Feminism, Pragmatism or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism and the Woman Question, 1898–1914

During a debate on the franchise reform bill in the Austrian Reichsrat on 12 September 1906, the Czech National Socialist Party deputy Václav Choc demanded that suffrage be extended to women as well as men. Otherwise, Choc asserted, the women of Austria would be consigned to the same status as “criminals and children.” Choc was certainly not the only Austrian parliamentarian to voice his support for votes for women during the debates on franchise reform. However, his party, the most radical of all the Czech nationalist political factions, was unique in that it not only included women's suffrage in its official program, as the Social Democrats had done a decade earlier, but also worked hard to change the political status of women in the Monarchy while the Social Democrats generally paid only lip service to this goal. Moreover, Choc and his colleagues in the National Socialist Party helped change the terms of the debate about women's rights by explicitly linking the “woman question” to the “national question” in ways entirely different from the prevailing discourse of liberalism infin-de-siècleAustria. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers, whether German or Czech, tried to mold the participation of women in political life to fit the liberal view of a woman's “proper” role in society. By contrast, the radical nationalists who rose to prominence in Czech political culture only after 1900, attempted to recast the debate over women's rights as central to their two-pronged discourse of social and national emancipation, while at the same time pressing for the complete democratization of Czech political life at all levels, not merely in the imperial parliament. In so doing, and with the active but often necessarily covert collaboration of women associated with the party, these radical nationalists helped extend the parameters of the debate over the place Czech women had in the larger national society.