This article was downloaded by: [Swets Content Distribution] On: 14 December 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 912280237] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713421386 Feminism from Amsterdam to Brussels in 1891: Political Transfer as Transformation Mieke Aerts To cite this Article Aerts, Mieke(2005) 'Feminism 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 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’Histoire Vol. 12, No. 2, July 2005, pp. 367–382 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 Belgium 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 history of feminism in the Netherlands. 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