Year XXXVII, Number 2, July 2024

Silvia Romano
EU affairs professional, graduated at the College of Europe in Bruges. Member of the bureau of Presse Fédéraliste
and of the editorial board of the French federalist journal Fédéchoses

A brilliant and open-minded personality, multilingual and naturally “stranger to any nationalism", Rosika Schwimmer is personally committed to the feminist cause, helping to found in 1903 the major national and international feminist organization in her country of origin, Hungary, where she holds positions of responsibility. Driven by the urgent need to take action to prevent war at all costs and ensure lasting peace, she works on the link between pacifism and feminism, and she takes part in the creation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1915, of which she was a member of the board of directors. When World War II approached, and at a time when most of feminists put aside the advocacy for peace, Rosika Schwimmer persisted in her efforts, co-founding with Lola Maverick Lloyd, the first Campaign for World Government, aimed at achieving a democratic, non-military World Federation.

A leading figure in the feminist movement

Born on 11 September 1877 in Budapest (Austria-Hungary) in a middle-class Jewish family, Rosika Schwimmer was the eldest of three children.

She briefly attended primary school in Budapest and, after her family moved to Transylvania, she was educated in a convent. After graduating from State school in 1891, she studied music and languages in Szabadka (now Subotica). She spoke English, French, German and Hungarian and could read Dutch, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish. From 1893 to 1894, she attended evening classes at a business school, until her father's bankruptcy forced the family to return to Budapest.

Faced with economic issues, she began taking short-term jobs as accountant and correspondence clerk. In 1897, she began working for the Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete (National Association of Office Women), and became its president in 1901. Having experienced first-hand the difficulty of finding a decently paid job, at a time when women were discouraged from seeking economic independence, she decided to study the issue, collecting data to compile statistics. She therefore wrote to the Ministry of Trade to obtain data on women's employment and sought out archived copies of Nemzeti Nőnevelés (Women's National Education), the most important magazine of the time that analysed the condition of women in education and work.

In order to compare the situation in Hungary and elsewhere, Schwimmer contacted various international feminist organisations to gather statistics on women's working conditions in other countries. Through this correspondence, she came into contact with influential figures in the international women's movement, such as Aletta Jacobs, Marie Lang and Adelheid Popp.

At the end of 1901, Schwimmer started working as a journalist. She wrote for Export Review and Lloyd's News Agency, and became a regular contributor to international feminist magazines. Thanks to her work as a translator, books such as Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman have been published in Hungarian.

In 1903, together with Mariska Gárdos, Schwimmer founded the Magyarországi Munkásnő Egyesület (Association of Hungarian Women Workers), the first national women's organisation, of which she later became the president. The following year, she was invited, as press representative, to speak on the working conditions of female industrial workers in Hungary at the inaugural conference of the International Alliance of Women (IAW). There, she met many leading feminists acting at international level, including the American suffragist and founder of the IAW, Carrie Chapman Catt.

Once back, Schwimmer and Vilma Glücklich co-founded the Feministák Egyesülete (Hungarian Feminist Association), which was joined by other feminists such as Eugénia Miskolczy Meller. The association's mission was to promote gender equality in all aspects of women's lives, including education, employment, access to birth control, women's emancipation and inheritance rights, and the fight against child labour. In 1907, to counter the unfavourable treatment given to the Feminist Association by media, they founded the magazine A Nő és a Társadalom (Women and Society), with Rosika Schwimmer as editor-in-chief [i].

In 1913, together with the Hungarian Feminist Association, Schwimmer helped to organise the Seventh Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), held in Budapest from 15 to 21 June. This was the first event of its kind to be held in Austria-Hungary, attracting around 3,000 international delegates.

Feminism for pacifism

Attending the Universal Peace Congress in The Hague in August 1913, reinforced her interest in pacifism, already nurtured since an early age through the influence of her maternal uncle Leopold Katscher, a well-known writer and pacifist.

During the same years, she travelled extensively in Europe to give lectures, and worked as a correspondent for various European newspapers. As a result of her international visibility, she was invited to become press secretary of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which led her to move to London. When the First World War broke out, she started campaigning to end hostilities. In this context, she decided to resign from her position in the IWSA, fearing that her nationality would cause problems for the women's movement and for her own ability to continue campaigning for peace.

Branded an enemy alien, in 1914 Schwimmer left the United Kingdom and went to the United States with the intention of lobbying to end the war. Since then, she spoke in 22 different States, urging women to engage in diplomatic mediation.

In 1915, she helped in the creation of the Woman's Peace Party and became the organisation's secretary.

The same year, the biennial IWSA conference was postponed because of the war and suffragists decided to organise a congress in the Netherlands, as a neutral nation, to discuss the principles of international peace. At the International Women's Congress, held in The Hague from 28 April, Rosika Schwimmer and Julia Grace Wales, a Canadian academic, proposed to move forward by planning a « conference of neutral nations » with the aim of starting negotiations to end World War and restore peace. The conference saw the creation of the Women's International Committee for Permanent Peace, which later became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), with Rosika Schwimmer chosen as one of its board members.

After the conference closure on 3 May 1915, Rosika Schwimmer, Jane Addams and Aletta Jacobs, along with Chrystal Macmillan, Emily Greene Balch, Mien van Wulfften Palthe and other suffragettes, formed two women's delegations in charge of meeting European Heads of State over the following months. Despite the misgivings about the effectiveness of creating a mediation body, the foreign ministers agreed to participate, or at least not to prevent, the creation of an assembly of neutrals, on the condition that other nations agreed, and that the American President Woodrow Wilson took the initiative. However, in the middle of the war, President Wilson refused to take action.

Once back in the United States, Schwimmer perceived a change in the general feeling among feminists, as many of them feared that pacifism would harm the cause of suffrage. Her disappointment with most of her fellow feminists, including Carrie Chapman Catt, led her later to leave the LIFPL a few years later in 1927.

Determined to continue lobbying for a mediation conference, Schwimmer felt that if politicians and feminists did not act, it would be up to individuals to work to end the war. She hence decided to join other pacifists on the Peace Ship, chartered by the American businessman Henry Ford. As the vessel arrived in Norway on 18 December 1915 with no precise plan for ending the war and no strong leadership from Ford, the initiative was left without any follow-up. However, this experience costed Schwimmer not only the mockery and hostility of the press, but also the suspicion that she was a German spy or a Bolshevik agent because of her Hungarian origins.  Despite that, she persisted for several months, until health problems forced her to resign from the mission in March 1916.

She remained in Europe until the end of the war, and in 1918 returned to Hungary, which had become independent. During the short government of Mihály Károly (November 1918 - August 1919), Rosika Schwimmer was appointed ambassador to Switzerland, becoming one of the first women ambassadors in the world. In February 1919, in Berne, she organised a peace conference for the Women's International Committee for Permanent Peace; however, she was recalled to her post a few days before the communist coup d'état in March.

In 1920, Schwimmer moved to Vienna where she lived as a refugee, supported financially by her friend Lola Maverick Lloyd, until she obtained the permission to emigrate to the United States in 1921.

She renounced her Hungarian nationality and arrived in the United States on 26 August 1921, initially settling in Winnetka, near Chicago, with Lola Maverick Lloyd. When she wanted to resume her career as a journalist and lecturer, Schwimmer realised that she had been blacklisted because of her involvement in feminist and pacifist organisations, which were considered subversive and dangerous to national security.

In 1924, Schwimmer applied to become a naturalised American citizen. Her application was rejected because she refused to declare herself ready to take up arms to defend her country (it should be noted that women were not called upon to fight, and that this was a purely rhetorical question). She appealed unsuccessfully, and in 1929 the Supreme Court ruled on her case in United States vs. Schwimmer. Far from giving up her ideals, during one of the hearings she declared: « I am totally alien to nationalism, I have only the cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family ». She will remain stateless for the rest of her life and will work to raise awareness of the situation of stateless people.

«How can we start practical action to establish world peace now?»

In the early 1930s, she moved to New York, where she lived with her sister Franciska and her secretary Edith Wynner. She founded the World Center for Women's Archives with Mary Ritter Beard in 1935, with the aim of documenting the achievements of influential women, in order to provide references for the study of women's history.

In 1937, she was awarded an honorary prize for world peace created ad hoc for her by a group coordinated by Lola Maverick Lloyd, which included influential figures such as Albert Einstein, feminists Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Greene Balch, Harriot Stanton Blatch, writers Romain Rolland and Ignazio Silone, the mayor of New York Fiorello La Guardia, German feminists Anita Augspurg, Lida Gustava Heymann and others.

At the award ceremony on 4 December 1937 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the creation of the Campaign for World Government (CWG) was announced. The word "campaign" was chosen to emphasise the non-bureaucratic, agile and militant nature of the CWG. The CWG is not intended to be a "membership organisation"; it will remain a small vanguard group, even as it expands, with a membership of between 150 and 200 in the US and around the world [ii]. The CWG had two offices, the national in Chicago and the international in New York, headed respectively by Lloyd and Schwimmer, both with the title of international co-chairmen.

The founding document of the CWG is a pamphlet co-signed by Schwimmer and Lloyd, entitled Chaos, War or a New World Order? - What we must do to establish the all-inclusive non-military, democratic federation of nations. The core of the project took up an earlier proposal drawn up by Schwimmer and Lloyd in 1924. The text was intended as a genuine action plan « for all those who agree that we must stop theorizing about peace and put the best existing theories into practice. It offers an answer to the question: How can we begin to take concrete action to establish peace in the world, right now? », and sets out « the preliminary steps necessary for a representative World Convention to draft the best possible constitution for an inclusive, non-military, democratic Federation of Nations » [iii]. The members of the World Constitutional Convention should have been elected by the people, according to a uniform electoral system developed by a commission of international experts.

The new Constitution should provide for the immediate admission into the federation of all existing states on an equal footing, and not as in the League of Nations, where the great powers enjoy privileges as permanent members of the Security Council. All members would have the same number of representatives, ten, in the World Parliament. The latter, which then expressed the executive body or executive council, was also to be elected directly by the people [iv].

Elected representatives from the States would vote individually, not as a block, free to form groups or parties « along lines of opinion, not lines of geography », similarly to what we today call « transnational lists ». World citizens would have the rights and duties recognised by the States in which they reside, as well as citizenship rights guaranteed by the Federal government.

Each representative would be able to speak his or her mother tongue and respect the calendar of his or her country or religion[v] .

Although the proposed constitution differed in several respects from that of the United States (it made no provision for bicameralism or presidentialism), the inspiration of the American federal model was evident, as was, to a lesser extent, that of the Swiss model. Schwimmer's ideal was in fact the formation of the « United States of the World », organised on the basis of the constitution of the United States of America. As in the case of the United States, the federal government should have direct authority over individual citizens and not just, as in confederations or leagues, over the member States[vi] .

As far as the division of powers is concerned, the world government would deal with relations and matters of common interest between States, leaving State governments with full authority over national matters. States would be free and independent and enjoy "unlimited national sovereignty" – except «where their interdependence requires federal regulation» or «where [their sovereignty] conflicts with the common good of the world». Finally, in the name of interdependence and global well-being, it would become possible, indeed necessary, to manage almost everything collectively. «Federal commissions» would be responsible for managing the conversion to a peace economy through genuine economic planning. Other commissions would be responsible for dismantling customs, creating a common monetary system and integrating air, sea and land transport systems. Finally, the Federal government would communicate directly with citizens by telegraph, telephone and radio, and operate a centralised radio station[vii]. And still, questions remained, such as: how could adequate education and health systems be guaranteed everywhere? Who would be responsible for abolishing the death penalty? [viii]

Although the project was inspired by the American model, Schwimmer and Lloyd's CWG asserted an approach that was neither American-centric nor Eurocentric, but anti-colonial and universal. Schwimmer explained this exhaustively when the journalist Clarence K. Streit published its Union Now (1938). Streit, faced with the collapse of the League of Nations and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, proposed the formation of a "Federal Union", or even a federation of North Atlantic democracies. The Federal Union would have included the democratic countries, North America and Europe, together with their colonies and the white dominions of the British Empire [ix].

Schwimmer responded to Streit with her Union Now – For Peace or War (1939)[x] , a pamphlet in which she denounced the danger inherent in his project. For her, the union of the democracies, corresponding to the geopolitical heart of contemporary imperialism, would have been perceived by the other countries as an act of hostility, domination and power politics[xi] , and would have pushed them to unite and turn into an opposing front. Therefore, instead of being the first step towards the desired world federation, it would have divided the world into two blocks and given rise to the cruelest conflicts.

After the Second World War, the CWG split into two groups under the leadership of the two branches in New York and Chicago. However, they participated, independently but often converging, in transatlantic federalist movements that focused on grassroots constitutional initiative (the so-called grassroots or people's convention movements, which criticised the United Nations as an instrument of governments rather than citizens, as they had done with the League of Nations, and which were sometimes behind the creation of the United Nations [xii]) [xiii].

Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948, Rosika Schwimmer died of pneumonia on 3 August 1948 in New York, before the Committee anyways decided not to award it that year.

*Published in French in the magazine Fédéchoses – pour le Fédéralisme (edited by Presse Fédéraliste), this article belongs to the column FédéFemmes, devoted to portraits of female federalism activists who were great thinkers ahead of their time, writers, philosophers, politicians, members of anti-fascist resistance whose stories are little known. Besides their role in federalism, these women share a common distinctive character, their commitment to the feminist cause. In fact, many of them played key roles in leading feminist organisations at national and at international level, they founded and edited magazines on feminist issues, wrote and advocated for women's rights.

^[i] In 1913, the magazine changed its name to A Nő (The Woman).

^[ii] Arnaldo Testi, Alle origini di una utopia pacifista transnazionale: Rosika Schwimmer e la fondazione della Campaign for World Government (1937-1938), in Genesis: rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche. A. VIII - N. 2: Femminismi senza frontiere, Ed. Viella 2009, p. 66.

^[iii]  Lola Maverick Lloyd, Rosika Schwimmer, Chaos, War or a New World Order?, second draft, May 1938, published by Campaign for World Government, 166 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, p.3.

[iv]  Ibidem p.4.

[v] Ibidem p.5.

[vi]  A. Testi, op. cit, p.78.

[vii]  L. M. Lloyd, R. Schwimmer, op. cit. pp. 5-6.

[viii]  A. Testi, op. cit, p.79.

[ix]  Clarence K. Streit, Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic, New York, Harper, 1938, pp. 31-35, in A. Testi, op. cit. p. 80.

[x]  Rosika Schwimmer, Union Now-For Peace or War? The Danger in the Plan of Clarence Streit, Chicago, CWG, 1939.

[xi] Similar criticisms to those put forward by Rosika Schwimmer were expressed by George Orwell in his article Not Counting Niggers, published in July 1939. Orwell emphasised the colonialist nature of Streit's North Atlantic project, which would only reinforce the imperialist logics on which the world order was based, and which had led to war and discrimination against non-white populations: “what sense would it make, even if successful, to bring down the Hitler system in order to stabilise something far greater and, in its own way, just as bad?”

^[xii] Ibidem p.68.

^[xiii] For an in-depth look at the genesis and development of the world federalist movements, see Jean Francis Billion, The World Federalist Movements from 1945 to 1954 and European Integration, in The Federalist, Year XXXIII, 1991, Number 1 - p.28, available here: https://www.thefederalist.eu/site/index.php/en/essays/1892-the-world-federalist-movements-from-1945-to-1954-and-european-integration#_edn4