SISTERS AND COMRADES. WOMEN'S MOVEMENTSAND THE 'AUSTRIAN REVOLUTION': GENDER ININSURRECTION, THE RATE MOVEMENT, PARTIESAND PARLIAMENT

摘要

The end of woman-specific, cross-party intervention coincided with the end of the short-lived Austrian First Republic, where, as one gender-specific aspect of the Austrian Revolution, women were granted formal political equality. The "new world", however, did not bring a profound transformation of gender relations. Nor was this a broad political goal of the revolution. The Rate movement in particular failed to confront issues of female emancipation or even flagging female participation in councils' elections. As citizens, women not only "compete[d] with man for his world," as Margarethe Susman put it, but, first and foremost, competed "within" a male world. Female participation in institutionalised politics met with defensiveness and irritation. However, the power of gender as a constructive category - deeply ingrained in the structure of bourgeois modernity - continued to limit female access to important political spaces. For strategic reasons, female activists in the First Republic identified themselves as representatives of women's interests and as women's politicians. Women parliamentarians lived the "feminist paradox"48 that dominated the modern emancipatory women's movement from the beginning: they criticised the construction of presumed female characteristics, and struggled to transform hierarchical gender relations based on such a construction - yet at the same time "being a woman" and having a collective female experience constituted the basis for their committed politics "from a woman's point of view" and "in the name of all women". At a maximum of only twelve in the National Assembly between 1920 and 1923, the number of women in parliament in the First Republic might seem low. However, we would have to reconsider this assumption when we remember that it took the Second Austrian Republic until 1978 to reach the figure of twelve female delegates in its National Assembly.