The Politics of Gender Women and the Left

The Politics of

Gender

Women and the Left

COMMUNISM AND WOMEN

What did women gain in the revolutionaryyears? Lenin insisted proudly on Bolshevik success: Not a single state . . . has done even half of what the Soviet Government did for women in the veryfirst months.¹¹ Allowing for nongendered exclusions of propertyowners from the franchise in the

1918 and 1923 constitutions, women had full citizenship in the Soviet state, sharing equallyin the new political communityof labor. Equalitywas grounded in economic independence, as the rightand obligationto work. Impediments to equalitywere removedthe gendered apparatus of nineteenth-centuryliberal reforms no less than the patriarchalism of tsarist law. Residential, property, and inheritance laws gave women equal rights in land, households, and communes. Radical labor laws provided extra protections and equal pay. New family law addressed the household dom- inance of fathers, introduced civil marriage and divorce on demand, abol- ished illegitimacy, and legalized abortion. Womens treatment in Muslim Central Asia was also addressed. This was Western feminisms maximum program, to which no government in the West ever came close to agreeing.¹²

Treatment of motherhood as a social responsibilitywas the dark side. If childbearing was a collective good (as against individual and familyful- filment), political egalitarianism and sexual radicalism could be twinned with equallystrong programs of maternal and child welfare. For Kollontai at the Commissariat for Social Welfare, collectivized living freed women from the familyto discharge their duties as workers and mothers. Indeed, she argued, attaching intimate relations, child-raising, and social reproduc- tion to the nuclear familywas historicallyoutmoded: The familyceases to be necessary.¹³ But few Bolsheviks were comfortable with Kollontais advocacyof sexual freedom and antifamilial critique, and by1923 her ideas were being attacked as irresponsible. Sexual danger replaced sexual free- dom in Bolshevik rhetoric. The familyform allowed sobrietyand discipline to be restored. N. Semashko, Peoples Commissar for Health, hammered this lesson home in 1925: Drown your sexual energy in public work. . . . If you want to solve the sexual problem, be a public worker, a comrade, not a stallion or a brood-mare.¹⁴

This conservative turn decided the fate of Zhenotdel, the CPSU Womens Department, created from the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women in November 1918. Charged with raising womens political con- sciousness, it was disregarded bymost partymen. It came to be channeled

in the usual waysto socialization of housework and childcare, provision of social services, food distribution, caring for homeless children, or nursing the wounded in the Civil War. Kollontai colluded, distinguishing the public sphere of men from womens everyday life. Zhenotdel, initially used for other purposes, was seen as a troublesome diversion and in 1930 was closed.¹⁵

If the Russian Revolutions legacyfor women was inconclusive, Stalin- ism consigned the issue to silence. In 191730, there were 301 Partydecrees and resolutions on women; in the next thirtyyears onlythree.¹⁶ This pattern was repeated in the Communist International. The second Com- intern Congress launched an International Womens Secretariat with sec- tions in Moscow and Berlin, unified under Klara Zetkin in November 1922, but Soviet insistence on a single model of womens agitation created ten- sions from the start. In April 1926, the Comintern Executive replaced the Secretariat with a new womens department directlyunder itself.¹⁷ In the individual CPs, the record varied. In the earlyyears, womens membership was weakest in Catholic countries where womens suffrage had failed: 6 percent in Belgium, 1.5 percent in Italy, 2 percent in France. It was stronger where Communists carried larger numbers from the existing labor move- ments with them in the splits of 192021, notablyin Germany(12 percent) and Czechoslovakia (20 percent).¹⁸

Particularlyin the smaller or illegal Communist parties, a womens strat- egybarelyarose, as priorities were elsewhere. In Italy, socialists had seen the woman question in strictlyworkerist terms, ruling anything else, from womens suffrage to social policies, dogmaticallyout of order. But the salience of womens wartime protests changed the terrain, and after the

1921 split the new CP immediatelymade the questione femminile a leading cause, seeing womens political rights as essential to the missing democratic revolution. Communists still focused on women as workers, treating them otherwise as a potentiallyconservative force. But Antonio Gramsci forced discussion onto the ground of culture, where noneconomic issues of family, schooling, and religion could be raised. From 1921, he persuaded Camilla Ravera to address these questions in lOrdine nuovoproblems of contraception, abortion, the burden of housework, . . . the commercial nature of marriage . . . the most radical aspects of the Soviet experience . . .

[and] the implications of socialism for the transformation of the traditional family.¹⁹ But this was terminated byFascism, which after 1922 smashed the labor movement, dismantled democracy, and reinstated the most re- actionaryof gender regimes against women.²⁰

A small CP like the British, with less than five thousand members in the early1920s, couldnt mobilize women as women. The partys industrial strongholds (mining in Scotland, South Wales, and the north, engineering in south Yorkshire and greater Manchester) were preciselythe labor move- ment bastions of skilled masculinitymost exclusionaryagainst women. Fe- male militants themselves opposed separate womens sections, preferring an

ideal of emancipated and egalitarian comradeship instead. Female recruits young women from socialist families, individual worker militants, teachers, and educated women radicalized via the warentered the mainstream of partywork. This worked for women with some economic independence, but ordinaryfemale supporters were connected vicariouslythrough their husbands. Relieving husbands of domestic duties itself counted as party work. Womens Sections held afternoon meetings in houses, keeping party wives loyal to their husbands political activity, providing a chance for political discussion, and counteracting housewifelyisolation. Yet this rep- licated the wider societys sexual division of labor, with women servicing their menas a sort of housewife to the party, as one Communist hus- band disarminglyput it.²¹

Some of this came from the British partys smallness. Recruiting outside the recognized working-class core was beyond its resources. It also resisted taking noneconomic oppression seriously. Conflict over birth control cli- maxed in the summer of 1922, for example, leading the advocates of womens reproductive rights, Stella Browne, Cedar Paul, and Maurice Eden Paul, either to leave or take minor roles. Feminists radicalized bythe pre-

1914 suffrage campaigning were one of the CPGBs founding groups, and it squandered the chance to build on this start. The failure reflected both socialisms gender blindness and the tightened discipline imposed byCom- intern in 192224.²²

The somewhat larger French party, 60,000 strong in 1924, showed a similar trajectory. In the early years it became a gathering point for diverse radicalisms frustrated with available political options, including feminists and sex reformers, offering a home for experimental ideas before disci- pline imposed a more orthodox frame. In contrast to the Socialists and Radicals, the PCF consistentlyadvocated womens suffrage, proposing bills in 1924, 1927, and 1928, and vigorouslypressed womens interests at work. Most impressivelyof all, it championed the cause of birth control and abortion reform, setting itself against the vociferous pronatalist con- sensus of French public life and collaborating with Madeleine Pelletier and other radical feminists.²³ On the other hand, Comintern directives steadily reduced the PCFs openness, until after 1928 the partyhardened its sectar- ianism, asserting ownership over working womens struggles, cutting its ties to feminists, and sharpening an aggressivelymasculine style. As member- ship halved by1930, womens issues inevitablyreceded.²⁴

The German Communist Party(KPD) seemed utterlytypical. It declared the primacyof the class struggle in industryfor mobilizing women and ascribed emancipation to productive employment, backed by socialization of childcare, housework, and other domestic services. In the mid-1920s, it demanded exclusive focus on the factory, assigning women an essential psychology whose petty-bourgeois backwardness required undeviating emphasis on the class struggle. True proletarian consciousness, Ruth Fischer claimed, was impossible in the four walls of the household, and working-

class housewives needed the hard reality of wage work to escape their backward mentality.²⁵ Yet the KPD was an unrulyparty, fluctuating wildly in membership: from a notional peak of 450,000 after fusing with the USPD in October 1920, it veered crazilyup and down, before plummeting from 294,230 to 121,394 between September 1923 and April 1924. This alone made the partyhard to control. Further, while the KPD became ac- cused of unimaginative Stalinist orthodoxy, it became despite itself a home for more complex agitations.

A large partylike the KPD had contacts with women that were denied to a small cadre partylike the British. Aside from wage workers themselves, it had three bridges to working-class women: consumer cooperatives; ed- ucational work; and protests against shortages and prices. The last affords the best example. Beginning as spontaneous protests byhousewives and youth in late 1919 and summer 1920, repeated in winter 192122, and peaking in the second half of 1922 with a major coda in summer 1923, such actions negotiated fair prices with shopkeepers and local authorities but also escalated into riots, with looting of food, shoes, and clothing, and battles against police. The KPD tried to shape this activityfor its own ends byforming control committees based on works councils to monitor local prices, blurring the link to womens direct actions. Such committees had diverse origins, including citywide parliaments of works councils, local union initiatives, mass meetings at big firms, or informal assemblies of workers and housewives. But the KPD typically imposed its own structure. It hitched womens militancyto the works councils, subsuming it in the

class struggle of the (male) worker in production. The 840 delegates to the national congress of works councils in November 1922 included only

16 housewives and 16 working women. Womens grassroots militancywas coopted into a bureaucratized revolutionaryposture. A separatelyinitiated womens movement was demoted to auxiliarysupport for the old factory- based ways.²⁶

The KPD practice was based in the dogma of the emancipatorynecessity of wage labor. Yet, however well-grounded in Marxist economics, this ap- proach scarcelyappealed to hard-pressed working-class mothers: in one course for female cadres, the class bridled at the idea that housework was

unproductive. Womens discussion evenings in Berlin-Neuko lln in 1922 replaced the factorystruggles exclusive primacywith a batteryof womens demands: cooperative households to ease the domestic burden (as against the KPDs program of factorycanteens, municipal provision, and nation- alization of services); the real eight-hour day (in the home as well as the factory); wages for housework; free choice of profession for women (re- jecting assumptions about womens work); and genuine sexual freedom

(beyond abortion reform and civil marriage).²⁷

The KPD leaders tried to make this local militancyconform with its official line. And the KPDs size and militancycontinued to attract radicals angrywith the SPDs compromising: this applied to radical women no less

than radical men. Among German parties, the KPD did have the strongest program of womens liberation, including not onlyfreeing women from the home, via the right to work, socializing domestic labor, and complete civil and professional equality, but also reproductive rights to birth control and abortion. In short, the KPDs assumptions about womens backwardness hardlyencouraged womens equalityin the movement, but it was still a place where womens political militancycould be articulated. Later in the

1920s, this took surprisinglydeveloped forms.²⁸

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE GENDERING OF CITIZENSHIP

One effect of the war was a new prominence of the state in domestic life: if husbands, fathers, and male breadwinners were absent, then womens resulting new presence needed attention. The earliest example was help for soldiers wives, and as war continued expenditure escalated. ByJuly

1918 in Britain, 1.5 million wives and 1.5 million dependent relatives were receiving armyseparation allowances (plus several million children), re- quiring 120 million pounds per year, or two-thirds of annual central gov- ernment spending before 1914. Government became involved in four ad- ditional areas: general income support and poor relief for the hardships of the war; controlling shortages and prices (especiallyfood and rents); social services for working women; and moral anxietyabout the absence of men, stressing disruption of marriages and the crisis of fertility, the spread of prostitution, sexuallytransmitted diseases, youth criminalityand control of children, and womens sexual independence.

Just when the familywas not there, it became vital to insist on its presence. Womens de facto independencethe unhusbanding of women, in a phrase of the timefed fears of moral endangerment. It not onlymade women heads of households and breadwinners, it also conjured huge anx- ieties around female autonomy, lack of restraint, and the abnormal ex- citement following removal of the husbands or fathers moral authority. The further connection, from unhusbanding and immoralityto militancy and troublemaking, was easy.

Domestic surveillance of women and families bypolice and social work- ers was universal among the First World Wars combatant governments. Welfare payments gave the leverage. In Britain, soldiers allowances were tied to the domestic competence and sexual chastityof wives, first through the volunteer casework of the Soldiers and Sailors Families Association and then directlyvia government in the StatutoryCommittee of military, political, and philanthropic representatives (1915) and the new Ministryof Pensions (1916).²⁹ In France and Germany, factory nurses or social workers

(companyhousewives) coordinated working womens needs for child-

care, housing, nutrition, and health, while encouraging sobrietyand orderly living. The German state created the Womens Department attached to the new War Office in November 1916, under the social worker and future liberal parliamentarian Marie-Elisabeth Lu ders. It wanted to ensure

healthysocial relations for after the war, which meant in the first instance protection of the family.³⁰

Despite womens unprecedented autonomy, these measures carefully constructed their entitlements as a dependencyon men. Payments of allow- ance directlyto women undoubtedlyreinforced their wartime indepen- dence: It seems too good to be true, a pound a week and myhusband away, in one British wifes words.³¹ But supporting women and children remained a strictlymale responsibilityfor which the state temporarilystood in. This model of social citizenship made motherhood the ideological complement to soldiering. If recognition of womens wartime contribu- tion was mediated through their husbands, the effects of their independence as workers and household managers might be contained. This over- determining impact of the war decisivelychanged the meanings of welfare for women, both as recipients and practitioners, tightening the institutional and discursive links to the state.³²

Here, social democrats were entirelycomplicit. Theyfound recognition of public responsibilityveryattractive. Soldiers allowances fixed the prin- ciple of the states obligation to its (male) citizenryin a language of social citizenship, attaching social rights to social roles like soldiering or working. Charities, the private apparatus of middle-class moral reform, were finally replaced bystate-provided welfare, which socialists would eventuallycon- trol. The Labour Partyin Britain saw the Ministryof Pensions, headed by the trade-union parliamentarian George Barnes, as a building-block for the welfare state. The SPD in Germanywas less successful in establishing public control. As in Britain, the labor movements local government strength de facto dominated social services deliveryafter 1918, but the religiouslyor- ganized private charities survived in the confusing tangle of laws composing the Weimar Republics welfare sector. Nowhere were womens rights given autonomous recognition. When womens benefits were extendedin Brit- ain for unemployed workers dependents (1921) and widows pensions

(1925, 1929)it was in virtue again of dependent status. Women remained secondarybeneficiaries of their husbands rights.

Reformist socialists congratulated themselves. Social needs were re- moved from the moralizing of middle-class charitable visitors to become the nations public responsibility. Family welfare became a class demand, legitimatelyvoiced bythe labor movements. Social rights became attached to citizenship. These lines ran directlyto post-1945 welfare states. But the erasure of working-class women as democratic agents with rights separate from husbands reflected deeplyconservative assumptions about womens proper place. This emerged instantlyin the revolutionaryturbulence of

191723, when German and Austrian Social Democrats anxiouslyde-

fended their own moral reliability, as women arrived for the first time as voters. Theyhad no interest in free love, in introducing a whore econ- omy, or in removing children from mothers to the charge of the state, theyinsisted. These were fairystories spread bydemagogues and priests.³³

The SPD was the protector of the working-class family. It upheld civil equality and equal pay, but its priority for women was the family: sup- porting families-in-need via benefits, home visiting, and advice centers; ma- ternal and child protection; contraception and abortion, ideallythrough citywide family care agencies; adequate housing and a family wage; ethical partnership in marriage and democratic child-raising. This was the

social workerseye view of working-class daily life. It reflected both the SPDs local government dominance in newlydemocratized urban Germany and a new professional cadre of socialist doctors, teachers, and social work- ers in public life. Social Democrats took a didactic and patronizing view of the working-class poor, separating respectable working families from the rough and disorderlyresiduum, whom the state needed to manage. Working-class familylife became either the solid fundament of socialist culture or the pathologyrequiring cure. The social democratic familywas an ideal in which the roughness of the poor could be recast. The skilled, regularly employed, unionized working class displayed the orderly family living that SPD ideologydesired.

These familyimages had little emancipatorypromise. As mothers and social workers, women appeared as agents of familymoralization, not the autonomous political subjects whom dismantling the familycould free. Whether through the budding welfare-statism of SPD cities or housing re- form and campaigns for rationalizing housework, socialist social policy made dependent places for women, bounded bythe home. In the domestic sphere, socialist creativitymostlyconcerned the youngfree school exper- iments, child republics, and youth movementsleaving sex-gender dis- tinctions in the familyalone. At the SPDs Heidelberg Congress in 1925, one Leipzig woman delegate accused SPD men of failing to introduce socialism into their own families.³⁴ But such critiques were rare.

Validating motherhood in a separate-spheres ideologywas institution- alized in the SPD after the opening of female membership in 1908.³⁵ Before

1914, the SPD still stressed the oppressiveness of private propertyorganized through the familyand the liberating necessityof womens productive la- bor. But with the wartime split, Marie Juchacz and others now celebrated womens reproductive contribution to the nation: as mothers of future gen- erations, theybecame a priorityof national policy. In taking its place inside the maternalist consensus, the SPD typified the socialist parties of the old north-central European social democratic coreGermanyand Austria, the Czech lands, the Low Countries, Scandinavia.³⁶

In the British Labour Party, womens activism was less wholly shaped bythe politics of social work. Women activists were still shunted into ed-

ucation, health, and social services. Union bloc voting rigged annual Con- ferences against feminist resolutions, and comparable worth strategies failed to budge the traditional line of equal payfor equal work, which directlybenefited women less. Yet in 1929 Labours first woman cabinet minister, Margaret Bondfield, took the Ministryof Labour rather than a welfare brief, and other leading women MPs, like Susan Lawrence and Ellen Wilkinson, made a point of speaking for the whole movement, with- out distinction of gender. During the 1920s Labour women enlivened mu- nicipal socialism bystrong grassroots movements around working-class welfare, including birth control and familyallowances, insisting that sex issues were reallyclass issues. What most separated Labour women from feminists in single-sex organizations, notwithstanding overlaps of member- ship, was the feeling that the latter were middle-class individualists insen- sitive to the working class.³⁷

FEMINISM BETWEEN THE WARS

What about feminism per se? Enfranchisement problematized feminisms future direction. Suffrage agitations had always raised other issues, con- cerning womens social, sexual, and civil identities. But wartime patriot- ismwith the exception of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom, formed in 1915largelynarrowed the debate. Following through on equalityof citizenship byattacking sex discrimination and cam- paigning for equal paywas one response to winning the vote, but it was eclipsed in most countries bya new feminist maternalism. By191718 prominent British feminists like Eleanor Rathbone and Maude Royden were advocating a national endowment for motherhood, and Rathbones tireless propaganda through the FamilyEndowment Committee captured postwar feminist agendas. Her tract, The Disinherited Family (1924), sought to shift feminism primarilyonto maternalist ground.

Rathbone was president of the National Union of Societies for Equal

Citizenship (NUSEC), British feminisms umbrella organization, during

191928.³⁸ The NUSEC initiallybacked an orthodox equality feminism, embracing equal suffrage, equal pay, equal opportunities for employment, equal moral standards for divorce, equal parental rights, and pensions for widows with dependent children. But by1925, Rathbone added birth con- trol and familyallowances in a verydifferent overall perspective, invoking patriotic motherhood-as-citizenship arguments to insist that real equality transcended equal opportunities with men. It stressed what was valuable and different in women themselves:

True equalitymeant freeing these women from economic dependence on their husbands bygranting equal honor and financial support to their work in womens sphere. This could not be done through old

feminist campaigns for equal payand open access to mens jobs; la- bor market reforms would not answer the needs of the unwaged. Only State intervention could do so; welfare programs could circumvent the labor market to provide independent support for mothers.³⁹

Equalityfeminism vigorouslyresistedvia the London Societyfor Womens Service under Rayand Pippa Strachey, the Womens Freedom League, the Six Point Group, and the weeklyjournal Time and Tide. When new feminists pushed another maternalist demand, protective legislation for women workers, equalityfeminists regrouped in the Open Door Council in May1926. The NUSEC annual council passed a motion supporting protective legislation by81 to 80 votes in March 1927. An attempt to reassert equal payas the main priorityover birth control and familyallow- ances was defeated, and 11 of the 23 members of the newlyelected exec- utive resigned. This divisive debateplus the completion of womens en- franchisement in 1928ended British feminisms unitybetween the wars. The conflict reflected larger visions.⁴⁰ For equalityfeminists, equal pay struck at the heart of the underlying gender assumptions whose persistence familyallowances helped entrench; byforegrounding the latter, new femi- nists were perpetuating inequalitys root cause. New feminists, on the other hand, saw themselves mounting a more imaginative challenge to existing gender relations, which were based on the male breadwinner norm and the ideologyof the familywage. Familyallowances payable directlyto the mother would break the chain of female subordination, recognize the na- tional interest in maternity, and constitute motherhood as citizenship. But in practice, Rathbones proposals were easilystolen bythe state, as in the laws for widows pensions in 1925 and 1929, which efficientlyassimilated her thinking to the prevailing masculinist rationale. In this sense, mater- nalist feminism was a trap. Severed from political alliances and lacking economic and institutional power, Rathbone and other new feminists couldnt win byrhetoric alone: in the end their maternalist, separate but equal ideologywas pressed into service in the creation of policies encoding

dependence, not the value of difference.⁴¹

Bythe 1930s, feminists in Europe more generallywere at an impasse. In north-central Europe, the vote was won. In the USSR, legal emancipation seemed veryadvanced, although the outlawing of abortion, restriction of divorce, and criminalizing of homosexualitywould shortlytell a verydif- ferent story. In western Europe, equality legislation begrudgingly ensued. In Britain, this included the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919, technicallyopening public appointments and professions; the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923, equalizing divorce; and the Guardianship of Infants Act in 1925, improving mothers rights. But such reforms mainlysought to head feminists off. Discrimination typically regrouped to impede womens progress via marriage bars in teaching, civil service, and public

employment. Economic dependency negated womens ability to enjoy legal equalities of choice.

If women joined social democratic parties, theywere typecast as car- ing auxiliaries in fields like welfare or health, finding feminist goals blocked bymale decision-making structures.⁴² Communist parties were more promising but also stifled gender politics byunrelenting proletari- anism. The dailypractice of left-wing movements was riddled with mas- culine prejudices that rarelywere honestlyfaced. Even worse, counterrev- olutionary repressionin Hungary, Italy, and Europes eastern and southern peripheriesreversed postwar gains or hardened existing gender oppressions. New right-wing mobilizations, disastrouslythreatening for women, started in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere in the West.

Feminist maternalismworking sexual difference into a program sought to make womens special nature into an instrument of empower- ment rather than oppression. Given male resistance to admitting women on equal terms, this took men at their word, coopting the idea of irreducible differences based in biologyand asserting motherhoods centralityas a pub- lic value. It, rather than the fruitless quest for equal pay, would be the basis of womens independence, the argument ran, because once the state en- dowed womens role in the family through a system of direct payments, the case for the male breadwinner norm, the need for men to support a familyon their own wage, fell away.

But social conservatives alreadycommanded the language of maternal- ism. Policy-makersin government, business, parties, unions, churches, pressmade motherhood keyto postwar normalizing. Maternalism was the medium of gender restoration, returning women to the home; and by equating motherhood with citizenship, British new feminists like Rathbone moved womens demands exactlywhere conservatives preferred. As mater- nalism seemed the onlygame in town, feminists joined in, bending things toward their own agenda. Antifamilyradicalism promised onlymarginali- zation. But left-wing maternalism remained a fateful choice: byembracing maternitys virtues, new feminists learned a language that already assigned women a lesser, poverty-ridden, and dependent place.

Rathbones was not the onlyBritish feminist voice, and her opponents stayed active in many areas of public, professional, and intellectual life, as new political agendas became composed.⁴³ Bythe 1930s, moreover, the contrast between equal rights and new feminist positions was often blurred, not least in the Labour Party, where they were caught in a rich and complex web of interlocking dialogues about the nature of the party and its relationship to the British state.⁴⁴ But in most of Europe, Com- munist and left-socialist support for womens civil and economic equality, social democratic welfarism, and the varietyof reformist and right-wing maternalisms left European feminists little independent spaceas, for ex- ample, the contrast between Madeleine Pelletiers Communist period in

192025 and her individualized efforts of the 1930s onlytoo tragically showed.⁴⁵ On the other hand, social changes were proceeding that over the longer term required feminist response: the birthrate did decline, families did become smaller, women were more visible in public, the woman and sex questions were discussed differently, and the role of doctors did in- crease.⁴⁶ In the 1920s, these and other questions affecting women were still awaiting the Lefts programmatic attention.

EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Official socialist and Communist views of sexualityitself were extremely conservative. While youthful working-class sexuality inevitably found its own way, party cultures stressed self-control. The Austrian Socialists were typical. Sexuality should be shaped and constrained to produce an or- dentliche (orderly, decent and respectable) family, laying the ghost of sex- ual decadence and promiscuityand bringing the partycredit. There was no space for the sexual independence of women. Such thoughts bowed to the familys affective needs. Measured by the latter, youth sexuality was an unhealthydisturbance, comparable to smoking and drink, for which the

cold showering of physical exercisein the Workers Association for

Sports and BodyCulturewas the answer.⁴⁷

Nevertheless, sexology, or the scientific construction of sexual knowl- edge around naturalized ideas of health and well-being, began to authorize a new openness about sexual pleasure. A new genre of marriage manuals encouraged women to see themselves as sexual agents, including Marie Stopess Married Love (1918), selling four hundred thousand copies by

1923; Theodor van de Veldes Her Volkomen Huwelijk (1926), translated byStella Browne as Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (1928), with editions in all other European languages; and Helena Wrights book The Sex Factor in Marriage (1930). Fiercelyrejecting the conventional estimate of womens sexual apathy as a mechanism of male control, Stella Browne expounded a politics of reproductive rights focused on birth con- trol, abortion, and womens sexual self-determination.⁴⁸ Population poli- tics, maternalism, and the growth of womens citizenship were also bringing sexual relations into political vision.

In Weimar Germany, a remarkable sex reform movement flourished. Growing from local working-class birth control leagues, it blossomed into a panoplyof educational, counseling, and clinical services, guided bya militant ideologyof working-class entitlement. By1928, the movement converged with medical networks and labor movement welfare organs. The League for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene formed a national umbrella with the Societyfor Sexual Reform, broadlyaligned with the SPD but rivaled in 1929 bythe apolitical League for the Protection of Mothers and Social FamilyHygiene. Despite the divisive launch of a rival Communist

organization in April 1931, cooperation continued among Communist, SPD, liberal, and nonaligned left-wing doctors, social workers and other activists, reaching its zenith in the 1931 campaign for abortion reform and the undergrowth of sex clinics in Berlin, Hamburg, and elsewhere.⁴⁹ The movements leadership was still mainlymale centered, indebted to mater- nalist and eugenicist assumptions. But it did make ordinarypeoples sexual enjoyment and womens right to reproductive freedom into serious political matters and came closest to allowing a woman-centered sexual politics to break through.

Sex reform reflected the politicizing of domesticityduring 191418. Child-raising, motherhood, and housewiferyentered politics under broadly maternalist auspices, and once the working-class home was opened up, not onlyto closer state regulation, but also as a legitimate sphere of polit- ical struggle, sexual relations came to the fore.⁵⁰ But sex reform had con- trarypotentials. If claiming privacyand everydaylife for politics could encourage emancipation, new opportunities for women, and new political alliances, it was also an invitation to control. Evoking Frederick Taylor and HenryFord under the banner of social rationalization, new managerial ideologies engendered a powerful conception of the mobility-oriented nu- clear family: comprising a skilled worker risen to plant engineer, a hygiene-conscious housewife, a boy in whose education a maximum of moneyand effort was invested, and a decentlyeducated daughter who worked in the office until marriage, with a well-groomed, discreetlyfash- ionable appearance.⁵¹ Ideas like this also captured the Lefts imagination in the 1920s, permeating the common sense of the labor movement.⁵²

Grandiose speculations were voiced. Reflecting on Fordism, Gramsci saw modernityrequiring a transformation of sexual culture, for the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production . . . cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitablyregulated.

It seems clear that the new industrialism wants monogamy: it wants the man as worker not to squander his nervous energies in the disor- derlyand stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction. The employee who goes to work after a night of excess is no good for his work. The exaltation of passion cannot be reconciled with the timed movements of productive motions connected with the most per- fect automatism.⁵³

But the Left shared too easilyin this discourse not of its own making. Women were unlikelyto benefit from ideas clinicallysubordinating their sexuality, where the wife waiting at home became just another per- manent machine part.⁵⁴ If sex reform promised womens emancipation, rationalization returned it to a new regime of regulation.

Rationalization also invaded the sphere of consumption, shaping new languages of advertising, fashion, and design. But if efficiency provided

one model of consuming, in kitchens, furnishings, and the products of mod- ern cheap design, dreaming was another, borne bynew entertainment media of radio, gramophone, and film, in the expressive codes of fashion and style. The emerging culture of consumption had collective expressions, partlyin the physical arenas of picture palaces and dance halls, partlyin the sociabilityof tightlyknit working-class neighborhoods. Another con- text was supplied bythe newlyflourishing keep fit movements of the

1930s, sometimes regimented bythe state, as in Fascist Italyand Nazi Germany, but often affording a new space of female companionship, self- affirmation, and autonomous pleasure in [the] body.⁵⁵ The British Womens League of Health and Beauty, with its 170,000 members

where standardized precision movement was performed bywomen vol- untarilyseeking fun and fitnessreflected the same cult of rationalization. Its members were women of the Machine Age, for whom the machine meant employment, consumer goods, modernity, individuality, pleasure.⁵⁶

The Left rarelygrasped the importance of the new woman. Feminists were dismayed. Can [young women] really follow a difficult scientific demonstration or a complex piece of music, can theyreallyfeel the inten- sities of admiration or love when a good part of their thoughts is concerned with the question Is it time to powder mynose again?⁵⁷ Young womens pleasure-seeking was frivolous and tawdry, male socialists complained. On his travels through northern England, George Orwell saw onlythe same sheeplike crowdgaping girls and shapeless middle-aged women dozing over their knitting.⁵⁸ Worse, female consumers betrayed their class. They were a fifth column of bourgeois materialist values and cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. Of course, the postwar development of cheap luxuries has been a veryfortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likelythat fish and chips, artificial silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the football pools have between them averted revolution.⁵⁹