Men's feminism: August Bebel and the German socialist movement

Abstract

August Bebel (1840-1913) was Europe's foremost theorist of feminism and socialism and, as the author of the widely read Women and Socialism, was the populariser of a set of politics as seductive and contested today as they were in the last century. In the 1860s and 1870s, Bebel was a founder and leading figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the most outspoken and largest organisation anywhere in existence to support women's equality. What is exceptional about the early history of the party is the degree to which this overwhelmingly male organisation, with its membership recruited from the crafts and heavy industry (from which women were generally excluded), turned gender and women's equality into major considerations for itself. At a time when women were legally barred from participation in political activities in much of Germany and in most of the world, a core of men helped organise women workers, campaigned for women's suffrage, financially supported women's newspapers, and encouraged women-only elections. Through extensive primary and archival research, political scientist Ann Lopes and sociologist Gary Roth reconstruct the life of a man whose commitment to gender equality helped determine his choice of friends, his enunciation of socialist goals, his sponsorship of women colleagues, his child-rearing practices, and his scholarship. Bebel's connection to feminists and feminism is plotted chronologically, politically, and conceptually. The nuances and the contradictions of these developments tell us much about men and their relationship to women, both in Bebel's time and our own.