EDITH KURZWEIL
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and economic development. Moreover, she supported a variety of other fem–
inist imtiatives, such as the Art School Association for Women and Girls, the
Association for Girls' Support, and the Vienna Association of Housewives.
She pressed for the admission of women to grammar school because
"woman as the moral educator of her children needs schooling... [and
because] the most disgraceful injustice is done us at the side of the beloved
spouse." Her motto was
equal but different.
Together with Auguste Fickert, she was a leading member of the
League of Austrian Women's Associations
(Bund Osterreichischer
FrauenlJereine).
Fickert, however, had more far-reaching goals. She expected
to abolish capitalist exploitation (wage slavery) and personal exploitation
(sexual slavery), for which she postulated that women undergo an "inner
change... [that would] overcome the slave mentality which holds them
captive." To that end, women would need both intelligence and morali ty.
Among other things, they would have to become familiar with science; to
shed their doll-like existence; become personalities to themselves; and to
give politics a new content. Both working-class and middle-class women,
she maintained, would have to help social democracy to take hold. But she
stated that women could not do this by means of the prevalent norms of
self-sacrifice, love and devotion: they were to inspire morality by means of
a " political awareness that upsets the prevailing bourgeois masculine order
instead of preserving it." Thus both Hainisch and Fickert aimed to infuse
society wi th morals, but Fickert expected first to abolish power relations
while Hainisch thought power could be gotten via equal rights.
Another feminist, Rosa Meyreder, was an almost exact contemporary
of Freud. An autodidact and admirer of Goethe and Nietzsche who kept
up with what Freud published, she was a psychologizing thinker. She
agreed with him that culture demands repression of sexuality, but attacked
the Oedipus complex, arguing that Oedipus slew his father unknowingly
and not from conscious rebellion as a son. Yet she assumed that not
all
men
opposed women's concerns, and did not want women to unite against
men, mostly because they would need their backing in order to pass pro–
women legislation in Parliament. In fact, many social reformers, university
professors, left-wing middle-class intellectuals, and liberals supported the
feminists up to a point. Among them were the social psychologist Ernst
Mach, the philosopher Friedrich Jodl, the wri ter Hermann Bahr, the physi–
cist Ludwig Bolzmann, as well as such socialist statesmen as Karl Renner,
Otto Bauer, and Victor Adler. However, their open support created a back–
lash: other men rejected and ridiculed them as liberals, non-Aryans,
socialists, and unhappy spouses, as "out to emancipate everything," and as
contributing to the "lamentable masculinization of women"-all of which
infiltrated the Freudians' debates at their Wednesday meetings.
