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Feminism from to in 1891: Political Transfer as Transformation Mieke Aerts

To cite this Article Aerts, Mieke(2005) ' from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891: Political Transfer as Transformation', European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 12: 2, 367 — 382 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13507480500269225 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507480500269225

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Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891: Political Transfer as Transformation Mieke Aerts1

Although the fact has been completely forgotten on both sides of the Dutch–Belgian border, careful historical reconstruction enables us to perceive the origins of organized feminism in as a case of political transfer from Amsterdam to Brussels. For it was the spectacular appearance that Dutch feminist Wilhelmina Drucker put in at the Brussels Congress of the Second Socialist International in 1891 that sparked off a first wave of feminist organizing in Belgium. However, this specific case of political transfer, with its many dissimilarities between political actors and political frames, forces us to review critically some assumptions basic to the field. Political transfer may not be so much about attribution of similarity leading to imitation, as about the certification of actors in highly volatile political situations. In that case political transfer should be conceived not as wholesale importation of ‘foreign’ political practices, but as a reinvention of all elements of a political configuration interdependently and relationally, so as to let actors, frames, political styles and the articulation of political claims emerge transformed through contention. Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009

In June 1893 the progressive-liberal Dutch weekly Sociaal Weekblad (Social Weekly) printed an appreciative review of a new feminist journal published in Brussels, the capital of neighbouring Belgium. On this occasion the Social Weekly characterized the incipient Belgian struggle for women’s rights as a respectable cause, deserving of general support. This prompted a reaction from one of the foremost exponents of Dutch feminism at the time, Wilhelmina Drucker. Just a few years earlier, in 1889,

Mieke Aerts is a sociologist and historian affiliated to the international Information centre and Archives for the Women’s Movement in Amsterdam; she has published widely on the political philosophy of gender and on the in the . Correspondence to: Plantage 6, 2311 JC Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1350-7486 (print)/ISSN 1469-8293 (online) q 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13507480500269225 368 Mieke Aerts Drucker had founded the Amsterdam-based Vrije Vrouwenvereeniging (Free Women’s Association), the first political feminist organization in the Netherlands. As of March 1893 she also edited a feminist journal, Evolutie (Evolution). Both the Free Women’s Association and Evolution had mostly been ignored by the authoritative Social Weekly, but Drucker now claimed the Weekly’s support for Belgian feminism as a retroactive recognition of her own initiatives. This was all the more a case of taking credit where credit was due, she stated, because ‘all Belgian women’s associations en bloc are in fact children of a Dutch mother: the Free Women’s Association’. In its response the Social Weekly pointedly declared itself ineligible to comment on the plausibility of Drucker’s claim to parenthood. Additionally it expressed the hope that in any case the Belgian children would not start to follow the example of their Dutch mother. For even if the aims of the Free Women’s Association could be deemed worthy of support in principle, the methods chosen by Wilhelmina Drucker to effect those aims were certainly not worth emulating, according to the Weekly.2 In a nutshell this marginal episode from the history of feminism in the Netherlands raises three issues of major interest to students of transnational political transfer. First of all there is the basic issue of establishing the fact that a particular cross-border political transfer took place. That may seem, but is not, a straightforward matter of historical observation, because in many cases contemporary sources, like the Social Weekly in this case, will question whether anything happened at all. This is all part and parcel of the generally contested nature of historical facts, but it also points to something more specific: how political transfer is embedded in political contention, a second important issue. As the altercation between Drucker and the Social Weekly shows, claiming or denying political transfer is intimately connected to what some students of political contention have called the ‘certification of actors’ and others have ranged among the ‘politics of recognition’.3 In this case Drucker tries to build herself up as a prestigious political actor by invoking transnational connections already respected by the Social Weekly, whereas the Social Weekly tries to discredit her, by

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 suggesting that either there is no transnational connection, or it did not and should not result in any meaningful similarity. Of course, in other cases credit and discredit can be assigned in reverse order, as when political actors are decertified for representing foreign influences rather than so-called authentic indigenous interests, but the mechanism involved is the same. One might object that what is at stake here is not so much political transfer as such, but the way it is conceptually and practically ‘framed’ after the fact.4 However, a neat distinction between before and after the fact depends on what counts as political transfer, the third major issue here, and again this is anything but a clear-cut matter. The metaphorical model of political transfer introduced by Drucker, that of motherhood, already implies the importance of a time factor. If, as the Social Weekly suggests in its adaptation of Drucker’s metaphor, one has to go beyond the moment of birth and watch the ‘children’ grow up before pronouncing judgment, political transfer becomes an open-ended history, with fluid boundaries between the fact and its afterlife. Another fluidity is implied by the Weekly’s suggestion that it is not necessary, in this case not even desirable, for ‘children’ Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891 369 to resemble their ‘mother’. This goes against a maxim long held dear by those who conceive of political transfer as diffusion of innovation, namely that the relationship between the actors involved—emitters or transmitters of innovations on the one hand, adopters or receivers on the other hand—is always characterized by a solid ‘attribution of similarity’ or ‘basic identification’.5 The three issues—how should we model transnational political transfer, what is its place in political contention, how do we know whether a specific political transfer took place—are of course of general importance. What is highlighted here is their particular relevance for our understanding of political actors and, conversely, the way in which a specific view of political actors supports a specific model of political transfer. In most research on transnational diffusion this model used to be rather static, or, as some have argued, ‘essentialist’: political transfer is taken to consist of some political actors ‘handing over’ to other political actors an item of political importance, be that a way of ‘doing things’ or a way of ‘doing ideas’.6 It is easy to see how this might lead to taking structural or attributed similarity between actors as an indication for potential or actual political transfer. As research has shown, however, in most cases neither the process of ‘handing over’ nor the ‘items’ transferred are as solid as this model would have it. Hence the renewed interest in notions such as ‘framing’, ‘brokerage’ and ‘appropriation’, which do more justice to the agency of actors in construing both the what and how of political transfer.7 The status of the actors themselves, however, has usually remained that of ‘natural agents’ (cf. ‘natural objects’). Even authors who are prepared to go a long way towards conceiving of political actors as relationally constructed identities do not discuss the implications of this view for the maxim of attributed similarity, or for the model of political transfer.8 Precisely these questions are the ones that will concern us, when we take a closer look at the events that inspired Wilhelmina Drucker’s claims to transnational greatness.

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 Wilhelmina Drucker as a Controversial Political Actor Wilhelmina, or Mina, Drucker was born in 1847 in one of Amsterdam’s poorer neighbourhoods, as an illegitimate child of the former seamstress Constantia Lensing and the extremely wealthy and eccentric Louis Drucker, a banker-financier of German-Jewish descent, and also the father of Mina’s elder sister Louise. Although Louis Drucker treated both girls as his daughters and let them carry his surname from early childhood, he fathered several other children out of wedlock with another woman, whom he eventually married. At his death in 1884, he was found to have left his fortune of millions to his legitimate children only, while Constantia Lensing and her two daughters received a pittance. Enraged by this obvious injustice, Wilhelmina Drucker, by then working as a seamstress, started a semi-public campaign of shaming—or rather blackmailing—her eldest but legitimate half-brother into sharing some of his inheritance with the Drucker sisters and their mother. Hendrik Lodewijk Drucker, a respectable university professor, was by then well on his way to becoming a leading spokesman for progressive or ‘social’ liberalism. Wilhelmina Drucker moved 370 Mieke Aerts in different circles. From 1885 on she had become involved with radical democrats, freethinkers and the early socialists of the Sociaal Democratische Bond (Social Democrat League), some of whom supported her in her campaign against her half- brother. In their company Drucker schooled herself in reframing a private slight as an example of broader social issues, such as the law-sanctioned inequality between legitimate and illegitimate wives and children, the double standard for men and women vis-a`-vis extra-marital sexuality, and the exploitative power relations between male capitalists and female workers. In 1888 Hendrik Lodewijk Drucker finally gave in to his fear of scandal, and a settlement was reached. Wilhelmina Drucker, her sister and their mother became financially independent, and Drucker could embark in earnest on a lifelong career as a feminist activist, until her death in 1925.9 Wilhelmina Drucker’s path to feminism would have to be called unconventional at the very least, and not only within the Dutch context. Her personal experiences and her schooling in the world of radical socialist politics moulded her into the most controversial feminist of the nineteenth-century Netherlands. All her life she would remain an ardent critic of the double standard, like most feminists. Unlike most feminists, indeed unlike most of her contemporaries, she was prepared to propagate quite openly an egalitarian sexual morality not based on chastity. Convinced that women’s sexual urges were at least equal in strength to those of men, Drucker observed that under the double standard women wishing to avoid a life of celibacy had a choice between two evils: marriage, where they would lose their freedom while preserving their reputation, or prostitution, where they would retain their freedom while compromising their reputation. In her opinion there was only one solution: complete economic independence for women and total equality of the sexes in matters political and sexual. She had no patience with those who opposed absolute equality, for instance by advocating special labour legislation for women, or a unique feminine world-view. For Drucker, differences between the sexes other than the bare biological facts were purely the result of custom and convention. In an ideal society the only

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 meaningful differences would be those between individuals, free to live sexually fulfilled and productive lives. At this point we can understand why, in 1893, Drucker was not exactly considered a respectable interlocutress by the progressive-liberal worthies of the Social Weekly. What is more, by that time many of her erstwhile socialist allies had also come to look upon Drucker as a controversial loudmouth, even a class enemy. This had nothing to do with her newly acquired affluence, for during the first years of her financial independence she still maintained cordial ties with the socialists. Although she never became a member of the Social Democrat League (SDL) or its women’s auxiliary, she frequently attended party meetings and participated in several political rallies. In 1889 she was one of the principal financiers of a new socialist meeting hall in Amsterdam. But when in that same year the socialist leadership disbanded the women’s auxiliary because of suspected feminist tendencies, it was to Wilhelmina Drucker that some dissatisfied socialist women appealed for help. She obliged, not by toeing the party line, but by founding the Free Women’s Association (FWA). As its name was meant to Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891 371 indicate, it would promote the social interest of women and their intellectual and political development ‘free’ of any party or class ties.10 To ensure its autonomy from male supervision, the FWA restricted its membership to women only. It soon acquired a sizeable following among working women such as teachers, telegraph operators, seamstresses and shop clerks. Drucker herself became a person of national notoriety in radical and socialist circles. She was an inveterate debater at meetings and a popular public speaker on the woman’s cause and on women’s . Representing the FWA she went on lecture tours and spoke at mass rallies, for instance of the SDL-connected Nederlandsche Bond voor Algemeen Kies- en Stemrecht (Dutch League for ). Drucker’s FWA thus built on the accepted repertoire of contention of socialist women’s auxiliaries, which also included also publishing brochures and distributing pamphlets. It refrained from the more physically violent of socialist tactics, but added some distinct innovations, both in organizational practice and in conceptual frames. Apart from offering its members lessons in speaking better Dutch (and French!), urging them to attend political science lectures at the University of Amsterdam, and advising them to read up on women’s rights in the renowned private library of the prominent social-liberal Carel Victor Gerritsen,11 the FWA propagated full equality between men and women. It sharply denounced the socialist defaulting on the issue of women’s suffrage and opposed separate labour legislation for women, as supported by socialists and social liberals. Debates over these issues were stormy and invective, and hard feelings were generated on both sides. Nevertheless, in August 1891 Wilhelmina Drucker set out to represent the FWA at the second congress of the Second Socialist International in Brussels. This proved to be a key event.

The Brussels Congress of the Second Socialist International The International Worker’s Congress, held at the Maison du peuple (People’s Hall) in

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 Brussels, drew over 350 delegates from 15 countries. When the credentials of the Dutch delegates were formally examined at the opening of the congress, SDL leader Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis publicly disavowed Drucker for representing a bourgeois association that opposed men rather than capitalism. Nieuwenhuis probably thought to mass the weight of international socialist disapproval against his troublesome opponent, in a way that had not been possible at home. If so, his plan was derailed completely. The audience became agitated and delegates from several countries expressed their support for Drucker, while condemning the unworthy conduct of the Dutch comrades. Drucker, no longer intimidated by the big names of her adversaries after her training in the rough socialist debating practices, or by the large audience before her, took the offensive, and shouted that her socialist compatriots were a bunch of liars. She explained that the FWA’s members were ordinary women, who supported themselves with their own labour. When Eleanor Marx—as Karl Marx’s daughter a person of considerable authority—put forward the ostensibly reasonable requirement that only women who belonged to a socialist party 372 Mieke Aerts could be admitted, Drucker was undaunted. She did not claim to be a party member, but instead reminded Marx of the brochure in which she, Marx, had written that women, like workers, could only achieve their liberation by acting in their own name.12 Nieuwenhuis then challenged Drucker to state that she would abandon her crusade against men, after which the Dutch delegation would withdraw its objections. Drucker remained ostentatiously silent, but now the female delegates in the audience en masse demanded the floor, to speak out against the victimization of a fellow woman-socialist. To prevent pandemonium before the congress had even started, the chairman hastily proposed to admit Drucker. His proposal was welcomed with thunderous applause and Drucker could enter in triumph.13 During the next days, for the first time in the history of the Second Socialist International, a group of female delegates, Drucker foremost among them, informally conferred on women’s rights. Eventually as a group they submitted a motion outside the agenda urging all socialist parties to put full equality between the sexes at the top of their programme. The motion was carried with near unanimity—only the Belgian socialist leaders Emile Vandervelde and August Mortelmans voiced any objections— but would remain a dead letter for the next decade. It did signify the beginning, however, of the troubled history of the ‘woman question’ inside the Second International. Drucker herself and the FWA, previously practically unknown outside the Netherlands, overnight became notorious in socialist circles all over Europe. Women’s rights activists from several countries established contact with Drucker, to offer her moral support or ask her advice. Among those international contacts, the Belgian ones were especially interesting. First of all, we know from Drucker’s personal notes that Belgian women at the congress introduced her to ‘a certain gentleman, said to be prominent on the woman question in Belgium’.14 Although Drucker in her notes did not give this gentleman a name, at the time there was only one person who answered the description, namely the Brussels lawyer . Frank had come to prominence as legal adviser of the first

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 woman lawyer in Belgium, Marie Popelin, when she protested against the laws that barred her from practising her profession. Frank had not been able to resolve the case to Popelin’s advantage, but the so-called Popelin affair had stirred up much talk about women’s rights. There is no evidence that Drucker had been aware of the Popelin affair before she came to Brussels, but apparently her introduction to Frank brought her up to date. When invited to give a public address on the woman question, Drucker told a packed hall of the Maison du peuple first of all about the injustice of allowing women to study law while prohibiting them from practising. When she concluded her remarks by urging the many women present to join forces and work for the improvement of women’s social and political positions, the Belgian socialist leader Mortelmans intervened with an admonition to give pride of place to the socialist party. But according to newspaper reports he received the same treatment as his Dutch comrades a few days earlier: the audience drowned his words in applause for Drucker.15 And still Drucker’s victorious passage continued. When after the congress most delegates travelled from Brussels to Ghent for an exuberant reception at this from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891 373 bastion of worldwide renown, Drucker was met by Emily Claeys, chair of the local socialist women’s auxiliary. For some time, Claeys had been trying to steer the membership towards awareness of women’s specific oppression and a more independent course, but her efforts were systematically frustrated by the male party leadership. This had resulted in a state of deadlock, and in a women’s organization that was as good as dead. Claeys now seized the opportunity and invited Drucker to give a public speech on the woman question, in the quarters of the Ghent worker’s cooperative Vooruit (Forwards). Again Drucker held forth on the need for equality between the sexes and women’s suffrage, again before a packed audience, again concluding with some exhortatory remarks towards women. Again, a prominent Belgian socialist leader, Eduard Anseele, tried to discredit Drucker by questioning her loyalty to socialism and emphasizing the all-importance of the party. And again, by confronting Anseele head-on, Drucker managed to discredit him instead. As Claeys wrote to Drucker afterwards: Even more than your lecture, the ensuing debate was most beneficial. Anseele’s brutal verbal attack on you made the women realize where they stood with him. The spell he had cast upon them was broken, and the objective I had been pursuing for six months was achieved in a few moments: the women decided not to be dominated by men anymore and to operate independently.16

Dutch–Belgian Connections So much is clear: Wilhelmina Drucker’s visit to Belgium in August 1891 did not go unnoticed. It is obvious that her spectacular confrontations with important male socialists generated a lively interest in her person, her views on sexual equality, the FWA, and the problem of framing the struggle for women’s rights theoretically and in practice. It is also clear that dozens, maybe hundreds of women in Brussels and Ghent must have attended her speeches, some perhaps even more than once. On the strength

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 of these observations alone we have to consider the possibility that she may have been right about her inspirational role, as far-fetched as her claims later seemed to the usually well-informed editors of Social Weekly. In fact, although research until now has not provided us with all the detail we should like, there is a lot of evidence that supports this possibility. Unfortunately, very little is known about the founders of the feminist journal that would command such approval from the Social Weekly in 1893. The journal was called La revendication des droits fe´minins (Demanding Women’s Rights) and it was published by a small feminist-socialist group in Brussels. It is quite probable that members of this group were among Drucker’s audience in the Maison du peuple. We can only note with certainty, however, that their journal started to appear right after the Brussels congress, and that they invited Drucker to become a member of the feminist organization founded by them in the course of 1892. Drucker’s reaction has not come down to us, but in the first volume of her own journal, Evolution, she published quite a few translations from Demanding Women’s Rights.17 374 Mieke Aerts Fortunately, we do know far more about Marie Popelin and Louis Frank, for instance that they engaged in exploratory talks concerning the feasibility of forming a feminist association right after the Brussels congress. Both of them contacted Drucker for more information about the FWA. Popelin visited Amsterdam in February 1892 and delivered a lecture at one of the FWA’s meetings. Frank stayed in touch with Drucker as well, as revealed by the complimentary copy of his Essai sur la condition politique de la femme (Essay on the political situation of woman) that he gave to Drucker in March 1892. He was a special guest at the FWA’s first public rally on women’s suffrage—the first of its kind in the Netherlands—in September 1892. In November 1892 Popelin and Frank founded the Brussels-based Ligue belge du droit des femmes (Belgian League for Women’s Rights), usually considered the first and foremost nineteenth-century feminist organization in Belgium. Soon Drucker featured on the list of the League’s foreign correspondents.18 Then there was Emily Claeys. After Drucker’s visit Claeys apparently found the courage to revive her women’s organization. She copied several initiatives of the FWA, such as offering a women’s night school, with Dutch and French language lessons and lectures on women’s rights. She also tried to unite all women’s auxiliaries of the Belgian socialist party behind the demand for women’s suffrage. As we have seen already, she entered into correspondence with Drucker, and invited her to lecture on suffrage in Ghent and Antwerp in January 1892. She herself travelled to Amsterdam in June 1892, to address a meeting of the FWA. To the FWA’s suffrage rally of September 1892 she sent a message of support on behalf of the Ghent women’s organization.19 Taken together this is certainly enough to conclude that political transfer between ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘Brussels’ did take place, more or less along the lines laid out by Drucker in her exchange with the Social Weekly. It is important to note, however, that the Brussels congress of 1891 and its aftermath led not only to developments in Belgium but also to some observable changes in Drucker’s political presence. Her public victory over the leading Dutch socialists and her new contacts with women’s

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 rights activists all over Europe acted as a boost to her self-respect as an independent actor. More and more she ventured outside the environment in which she had received her first political schooling. In early 1893, together with fellow FWA member Theodore Schook-Haver, Drucker started her own weekly, Evolution. Its name was meant to convey Drucker’s definitive farewell to the ideals of violent socialist revolution as promoted by the SDL, in favour of the struggle for ‘gradual rectification of the social wrongs that affect women’.20 For the record, this should not be understood as a shift to moderateness. As has already been noted, Drucker remained as radical as ever in her plea for absolute sexual, economic, social and political equality between the sexes. However, just like the FWA Evolution rejected all party affiliations, voicing instead the intention to set an autonomous course and look for allies of either sex, wherever they might be found. True to its programme the journal counted among its regular authors a utopian socialist, current and former members of the SDL, radical democrats and a great many feminists from the Netherlands and abroad, espousing free-thinking, social liberal, socialist and even spiritualist principles. Drucker’s Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891 375 reaching out to other political milieux became even more marked when in 1894 the FWA took the initiative of founding the Dutch Association for Women’s Suffrage. So as not to scare away women from different social backgrounds and less radical feminist persuasions, Drucker deliberately refrained from claiming the chair for herself, instead working for the next 20 years as an ordinary, albeit vocal, activist in the background. In the same key she handled her initiating contribution to the National Exhibition of Women’s Labour in 1898, the first nationwide feminist event in the Netherlands.21 Yet the broad Belgian–Dutch collaboration that seemed to come into existence in 1891 never truly came to fruition. Of course Emilie Claeys, Marie Popelin and Louis Frank were proudly featured as the Belgian correspondents of Evolution. But while Claeys initially submitted some contributions, she soon drifted away from Drucker’s sphere of influence. For one thing, the Belgian socialist women’s auxiliaries never took the crucial step of severing their organizational ties to the socialist party, as the FWA had done. After a short time the party leadership tightened the reins, and in 1902 the women in the Belgian socialist party formally renounced their aspirations towards women’s suffrage, in favour of universal male suffrage. By that time Claeys herself had already fallen out with the party, after having found a new Dutch ally in the feminist Nellie van Kol, who was still a loyal member of the Dutch socialist party and as such the object of much scorn by Drucker. As for Popelin, she wrote only one article during her three years on the staff of Evolution. Frank was the most regular contributor of the three Belgians. In addition to submitting a dozen articles, he frequently provided short news updates from Belgium, while Drucker and Schook-Haver translated his Grand cate´chisme de la femme (Women’s Catechism) into Dutch. Nevertheless, Frank too resigned from the staff of Evolution after three years. He and Marie Popelin had a major quarrel, which resulted in his break with the League. Just as with Emily Claeys, in this case too crucial differences of organizational style between Dutch and Belgian allies may have played a part. Unlike the FWA, the Belgian League for Women’s Rights never aimed for mass campaigns or street demonstrations. It remained an elite lobby

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 group that comprised male and female lawyers, physicians, university professors, and parliamentarians of both socialist and progressive liberal leanings. Whereas Drucker and the FWA devoted much of their energy to the suffrage issue, the League did not consider women’s political rights of immediate importance, restricting itself for many years to urging reforms of the Belgian civil code.22 In short, if we grant Wilhelmina Drucker’s claim that the first feminist organizations in Belgium were directly inspired by the example of the Dutch FWA, we must also conclude that the Social Weekly definitely got its wish. Apart from a few half-hearted and short-lived attempts by Emily Claeys, the Belgian ‘children’ did not follow the example of their Dutch ‘mother’. In fact, so little resemblance was there between the FWA on the one hand, and the League and socialist women’s clubs on the other, that it is understandable why not only the Social Weekly but all major modern historians of feminism in Belgium and the Netherlands seem completely unaware of an historical Dutch–Belgian connection. At the same time, since there was almost no similarity or interchange among the Belgian organizations themselves, and since Drucker during 376 Mieke Aerts the early 1890s did not command the kind of friendly relations with their Dutch counterparts that she maintained with all Belgian ones, the existence of those relations as such is an indication that something unusual had occurred. What we have here, then, is an atypical case: transnational political transfer without any strong similarity between the actors involved. But if we accept this, what does it imply for our understanding of political transfer in general?

Transnational Transformation Let us first retrace our steps a little, and clarify the meaning of ‘similarity between actors’ in this case. As we have seen, the diffusion model of political transfer traditionally attaches great importance to ‘attribution of similarity’, because, so the argument goes—and common sense suggests—political actors will only be inspired by those with whom they identify. The story of Drucker’s repeated confrontations with prominent male socialists undoubtedly contains many moments of such identification. At the Brussels congress, the accredited women delegates obviously saw the aggression against Drucker as a retroactive insult to themselves, and so felt obliged to take action. The women of Ghent must have taken heart along the line ‘If she can beat the men at their own game, we can at least try’, or something like it. However, if we want to call this attribution of similarity, we must be certain to understand attribution as a constitutive practice, and not as a recognition of similarities somehow already in place. In fact, if we look closely we can see that both groups of socialist women must have put much work into their identification with Drucker. Unlike most of them, by her own admission Wilhelmina Drucker was not a party member, and neither was the FWA she represented organizationally tied to a socialist party. As a person, Drucker was also completely unknown to the Brussels delegates and the women of Ghent. It would have been understandable if the unknown and self-styled feminist from Amsterdam had been rejected as ‘dissimilar’, or if she had

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 been ‘recognized’ for what male party leaders from the Netherlands and Belgium said she was: a bourgeois man-hater, without loyalty to the socialist cause. Instead, it was precisely this framing of Drucker, even more than Drucker’s arguments, that apparently convinced the female audiences to accept her as ‘one of us’—that is ‘us women’, and as such legitimately concerned with the ‘woman question’. Again, this is not at all a straightforward recognition of similarity but a constitutive practice. Presumably Drucker and her female socialist supporters had already considered themselves women before 1891 but until then most of them had not considered women a relevant category for political contention. In other words, similarity between actors is neither a condition nor a necessary indication of political transfer but an effect, or a specific expression, of transfer. To be precise, it is only one of many such possible effects. Understood as a constructive or constitutive practice, attribution of similarity is not so very different in kind from appropriation or even brokerage. Thus we are able to note all those cases of political transfer in which there is very little similarity to begin with, as in the unlikely Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891 377 connection between the rather ‘common’ FWA and the distinguished Belgian League for the Rights of Women. In fact, if we do not focus exclusively on attribution of similarity, we can see that most of what we might call the ‘Wilhelmina Drucker effect’ had to do with something of which identification forms only a small part, namely the certification of political actors. The opening scene of the Brussels congress is mainly about the certification of Drucker herself, but after she has managed to emerge victorious, her various supporters try to build on her status to elevate themselves into serious political actors. As we have seen, the process does not stop there, but continues in Drucker’s attempts to use her international contacts as political assets in the Dutch context and vice versa. All these instances of attempted certification are more or less heavily contested. In general that need not necessarily be the case—even at the Brussels congress there must have been many delegates whose accreditation was a matter of routine. However, it seems highly probable that moments, or sites, of potential political transfer are particularly open to serious contention regarding the credibility of political actors. The logic behind this might be even better understood the other way round: in situations where routine political exchange breaks down and contention is extended to the fundamentals of the political framework, such as who is to count as a political actor, there is a higher reward for taking the risk of appropriating new or ‘foreign’ ways of thinking and doing. This of course begs the question of what kind of ‘foreignness’ was at stake in this case. In the altercation between Drucker and the Social Weekly the relevant political framework is unmistakably and as a matter of course national political culture, more in particular the difference or the connection between Dutch and Belgian versions of feminism. As our reconstruction of the events in 1891 has shown, it is certainly justified to speak of a political transfer of feminism across the Dutch–Belgian border. However, it should also be noted that this is not the way the confrontations of 1891 were framed by the participants themselves. For all their harsh criticism of Wilhelmina Drucker, the Belgian socialist leaders never put forward the argument that her approach to the

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 woman question was not compatible with Belgian political culture. Neither did Louis Frank or Marie Popelin mention the specifics of the Belgian situation when they dissociated themselves from the political style of the FWA. If, both at the Brussels congress and later on in Ghent, something was perceived as foreign or new, it was the spectacle of a woman boldly holding her own in presenting the woman question as on a par with the struggle against capitalist exploitation. In sum: if there was a border disputed or transgressed, it was the one between feminism and socialism. In fact, all participants in their various ways were concerned with an even more fundamental question: whether there should be a border at all, or a different articulation of feminism to politics. Now, the absence of national references may easily be explained by socialism’s or feminism’s avowed internationalism, but that would be too convenient. The histories of feminism and socialism abound with instances where political differences are very much framed as conflicts between the exigencies of different national political opportunity structures. Besides, much socialist and feminist internationalism was (and remains) predicated on taking national peculiarities for granted, if only as 378 Mieke Aerts quasi-touristy stereotypes.23 All of this should make us wary of using either national political opportunity structures or avowed internationalism to explain specific framings. In this case anyhow, a consideration of a different order seems far more likely. After all, Drucker’s presentation was not meant to elicit a debate on the merits of various variants of feminism, but to establish the legitimacy of feminism as such. Neither universalist internationalism nor relativist nationalism would have sufficed in supplying the arguments to credit or discredit this ‘foreign’ political actor, wholly outside the existing political framework relevant to the participants. Again we are brought back to the issue of certification of actors. More than any other element of political contention, certification issues seem to be bound up with political transfer. But if we look carefully at our case, the notion of certification is actually a conservative description of what happens to political actors. What we have here is not ‘natural actors’ in search of recognition but emerging actor identities, constituted or relationally constructed through political contention. The women delegates of the Second International for the first time constitute themselves into an informal women’s caucus and present themselves to their male comrades with a public statement in favour of women’s rights. In Belgium several new feminist initiatives are launched. Only Drucker and the FWA are already on the political scene before 1891, but the Brussels congress signifies a major change in their political status and also leads to some noticeable changes in their political style. After 1891 in a very real sense they are not the political actors they were before. So if the case of Wilhelmina Drucker and the Brussels congress of the Second International is anything to go by, we have to develop a model of political transfer that goes beyond any lingering ‘essentialism’ or methodological atomism as implied by the metaphor of diffusion. Drucker’s own metaphor of motherhood, while not guilty of ‘itemizing’ the political process, still naturalizes political actors, and so offers no viable alternative. We need instead a model and a metaphor that makes sense of moments in which all elements of a political configuration change interdependently and relationally, so as to let actors, frames,

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 political styles and the articulation of political claims emerge transformed through contention. Such a model must be able to do justice to asymmetrical relations between actors or frames, without taking any reference to boundaries, or attributions of similarity and difference, as self-evident. If this way of conceptualizing makes political transfer look less like a clearly defined category of political events and more like a particularly intense and complicated way of inventing politics, then that is exactly as it should be. The idea that political practices need not be (re)invented, but can be transferred wholesale— or with minor adaptations—from other times or places has been one of the more tempting illusions, not only of political activists but of historians too. As one historian of European feminism has it, at the end of her 400-page general history: ‘Why reinvention? Why not memory? Why not history?—We have far more important things to do than continually to reinvent the wheel.’24 In fact, a more detailed look at Wilhelmina Drucker’s visit to Brussels in 1891, and at other cases of political transfer, would have revealed quite the opposite. To become effective, Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891 379 there is hardly anything political actors can do that is more important than reinventing the wheel; they even continually have to reinvent themselves.

Notes [1] I would like to thank Myriam Everard for the ongoing and productive exchange of ideas about our joint research on Wilhelmina Drucker, and Charles Tilly and Henk te Velde for their generous and thoughtful replies to my critical remarks on the concept of political transfer. [2] Sociaal Weekblad 7 (1893): 188–189, 198; Evolutie, 14 June 1893. For more references to Dutch and Belgian sources, and a detailed reconstruction of the historical events under consideration in this article, see Everard and Aerts, “Forgotten intersections”. [3] Both certification (for instance McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention) and the politics of recognition (Taylor, Multiculturalism; Honneth, Struggle for Recognition) refer to the need for political actors to get themselves and their claims validated by relevant others. [4] In the field of social movement studies Ervin Goffman’s notion of ‘framing’ is usually understood as the practice of systematically trying to make sense of one’s position and world- view, in order to justify them to relevant others. In this article the notion will be used in a slightly enlarged sense, as referring not only to ideas but also to the organizational practices through which political actors situate themselves, which brings it close to Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’. Of course, framing is an essential part not only of political transfer but also of politics in general; see for instance Tarrow, Power in Movement. [5] These are terms from the 1990s as used in McAdam and Rucht, “Cross-national Diffusion”, 66; McAdam, “Initiator and Spin-Off Movements”, 232–235; 237. They unmistakably echo the older notion of ‘homophily’ as developed in the 1960s classic Rogers, Diffusion. [6] For a succinct critique of essentialism in diffusion studies, see Chabot and Duyvendak, “Globalization and transnational diffusion”. [7] McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 26, 92, 157–159. [8] Tilly, Stories; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 31–32, 130–137. [9] Drucker’s early history as presented in this paragraph and the next is treated more fully in Everard, “Een natuurlijke erfdochter” and Dieteren, “De geestelijke eenzaamheid”.

Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 [10] See Drucker, “De Vrije Vrouwenvereeniging”, 139–140. [11] Carel Victor Gerritsen was married to prominent feminist . By 1900 his library comprised over 3000 Dutch and foreign works on feminism. For financial reasons it was sold off to the United States in 1903, where it remains to date one of the richest collections of European feminist materials. [12] Drucker undoubtedly referred to Marx and Aveling, The Woman Question, which contains lines such as ‘Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.... Both the oppressed classes, women and the immediate producers, must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves. Women will find allies in the better sort of men, as the labourers are finding allies among philosophers, artists, and poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole.’ [13] The official proceedings of the Brussels congress can be found in Winock, Congre`s international. General background is provided by Bu¨rgi, Anfa¨nge der Zweiten Internationale, 148–179. The debates about Drucker’s participation are covered by many Dutch and Belgian newspapers of the time, see references in Everard and Aerts, “Forgotten intersections”, 450–452. Drucker herself wrote a report for the FWA, see Drucker, “Verslag van het Internationaal Socialistisch Arbeiderscongres”. 380 Mieke Aerts

[14] Drucker, “Verslag”, 12. [15] Reports for instance in the Brussels newspaper La Re´forme, 22 August 1891 and 24 Augsut 1891 (edition C). [16] Emily Claes to Wilhelmina Drucker, 2 January 1892. This historically important letter is published in its entirety for the first time as an appendix to Everard and Aerts, “Forgotten intersections”. [17] See Gubin, Piette and Jacques, “Les fe´minismes belges”, 62–63; the invitation from the founders of Demanding Women’s Rights is among Drucker’s papers in the collection of the Nationaal Bureau voor Vrouwenarbeid (National Office for Women’s Labour) at the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women’s Movement in Amsterdam, folder no. 459. Translations from Demanding Women’s Rights can for instance be found in Evolutie, 31 May 1893, 21 June 1893, 23 August 1893, 11 January 1894, 11 April 1894. [18] Drucker mentioned these Belgian contacts in Evolution several times, see for a late example “Marie Popelin”, Evolutie 16 July 1913; the presence of Popelin and Frank in Amsterdam is noted by the regular Dutch press at the time, for instance “Mlle. Popelin in de Vrije Vrouwen- Vereeniging”, De Amsterdammer. Dagblad voor Nederland 25 February 1892, and about Frank Nieuws van den Dag, 08 September 1892; Frank’s presentation copy with signed dedication to Wilhelmina Drucker can be found in the Amsterdam University Library. See for the origins of the Belgian League for Women’s Rights De Bueger-Van Lierde, “La Ligue belge”. [19] See Vanschoenbeek, “Emilie Claeys”. [20] Evolutie, trial issue, 8 March 1983. [21] See the recollections of Drucker’s close collaborator Th. P. B. Haver, “De geschiedenis van de Vrouwenkiesrechtbeweging in Nederland” (The history of the Woman Suffrage Movement in The Netherlands), Maandblad van de Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht, 31 July 1907 and 15 September 1907. The strategic self-effacement of Drucker and the FWA in 1898 is remembered with admiration in 1923 by prominent conservative feminist Johanna Naber in a memorial speech; see Evolutie, 29 August 1923. [22] Unfortunately, an authoritative modern history of the women’s movement in Belgium is still lacking. Much relevant literature about developments after 1891 can be found in the footnotes to Everard and Aerts, “Forgotten Intersections”. Articles by Claeys in Evolution are in the issues of 15 March 1893 and 10 May 1893; by Popelin in 20 September 1893; by Frank in 10 May 1893, 21 June 1893, 28 June 1893, 8 November 1893, 15 November 1893, Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009 28 February 1894, 16 May 1894, 23 May 1894, 5 September 1894, 10 October 1894 and 17 October 1894. [23] A well-known example is the way in which the spectacular activism of the Women’s Social and Political Union was rejected by many continental contemporaries as a specifically British ‘suffragettism’. Modern historians of feminism and socialism too take national frameworks for granted, an assumption that is usually not really challenged in works on international networks, and often inadvertently reinforced by comparative studies. A first and not altogether convincing attempt to discuss national and international as nationalized and internationalized feminisms is Offen, European Feminisms. [24] Offen, European Feminisms, 393, 395.

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RE´ SUME´ : Bien que la chose soit occulte´e des deux cote´s de la frontie`re Belgo–hollandaise, une analyse des origines nous permet de pre´senter les origines du fe´minisme Belge comme un cas de transfert politique d’Amsterdam a` Bruxelles. La pre´sence spectaculaire de la fe´ministe hollandaise Wilhelmina Drucker au congre`s de Bruxelles de la Seconde Internationale Socialiste de 1891 fut le point de de´part d’une premie`re vague de fe´minisme organise´e en Belgique. Cependant ce cas de transfert politique avec ses divergences entre acteurs et cadres politiques nous oblige a` remettre en question les termes du concept de transfert politique. Le pivot du transfer politique est peut-eˆtre moins la similarite´ ou l’imitation des acteurs que leur lutte pour reconnaissance dans des circonstances changeantes. Dans ce cas, le transfert politique est moins une importation de pratiques e´trange`res mais plutoˆt une re´invention des termes interde´pendants d’une situation politique de sorte que tous les e´le´ments, les acteurs, les cadres, les styles politiques et les revendications en sortent transforme´s. Downloaded By: [Swets Content Distribution] At: 23:31 14 December 2009