Frontières nationales et barrières sociales dans les mouvements féministes et le mouvement ouvrier féminin allemands (1871-1918)

Abstract

This article examines an aspect that has been often overlooked in the historiography of German feminist movements during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries: the relationship between bourgeois feminist movements and the women’s labor movement. We shall seek to understand why the German feminist and women’s labor movements never cooperated on more than an ad hoc basis. The first part of this article describes how the leaders of the German women’s movements placed themselves, from the very beginning, in an international but not a trans-class perspective. The second part analyzes the ideological, strategic, and symbolic factors that prevented anything more than episodic cooperation between these two movements in Germany. The third part looks at the uses of an international sectoral public space, in which national borders were crossed with ease, while social barriers remained quite impermeable. In the fourth and final part, we shall show that the war certainly pushed aside the internationalism of the feminist networks, but nonetheless allowed the German bourgeois and working-class women’s movements to communicate and even to fight together to obtain the right to vote for women.