20]

As such descriptions make clear, Heymann and Augspurg presented themselves in public, in their daily lives, and unselfconsciously as a couple, and that  is certainly how they were treated within the international women's movement. Correspondents regularly sent messages to and received them from both women. Heymann sent "Hearty greetings from us both" to Rosika Schwimmer in 1919; "I hope you and Dr. Augspurg are not too tired after these strenuous days of Vienna," a friend wrote in 1921. When the German section of WILPF put out a translation of the 1924 congress report, the editors replaced a photograph of Heymann with one of the two women together, because, according to Heymann, "our German members like that better." [21]

Augspurg and Heymann stayed in double rooms when they attended congresses, entertained movement friends at their home, and described a happy family life: "I had a very good journey home and found Anita and our dog in good health," Heymann wrote French WILPF leader Gabrielle Duchene on her  return from a trip to Paris. [22] When Heymann planned to travel to Geneva for a meeting in 1930, a WILPF staff member reported that "she is coming without Dr. Augspurg which is scarcely believable!" [23]

Heymann and Augspurg were enjoying a Mediterranean vacation in March of 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany. As pacifists and feminists they had made themselves enemies of the Nazis, so they never returned to the land of their birth. Although in this way they stayed out of the Nazis' clutches, the regime seized all their property, including their books and personal papers, prompting WILPF friends not to try to help them. Swiss WILPF cochair Clara  Ragaz, hoping to arrange hospitality at headquarters in Geneva, commented about Augspurg, who suffered from heart disease, that "it is a very hard time for her friend-and of course for herself." When Heymann died in June of 1943, American Emily Greene Balch worked to raise money to support Heymann's "life-long friend and co-worker..., for whom she had cared so devotedly." But as it turned out, Augspurg did not survive long. "Did you notice that Lida Gustava Heymann and Dr. Anita Augspurg died within a few short weeks of each other?" Rosika Schwimmer asked a friend.[24]

Augspurg and Heymann made the acquaintance of another well-known couple, Hull House founder and WILPF president Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, in the course of their work in the international women's movement. The German women enjoyed the hospitality of Addams and Smith when they came to the United States for the WILPF congress in 1924, and in 1929 Heymann and Augspurg sent Addams "and Miss Smith many hearty greetings." [25]

Like the German couple, Addams and Smith sent and received messages for one another, made arrangements for double-bedded rooms when they traveled, and took care of each other, although that responsibility fell more heavily on Smith: Addams would "suffer from your absence," British WILPF member Mary Sheepshanks wrote Smith when she was too ill to travel to Europe in 1929. Smith, whom Addams described to Heymann as her "most intimate friend," inspired a great deal of enthusiasm among Addams's colleagues. [26] "Will you kiss your dear friend, Miss Smith, for me and tell her that in sleepless nights and even in nice dreams I see her before me as a good angel," wrote Aletta Jacobs in 1915. "I have a remembrance of her as one of  the sweetest women I ever met in the world," Jacobs added four years later. And, even more extravagantly, Jacobs concluded in 1923 that "I always have admired her and if I would have been a man I should have fallen in love with her." It is interesting that Jacobs, a sexual progressive who recognized and apparently accepted lesbianism, expressed her admiration in this subjunctive heterosexual form.[27]

If the relationships of Heymann and Augspurg and Addams and Smith sat astride some shifting border between lesbian bonds and romantic friendships, Smith's nurturing of her more prominent partner also verged on the kind of devoted service on the part of one woman toward another described so well by Karin Lutzen in her book on love and friendship between women. [28]

Such relationships between older and younger, or more and less powerful, women seemed to obscure the bond of love from the vision of outsiders. The relationship between Anna Howard Shaw, American minister, charismatic orator, and international leader, and Lucy Anthony, a niece of Shaw's idol, Susan B. Anthony, falls into this category. Shaw had a reputation within suffrage circles for her "strong and passionate attachments to other women," some of which "have broken up in some such tempestuous fashion." [29] Shaw described her "abiding love for home and home life" at her country house, Moylan, which she shared with Anthony. When Shaw fell and broke her foot and Anthony, at the same time, fractured her elbow, Shaw ruefully labeled them "rather a broken up couple." Yet Aletta Jacobs saw Anthony as Shaw's "secretary, friend, and housekeeper," since Shaw paid her a salary. Anthony herself called Shaw, after her death, "my Precious Love," "the joy of my life."[30]

The same confusion greeted the relationship of International Woman Suffrage Alliance president Carrie Chapman Catt and New York suffrage leader Mary Garrett Hay. Catt's reserve and distaste for emotional display-one intimate friend likened her to "cold boiled halibut"-may have obscured the reality of her relationships, or the fact that Catt married twice may have led observers-as it has scholars-to undervalue her ties to women.[31]  But Catt did not even live full time with her husband when he was alive, and when he died she and Hay set up housekeeping together. Although Hay, like Catt, was affluent, according to Shaw she "seems to take the responsibility of almost all the household in her own hands." Yet Hay was more than a housekeeper. Dutch IWSA member Martina Kramers referred to her cynically as "the eternal Hay," marveling that she was not accompanying Catt on a trip to Europe.

Apparently rather authoritarian, Hay was not popular in international circles. Shaw, who detested her, thought Hay's "power over" Catt "tightened with passing days." Shaw could not understand Catt "wanting to tie to herself as her most intimate friend a woman of such a common nature and such a trouble breader [sic]." Martina Kramers agreed with Shaw's description, referring to Hay as "a perpetual source of dissension." But Shaw did "not think there is any hope of breaking that affair off." American Rachel Foster Avery concluded that Hay "really loves" Catt in 1910, and when Catt died in 1947, she was buried, at her request, not with either of her two husbands but next to her "unforgettable friend and comrade" Hay. [32]

More ambivalent, but following a similar pattern, was the relationship of Emily Greene Balch, Wellesley professor, WILPF leader, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and her childhood friend Helen Cheever. Balch, like Catt, was a reserved woman; she described her Yankee background as one that valued  "restraint not only of expression of emotion but of emotion itself." Cheever was a wealthy woman who financially supported Balch and wanted to live with  her on a permanent basis. But Balch, who admitted that she both loved and was irritated by Cheever, balked. Perhaps, she wrote her sister, it was a result of Cheever's "giving me more love than I can quite digest." [33] Yet when Balch was in Geneva as international secretary of WILPF, her coworkers eagerly anticipated, on Balch's behalf, a visit from Cheever. "I think she is homesick and it would be very good if her friend from America came soon to  keep her company and also attend a bit to her physical health," Lida Gustava Heymann confided to Jane Addams. Three years later Cheever wanted to resign her offices in the U.S. section of WILPF in order to go to Geneva where "my usefulness to the W.I.L. will be confined to being with Miss Balch." [34]

Emily Greene Balch resisted becoming part of a female couple and identified as an unmarried woman. In a 1904 diary entry she described herself as happy but missing out on "the deepest reach of life," "not only unmarried but virgin in my emotions, never having loved or been loved." "The intense love of children, the instinct for homemaking, the preference for the companionship of men over that of women-all these made themselves felt only when my path in life had irrevocably fixed itself," she wrote in a document she titled "Confessions of a Professional Woman." And in reply to Jane Addams's inquiry about the new phenomenon of the unmarried career woman for her autobiography, Second Twenty Years at Hull House, Balch wrote that such women might have missed out on the most precious of women's experiences but that "there is no evidence that they themselves or those who know them best find in them the abnormality that the Freudian psychoanalysts of life would have one look for." Unmarried women thought strange, she said, the evaluation  of "everything that is not concerned with the play of desire between men and women as without adventure." [35]

The public defensiveness of single women may have originated in the awakened suspicion that women living without men might have perverse desires or it might simply have been provoked by popular assumptions that such women had no intimate ties. In a 1931 German anthology on the modern single career woman, Elisabeth Busse explained that such women were not "amazonian," "inverts," or "homosexuals," although "they lived in women's unions." [36]

So it is not surprising that ICW secretary Alice Salomon, a German Jewish pioneer in the world of social work who never married, apologized in her autobiography that "this book may sometimes seem as much a book about women as though I had lived in a harem." Actually, she assured her readers, "I always had men and women, old and young, rich and poor, and sometimes whole families as my friends." But, in fact, Salomon made her life in the female world of social reform and the women's movement. She apparently felt compelled to discuss why she never married, explaining that her work "estranged me from my background" and "made me reluctant to form a union which could not combine love with common interests and convictions." [37]

In the ICW Bulletin of October 1932, Salomon published a defense of unmarried women, the first generation of independent women who pursued careers.  She recognized that the discipline of psychology had changed attitudes toward single women-that they were reputed to be warped by celibacy- but quoted a woman of "international fame" to the effect that "they are alive, active, and they fully participate in present-day life by means of a thousand interests."  Similarly, Lena Madesin Phillips recognized: "To live an old maid was ... considered something to be greatly deplored"; but she insisted that she had "no complaints, no regrets, no fears" about her own unmarried, but woman-coupled life. Helen Archdale, a British equal rights advocate active in the international arena, reacted testily to a paean to marriage Doris Stevens apparently penned after her second wedding. "What you say about the beneficial effects of marriage on one's life rather puzzles me. Why should `spinsterhood' be gray?" Archdale shared a London flat and country home with Lady Margaret Rhondda, another international activist, in the 1920s, after which they "personally drifted very far apart." [38] Such defensiveness and defiance about living apart from men reflects the power of the intensified vision of married life as the only healthy alternative for women.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, then, overlapping frames of lesbianism, romantic friendship, devoted service, and singleness existed for women's choices in their personal lives. Women-only organizations offered an appealing haven for those who made their lives with other women, whatever the nature of their ties. But in a context in which homosociality often cast a pall of deviance, the desire to work apart from men grew more complex.

Almost all participants in the major international women's organizations accepted-or did not raise public objections to-an ideology of fundamental difference between women and men. [39] The notion of difference underlay what we have come to call "maternalist politics"-the construction of public positions on the foundation of women's biological and social roles as mothers. [40] But among women not involved in intimate relationships with men, belief in female values-read superior values-also led in a different direction: to the regular expression of antimale sentiments in both private and public life. Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg tried as far as possible to hire only women to manage their farm, and Heymann contrasted their satisfaction with their women employees to their displeasure with a male manager: "Vanity, thy name is man!" she proclaimed. "The customary judgment maintains, of course, that the female sex is the one enslaved by vanity, but this customary assertion is only a diversion and contradicts the law of nature among humans and animals." [41]

Similarly, Anna Howard Shaw had little use for men in her private life. When Lucy Anthony's broken arm failed to heal properly, Shaw announced that if a woman physician had treated Anthony everything would have been all right. During the First World War, Shaw complained about "male experts" wasting "millions of dollars on smoke and drink" while advising housewives to tighten their belts. "Men, I am convinced, never grow up and of all the animal creation are the least capable of reason." [42]

Such views spilled over into work in the international women's movement, merging especially with the common association of men with war and women with peace. The outbreak of the First World War unleashed a veritable barrage of antimale proclamations. Shaw found men's "war madness and barbarism" "unthinkable" and claimed, despite her already low opinion of men, that "I have not half the respect for man's judgment or common sense that I used to have, that they are such fools as to go out and kill and be killed without knowing why."

Heymann condemned men's "lies and hatred and violence" at the WILPF congress in 1919, proclaiming that the war would "never have come to pass had we women, the mothers of the world, been given the opportunity of helping to govern the people and join in the social life of nations." At the 1934 WILPF congress, Augspurg denounced the "world of men" as "built up on profit and power, on gaining material wealth and oppressing other people." Women "would be able to build a new world which would produce enough for all." According to Carrie Chapman Catt, "All wars are men's wars. Peace has been made by women but war never." [43]

Advocacy of separatist organizing logically flowed from such assumptions about women's moral superiority and potential efficacy in creating a peaceful world. It is not that women who build lives apart from men never associated or worked with them-both Lida Gustava Heymann and Jane Addams, for example, participated in political parties-but that they seemed particularly to value the women's world of the women's movement. Yet few women in the international women's movement explicitly defended the practice of separatism.

Emily Greene Balch seemed to prefer work with women but to feel that WILPF had to consider admitting men. In the first year after the Hague congress, she wrote that "my interest and belief in our woman's organization is as  strong as ever." WILPF debated its commitment to separatism in the early 1920s but decided to remain a woman-only organization on the international level, in the process putting out a pamphlet that explained the reasons for keeping out men, one of the only public documents to defend the practice of separatism. Balch seemed to force herself to consider merging in a "men-and-women's international peace body," because "I do hate and dread the kind of devotion to one's organization as an end in itself."[44]

Given the persistence of all-female groups, the lack of vigorous defense of the principle of separatism is curious. Yet such silence speaks. It is possible that the need never occurred to those long committed to organizing in woman-only groups. But because the question of admitting men did arise, perhaps the silence was a sign of uneasiness over the old-fashioned associations of single-sex organizing in an increasingly heterosocial world. That separatist inclinations remained strong is clear from the apology of Eva Fichet, member of the mixed-gender Tunis section of WILPF, who planned to bring her member husband to the 1934 international congress. Noting that "his presence will offend some of our collaborators," she promised that "he will only make an appearance at public meetings, if there are any." Still, the comments of British suffragist and WILPF member Catherine E. Marshall, who never married, stand out in the records of the international women's movement: "It is always a pleasure to meet Women fellow workers.... I do like women best! Who was it said: The more I see of men the better I think of women!" [45]

Such sentiments expressed the conviction that women had more in common with one another than with men and underlay the inclination to make both a personal and work life with other women.

Heterosexuality and Work with Men

Some women within the international women's movement lived traditional married lives, while others engaged in more unconventional forms of heterosexual relationships. The model of the woman leader married to a supportive husband received a great deal of praise, but unorthodox heterosexuality crossed the line of respectability in a way that women's same-sex relationships did not and as a result met with disapproval. This difference probably reflects the generational divide that separated the predominantly older women of the international women's movement from younger cohorts more blaze about heterosexual expressiveness and more attuned to the sexual possibilities between women.

Lady and Lord Aberdeen, Scottish aristocrats, were without doubt the most lauded couple in international women's movement circles. The ICW regularly held them up as an exemplar of a couple committed to the same work, even though Lord Aberdeen in fact played no role in the organization. As they approached the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage in 1927, supporters within the ICW sent out appeals for contributions to purchase an automobile as a gift, and the ICW Bulletin featured a front-page photograph of the happy couple with their shiny new possession. [46] Lady Aberdeen's devoted friend Alice Salomon described the Aberdeen marriage as modern and ideal and insisted that the ICW was as much a matter of concern to Lord Aberdeen as to Lady Aberdeen. The ICW president herself appreciated her husband's "never wavering support and... belief in the I.C.W." that had made possible everything she had accomplished. Emma Ender, the president of the German section of the ICW, responded that she knew from her own experience "what it means, to live at the side of a man who totally understands and supports the life work that we have taken on." Even after Lord Aberdeen's death, Lady Aberdeen  referred to "the inestimable blessing of husbands who wish us to enter into all the fullness of life in service and responsibility."[47]

Aletta Jacobs, the first woman physician in the Netherlands and an international leader, and her husband, Carel Victor Gerritsen, also attracted favorable   attention as a model couple within the international women's movement. Jacobs entered into marriage despite her perception of the institution's injustice in  deference to her husband's political career and their mutual desire to have a child. She described Gerritsen as "a feminist from the start," and when they  married she kept her own name and they maintained separate quarters within the house they shared. Gerritsen actually took up Jacobs's cause by not only supporting her but by also speaking himself in favor of women's suffrage.[48] Anna Howard Shaw, not known for her appreciation of men, added Gerritsen to her list of six men "of whom I say very often they have proved to me beyond a doubt, that it is possible to be as happy married as to be not married." Rosika Schwimmer planned to write about Jacobs and Gerritsen in her book about marriage ideals and ideal marriages, although the final  version, published in German, did not contain anything about the couple, apparently because Jacobs did not approve of what Schwimmer had to say.

When Gerritsen died in 1905, a friend wrote to Jacobs to express her understanding of how hard it was "to be deprived of the companionship of your dear husband, when you were so harmonious in all your tastes and thoughts."[49]

Another compatible and supportive husband, although he had never thought about votes for women before meeting her family, was married to Margery Corbett Ashby, president of the IWSA/IAW from 1923 to 1946. Brian Ashby sometimes attended international congresses with her, and when he did not, she wrote him regularly, pouring out her worries and victories and love for him and her son. From the Paris congress in 1926, she wrote him: "My dear love, I don't know what I should do without you and the dear son. At all the moments of crisis and triumph I steady myself by thinking of you & him, of you and all you are to me & of his dear eyes that look so confidently into mine & think me perfect. Because honestly without you both I should be desperately afraid." Their son, when grown, described their marriage as a complementary partnership, each "really blissfully happy that the other one existed." [50]

Madeleine Doty, international secretary of WILPF in the 1920s, had a far less conventional marriage to American Civil Liberties Union cofounder Roger Baldwin, and, perhaps as a result, she seemed to elicit less support from her coworkers. Doty, a lawyer and emancipated woman who lived in Greenwich Village, applied for the job in Geneva because Baldwin was taking a year off and planned to travel, leaving her "free to do." When she left Geneva and her work to visit him in England in 1927, she reported that the staff at headquarters was "very severe," but Doty wondered "how good they'd be if they hadn't seen a husband in 15 months." Baldwin's visits to WILPF headquarters prompted Doty to remark, "the Maison has much too feminine an atmosphere." "He certainly made it lively here and we decided that one or two men are needed in this house of `females,'" Doty wrote to Jane Addams. [51]

Despite her commitment to an all-female organization, Doty seemed to prefer work in a mixed-gender environment. Whether "New Women" like Doty or an older generation like Aberdeen, women who lived and worked side by side with men may have had more ambivalence about separatism as the best method of organizing.

In fact, married women leaders did speak out on behalf of cooperation across the lines of gender. In her 1899 presidential address, Lady Aberdeen referred to separate women's organizations as a "temporary expedient to meet a temporary need" and hoped that they would not be allowed "to crystallise into a permanent element in social life." Her successor as president, American May Wright Sewall, also a married woman, agreed: "the Council idea does not stand for the separation of women from men, but rather for the reunion of women with men in the consideration of great general principles and large public  interests." In a 1976 interview, Margery Corbett Ashby explained that the goal of women's organizations was to eliminate the need for women’s organizations, although she admitted that it could be difficult for devoted members to accept this. [52]

Doty's complaint about her colleagues' lack of understanding of her need to leave her work to go see her husband suggests that not all heterosexual bonds merited the adulation heaped on Lady Aberdeen's. Women perceived as too involved-or in improper relationships-with men attracted harsh criticism. Martina Kramers, who maintained a long-term but unconventional liaison with a man, faced the censure of Carrie Chapman Catt in 1913. Bobbie, whom Kramers called her "left-handed husband," was a socialist and married man whose wife refused to divorce him. As president of the IWSA, Catt wrote to Kramers to recommend that she resign as editor of the organization's journal, Jus Suffragii, because her "moral transgressions" had provoked "horror and repugnance" among U.S. IWSA members.

Kramers reacted with incredulity and defiance, refusing to give up either her man or her work and insisting to Catt that she was not a "propagandist of free love." She also implicitly equated the unconventionality but acceptability of her relationship with same-sex sexuality by comparing her situation to "the cases of Anita Augspurg, Kathe Schirmacher and Mr. Stanton Coit accused by many gossipers of homosexual intercourse." She offered Catt "an answer that will silence interfering people as effectively" for her as for them. But to no avail. Catt managed,  as Kramers put it, "to throw me out of the whole movement" by moving the office of Jus Suffragii to London and appointing a new editor. What really hurt Kramers was her countrywoman Aletta Jacobs's support of Catt. A "Neomalthusian" advocate of birth control herself rumored of "having anticipated marriage and of practising abortus," Jacobs had even before 1913 begun to act, according to Kramers, "as if she were the purest philistine's wife," "so   proper and orderly she could be in parliament." [53]

Shortly before Kramers's tangle with propriety, a similar scandal broke out within the German women's movement and spilled over into international  circles. Conflict within the German League for the Protection of Motherhood, the leading progressive sex-reform association, led to revelations about the "free marriage" of Helene Stocker and one of her major male allies, Bruno Springer, and Stocker's countercharges that her opponent, Adele Schreiber-Krieger, was also sleeping with her male supporters.[54] the aftermath of this affair, Aletta Jacobs reported, disgustedly, to Rosika Schwimmer that "Dr. Stocker behaved in the Hague just as everywhere, always clinging on one of the men," suggesting, perhaps, excessive dependence on men as well. [55]

Unrestrained heterosexuality also became an issue within the Inter-American Commission of Women, as we have seen. Doris Stevens struck Bertha Lutz, a single woman who called herself Catt's "daughter," not only as a nymphomaniac but also as a "sex-mad psychopath" and a "mentally deranged woman." In fact, Stevens did engage in heterosexual activities outside of marriage, and in her work for the Inter-American Commission of Women she pursued flirtatious relationships with several Latin American diplomats. Far from ashamed of such interactions, she remarked that women and men active in politics together were likely to find that the "deep personal bond takes the form of heterosexual love." At the Montevideo conference of the Pan American Union in 1934, Lutz accused Stevens of leaving "many of the latin american men under the impression that feminists are like the greek women who shared the life and the loose living of the men of Athens." Two years later at the conference in Buenos Aires, Lutz thought Stevens put "all women to shame."[56]

In all these cases, the women not only expressed strong criticism of what they evidently considered disreputable behavior but they also linked the aberrant heterosexual relationships to political work with men and seemed to disapprove of both. Kramers had joined the socialist party, under Bobbie's influence, in 1912 and fought from within for her feminist principles. As early as 1908, she perceived that Aletta Jacobs suspected her of becoming more attached to socialism than feminism on account of Bobbie.[57]  The conflict in the German League for the Protection of Motherhood also involved the combination of sexual liaisons and political alliances. And Doris Stevens made her reputation-however one wants to interpret that term-in the international women's movement as a vocal advocate of both working with and playing with men.

Conclusion

I do not mean to imply that the lines on the question of separatism ran strictly in accordance with sexuality or that no other factors shaped the political  practices of separatist organizing. As the evidence presented here makes clear, women within the international women's movement in the first half of the  twentieth century formed a variety of relationships, with both women and men, and cannot easily be categorized as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" in any case. There were married women such as Carrie Chapman Catt who lived with and loved women, and single women such as Alice Salomon who lavished devoted admiration on Lord and Lady Aberdeen. Coupled women's relationships might be characterized as lesbian partnerships, romantic friendships, loving caretaking, or some combination. In fact, given the variety of bonds, we might wonder whether internationally organized women  managed to cross the boundaries of sexuality more easily than those of class, religion, and nationality. [58] Certainly the conflicts over sexuality within the movement tended to pit "respectable" against unconventional behavior rather than same-sex against heterosexual relationships.

And even if we could divide women into neat categories, the association would not be perfect. Rosika Schwimmer, who was married briefly in her youth but lived most of her life in close association with women, grew disgusted with separatist organizing in the 1930s. [59] Mildred Scott Olmstead, a U.S. WILPF leader who maintained an intimate relationship with a woman throughout her married life, proposed in 1934 that the international organization admit men. [60] And the married women leaders and heterosexual renegades all continued to commit themselves to all-female groups, whatever their ideas about the proper way to organize.

Furthermore, affectional choices alone did not fashion the politics of separatism. National and generational differences, which helped to construct interpretations of sexuality, are particularly striking. European women seemed both more open to sexual expression and less interested in single-sex organizing than their Anglo-American colleagues. Although documentation and analysis of the contrast between more "sex-positive" European cultures and "sex-negative" Anglo-American societies is strangely lacking in the secondary literature, such differences are widely, and I believe correctly, assumed.

Certainly women in the international organizations took this contrast for granted. Alice Salomon reported a conversation she had had with Lillian Wald, who lived in the women's world of Henry Street Settlement in New York. Wald and another of her countrywomen opined that single life was easier for women, but Salomon thought that few German women would agree. Expressing the conviction of national differences in attitudes toward sexuality, Salomon suggested that Americans were affected by the "Puritan strain in their upbringing," but the Americans denied it, retorting that German women were oversexed.

Rosa Manus seemed to make the same assumption about "puritanical" American views when she and her parents took Carrie Chapman Catt to a show at the Casino de Paris in 1923, "a most shocking real Paris Veau de ville [sic-vaudeville] with a quantity of naked women. She had never   seen anything like that, and I think it was good for her education," Manus reported. Emily Greene Balch learned that gossip had began to circulate about an innocent young American woman working in Geneva in the 1920s, leading her to conclude that European women could not understand the peculiarly American combination of sexual restraint and an informal manner in relations with young men. And when Martina Kramers faced condemnation for her relationship with Bobbie, she noted "nowhere in Europe, beginning with my own country, are people so convinced of my immorality as they seem to be in America." [61] Perhaps as a result, when Kramers wrote Rosika Schwimmer about this whole affair, she switched from their normal English to German.

Women in the more (hetero) sexually permissive societies and circles seemed to differ from their compatriots on the issue of separatism. Reflecting national preferences for mixed-gender groups, the president of the National Council of Women of the Netherlands explicitly associated women's exclusion of men with the "New World." Danish women responded to the announcement of the Woman's Peace Party in the United States and a call for the formation of similar groups in other countries by asserting that "we preferred to work together, men and women, in the same organization."

At the 1915 Hague congress, Dutch women called for the concentration of all forces, female and male, working for peace. They noted that "a special women's movement is not necessary and therefore undesired. The force of a movement where two sexes cooperate will come to better results than an organization of one sex only." Women trade unionists from Germany and Austria refused to send representatives to the second congress of the International Federation of Working Women in 1921, because they were "opposed to taking part in a separate women's trade union organization" in the American fashion. And the Austrian woman who commented on the manless celebrations in the International Federation of Business and Professional Women went on to comment: "This would simply have been an unheard of thing with us." [62]

Similarly, women struggling side by side with men of their class or national group for justice or independence had reason to look critically at separatist organizing. Women committed to the powerful socialist and social-democratic parties of Europe had particular reasons for eschewing single-sex groups, as the conflict in the International Federation of Working Women illustrates. Katherine Bompas, British IAW secretary, contrasting the "older" women's movement with the Soviet-inspired Women's International Democratic Federation after the Second World War, believed that the existing groups, by shunning affiliation with (male-dominated) political parties, had "in the eyes of working women seemed bourgeois and even perhaps conservative." In 1935, Margery Corbett Ashby reported that the enormous difficulties facing the nationalist struggle in Egypt "bring the men and women nearer together" and found the leading Egyptian nationalist movement, the Wafd, "quite progressive as regards women's position." A Syrian woman, speaking at the Istanbul congress of the IAW in the same year, asserted her belief in the necessity of working shoulder to shoulder with men in her country for prosperity and freedom. "The economic and political situation of my country is so desperate that it is extremely difficult for us women to give our wholehearted energies to the cause of feminism alone." [63]

Generational differences on the question of separatism are also striking. Young women experiencing firsthand the accelerated breakdown between female and male social spheres in the twentieth-century world challenged women-only groups more readily than their older colleagues who clung to separatist organizing. British WILPF leader Mary Sheepshanks related in 1930 that young women at a Geneva meeting of the International Federation of University Women announced that "we are not going to join any more of these women's organizations." In 1931, Canadian Dorothy Heneker pointed out that young European women thought that women should work with men, and the IAW Youth Committee reported in 1938 that the general feeling favored a mixed organization of young women and men. [64] Generational, like national and class, differences on the question of separatism grew from distinctive patterns of homosocial versus heterosocial interaction, and so resistance to all-female groups came from both traditional and progressive sources.

The case of the international women's movement in this period illuminates the paradoxes of a women's world in an era undergoing profound change in the relations between the sexes. Internationally organized women, or at least some of them, knew about lesbianism but chose to view the same-sex relationships of their coworkers in an older frame. Single women alternated between defiance and defensiveness, suggesting that the declining social segregation of the sexes in the industrialized Western world and the more insistent labeling of women without men as lesbians or old maids made a woman's choice of a female-or no-partner more suspicious and thus the women's world of separatist organizations more precarious.

The polarized responses to women in decorous-versus-unconventional heterosexual relationships, and the reservation of the strongest condemnation for women who challenged respectability through their sexual liaisons with men, hints at the unease that spilled over from the transformation of social and sexual relations to the process of political organizing.

The story of the international women's movement also reveals how important it is to attend to the interaction of sexuality and politics. Conflict over sexuality and separatism added to the national, class, and generational tensions already bubbling within the international organizations and foreshadowed some of the contemporary critiques of lesbian separatism in the United States by working-class women and women of color. [65] At the same time, the silencing of the defenders of separatist organizing may have helped to undermine the potential power of a global women's movement in these years by questioning the validity of gathering apart from men in an increasingly heterosocial world. Whatever the case, the dynamics within the first wave of international organizing among women make clear that our contemporary struggles over sexuality and politics have a longer and more complex history than we sometimes think.[66]

I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies and to the Ohio State University Office of Research and Graduate Studies, College of Humanities, Department of History, Center for Women's Studies, and Mershon Center for financial support for this research. I would also like to thank Margot Badran, Mineke Bosch, Estelle Freedman, Susan Hartmann, Karin Lutzen, Birgitte Sfland, Verta Taylor, and several anonymous readers forvarious challenges and contributions to my thinking; Helen Fehervary for advice on translating some difficult German phrases; and Ayfer Karakaya Stump for research assistance.

* This article originally appeared in Feminist Studies 23 (Fall 1997): 577-605.

Biography

Leila J. Rupp is Professor of History and Chair of the department at Ohio State Universty, soon to be Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  She is the author of Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945, coauthor with Verta Taylor of Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s, author of Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement, author of A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America, and coauthor, with Verta Taylor, of the forthcoming Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret.  She is the editor of the Journal of Women's History.