Algo sobre el derecho indiano y el régimen municipal hispanoamericano

Co-existing with fin-de-siècle romanticization of the city, but decidedly distinct from male visions of a seductive city inhabited by compliant serving wenches and whores, was the world of the Czech feminist movement. Nineteenth-century Czech women had had few rights and little opportunity for education or for well-paid work outside the home. During the course of the century, however, they, like French, German, English, and Russian women, had developed a feminist movement. Initially a bourgeois movement of modest goals, with time it encompassed a wider range of social classes and became more daring in its demands.¹⁰ Its close relationship

opakuje téměř vždy, kdykoliv mne zastihne klekání nad oním černým jezerem hvězdných střech, jsem kdysi sloučil v své mysli s představou jakési absolutní defenestrace...” (Vítězslav Nezval, Pražský chodec [Labyrint, 2003], 58.)

10 Discussions of late Imperial Czech feminism include: Pavla Horská, Naše prababičky feministky (Prague:

Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1999); Marie L. Neudorflová, České ženy v 19. století: Úsilí a sny, úspěchy i zklamání na cestě k emancipaci (Prague: Janua, 1999); Karen Johnson Freeze, “Medical Education for Women in Austria: A Study in the Politics of the Czech Women’s Movement in the 1890s,” in Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe, ed. Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 51–63;

Katherine David, “Czech Feminists and Nationalism in the Late Hapsburg Monarchy: ‘The First in Austria’,”

Journal of Women’s History 3, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 26–45; Iveta Jusová, “Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms: The Development of Feminist Narratives Within the Discourses of British Imperialism and Czech Nationalism” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford, Ohio: Miami University, 2000); Jitka Malečková, “Nationalizing Women and Engendering the Nation: The Czech

with nationalism, however, immediately separated Czech feminists from their ethnic German and Jewish sisters in the Bohemian lands. Indeed, fin-de-siècle feminist rhetoric had often proposed that Czech men must sympathize with the cause because Czech men, too, were oppressed. As one activist stated, “The Czech man, feeling how the denial of national and political equality hurts, angers, and inflames a thinking person, certainly will not prepare the same fate for the women of his nation: his mother, wife, daughters, sisters.”¹¹

When feminists in the Czech lands achieved many of their goals with the foundation of the First Republic in 1918, this success was due not only to the hard work of Czech feminists, but also to the ongoing support of the new president, the philosopher Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, as well as that of his American wife, Charlotte Garrigue Masaryková, who had translated John Stuart Mill’s influential On the Subjugation of Women.¹² Masaryk’s Progressive Party had cooperated with local suffragettes, and during most of the period 1905–1915 his journal Naše doba (Our Era) had carried a monthly column on women’s issues.¹³ The 1918 Washington Declaration, which proclaimed the founding of Czechoslovakia, announced “Women will enjoy the same political, social, and cultural rights as men.” The new constitution followed up on this

National Movement,” in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed.

Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), 293–310; Helene Volet-Jeannert, La Femme bourgeoise à Prague, 1860–1895, de la philanthropie à l’emancipation (Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 1988).

11 “Český muž, cítě sám na sobě, jak uvědomělého člověka bolí, zlobí a bouří odpírání národnostní a politické rovnoprávnosti, zajisté nebude stejný osud připravovati ženám svého národa: svým matkám, manželkám, dcerám, sestrám.” (“Ženské hnutí. Volební právo žen,” Naše doba 19 [April 1912]: 554, translated in David, “Czech Feminists and Nationalism,” 35.)

12 See Marie Neudorfl, “Masaryk and the Women’s Question,” in Thinker and Politician, vol. 1 of T. G. Masaryk (1850–1937), ed. Stanley B. Winters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 258–82, for an overview of Masaryk’s feminism. See also David, “Czech Feminists and Nationalism,” 30. Evans points out that Mill’s 1869 essay “was the feminist bible” and was almost immediately translated into several languages, coinciding with the appearance of feminist movements in France, Germany, Finland, and possibly elsewhere. (Richard J. Evans, The Feminists:

Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920 [London/New York: Croom Helm/Barnes & Noble Books, 1977], 19.)

13David, “Czech Feminists and Nationalism,” 31.

promise, stating, “Privileges of race, gender, and profession are not recognized.”¹⁴ It did not require nationalist fervor for Czechoslovak women to see the new state as cause for optimism.

They officially gained the vote in 1920, whereas French women would not vote until 1944. The First Republic prided itself on its liberalism and attention to gender equality; some Western feminists even considered Czechoslovakia a “paradise of the modern woman.”¹⁵ Divorce was eased in 1919 and new laws abolished the requirement that women employed in the civil service be unmarried, and also acknowledged their right to the same salary as men.

Masaryk’s support of feminism would continue throughout his presidency, which lasted nearly the whole of the First Republic. During this period, Czech women not only attained the vote and achieved better educational options, but they branched out occupationally, becoming not just artists but even pilots, motorcyclists, and racecar drivers. The mainstream women’s magazine Eva made a point of presenting photo essays of women from all over the world in unusual fields of endeavor and by providing a department on women and work in each issue.

Toyen and her urban Czech contemporaries, therefore, experienced the excitements of a feminist movement at its peak. They studied school subjects previously unknown to girls, played games and sports recently the sole province of boys and men, and heard grown-ups discussing women’s suffrage. They began to wear corsetless undergarments, and filled in for male workers during the War. In other words, their experience, while uniquely Czech, was comparable to that of British, French, German, American, and Scandinavian women. While Toyen was an exceptional woman in more ways than one, her choices about both employment and personal

14Eva Uchalová, et al., Czech Fashion, 1918–1939: Elegance of the Czechoslovak First Republic, ed. Andreas Beckmann, trans. Štěpán Suchochleb (Prague: Olympia Publishing House in cooperation with the Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM), 1996), 11. The Washington Declaration was released by Masaryk in Washington, DC.

15 Europe Centrale, 24 August 1929, quoted in XXX, “Le Féminisme en Tchécoslovaquie,” Revue Française de Prague 8, no. 46 (December 1929): 410.

relationships were shaped by larger societal circumstances, during the First Republic as well as under Austria-Hungary. We will see that becoming a working artist was compatible with gender expectations of the interwar period, while remaining single and avoiding setting up household with a man safeguarded her career.

Recent scholarship, however, has emphasized that First Republic Czechoslovakia was not quite the paradise recalled by its nostalgic survivors. Though it was a relatively successful democracy, not only did it struggle with the question of minority rights, but the Masaryk and Beneš governments did not succeed in creating the gender-equal state guaranteed in the constitution. Throughout the First Republic, feminists and legal scholars were preoccupied with the revision of inherited Austrian legal codes relating to family law, a project which never came to satisfactory resolution.

Active feminism worldwide, however, suffered a decline after World War I, in part due to its very gains regarding education, employment, suffrage, and political activity.

Czechoslovakia was no exception. Once women had the vote, feminist organizations tended to collapse or contract. Still, interest in women’s issues did not die away. In 1922, the Ženská národní rada (Women’s National Council) was established, uniting more than 50 existing women’s associations. Throughout the interwar period, however, Czech feminists continued to tie feminism to nationalism and to emphasize sexual purity, a stance that made feminism unappealing to the younger generation.¹⁶ Women of Toyen’s generation often perceived older feminists as outdated due to their emphasis on purity and temperance, which combined badly with jazz-age interest in Freud, contraception, sexual pleasure, and social drinking.

16 For example, see Věra Babáková, “Masaryk a mravní základ ženského hnutí,” in Masaryk a ženy (Prague: Ženská národní rada, 1930), 260–63, and other contributors to the same volume such as Alois Hajn.

However, while interwar Czechs believed women had a right to intellectual and political equality, in practice, women’s rights remained subsidiary to the rights of the family and nation, and did not take precedence over their womanhood. In other words, while legal equality was considered a desirable part of democracy, this did not mean significant changes in gender roles, which were believed to be defined by nature. Women were expected to vote and take some part in civic life, but the roles of wife and mother were deeply valued. Double-income families were regarded as taking jobs from the unemployed.¹⁷ Nonetheless, most women worked outside the home at some point, and throughout the interwar period close to a quarter of Czech women had jobs. Professional women such as Toyen were unusual not in that they worked outside the home, but in that they had true careers.

How, then, did Toyen and other Czech women artists fit into this newly liberated, yet incompletely equal, milieu? Toyen and many other women attended the renowned UMPRŮM (School of Decorative Arts), which was founded in 1885.¹⁸ But while Czech girls had had access to college-preparatory education since the 1890s, began receiving university degrees at the turn of the century, and were well represented in art and design schools, few women were particularly visible on the Prague art scene. Though the artist Zdenka Braunerová had been a well-respected personality among fin-de-siècle writers and intellectuals, mentions of female artists in First Republic journalism are relatively scarce. Toyen and the sculptor Hana Wichterlová were almost the only women artists consistently mentioned in the press, despite the existence of and occasional mention of many more working female artists.

17 See Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). Feinberg’s pioneering work provides a framework for my discussion of Czechoslovak women’s political situation and adherence to feminist principles during the First Republic.

18Eva Uchalová, Czech Fashion from the Waltz to the Tango, trans. Capricorn Promotions (Prague: Olympia Publishing House in cooperation with the Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM), 1997), 18.

As an artist, Toyen herself was both representative and exceptional. She was representative in being something of a New Woman—she worked, wore pants, smoked—and like many women she attended UMPRŮM rather than the fine art academy. But she was also very much an exception. How? First, she was a member of the avant-garde, having joined the Devětsil group in 1923 with her male associates Jindřich Štyrský and Jiří Jelínek. The only other women known to have joined Devětsil were the dancer Mira Holzbachová and the columnist Jaroslava Václavková, while the only other woman in the original Prague surrealist group, Katy King, was more a supporter than an active poet. Toyen was the only female visual artist in either group during the interwar period.

Second, Toyen presented herself differently than most of her contemporaries. Fellow members of the Czech avant-garde often commented on her spoken use of the masculine gender, which struck them as bizarre. We have seen that Jaroslav Seifert recalled how one night she exclaimed “Já jsem malíř smutnej”— I am an unhappy male painter—rather than the gender-appropriate “Já jsem malířka smutná.” Fellow Devětsil member Adolf Hoffmeister captured her most tellingly as “Ten-Ta-To-yen” in his 1930 caricature for the cover of the Prague arts paper Rozpravy Aventina. In this brilliantly perceptive sketch, Hoffmeister presents Toyen wearing trousers but casting a skirted shadow with fish in her bosom, a bird for a head, and a drafting triangle for an arm. Via the title “Ten-Ta-To-yen” he gives us a witty grammar lesson of that male, that female, that neuter creature whose gender and nature cannot be pinned down. Toyen did not adopt the kind of stereotypical lesbian persona visible in photos of the writer Lida Merlínová. She attracted male admirers within and beyond the Devětsil group, although she spurned both the architect Bedřich Feuerstein and her school friend Alen Diviš and claimed that

her partnership with Štyrský was platonic. Thus, her persona was complex and intriguing in its gender ambiguity.

Toyen’s difference from her female contemporaries was hardly limited to her public persona, however. Many women in the early avant-garde, if not so many in Prague, presented themselves as lesbian, bisexual, or simply opposed to old codes of femininity. Few, however, were as bold in their artistic representations of gender and sexuality. Very few took on these themes in art at an early age. Toyen’s oeuvre includes a significant body of erotica, both in the form of book illustrations and as personal sketches and oil paintings. These date back to at least 1922, or in other words to the very beginning of her career. While works such as Pillow and Paradise of the Blacks do not seem to have been publicly shown, Toyen quickly became a well-known illustrator and even her anonymous erotic drawings in Štyrský’s Erotická revue were probably easily recognizable to readers who knew her mainstream illustrations or bought her signed erotic titles. The luxury edition of Marguerite de Navarre’s classic Heptameron, which she illustrated for the modernist house DP in 1932, was advertised as erotic, although none of these illustrations were explicit.

What sort of work, then, were other Czech women artists creating? Many, of course, worked in design, such as Emilie Paličková, credited with the revival of Czech lace and embroidery, and Helena Johnová and Ludvika Smrčková. Indeed, Toyen and many of the male art stars worked in both design and fine art, as design was a respected but less publicized means of making a living in the Czech art world. Czech women artists had presented painted glass in the first “ladies’” exhibition in Prague in 1909, but the 1911 Souborná výstava českých malířek (Collective Exhibition of Czech Women Artists) in Turnova had a broader focus. In 1918 the Kruh výtvarných umělkyň (KVU, Circle of Women Visual Artists) became an independent

group.¹⁹ Active throughout the First Republic, it included women not just from Bohemia but also from Moravia and even from Ruthenia, the impoverished easternmost region of Czechoslovakia.

The KVU’s members belonged to non-gendered artists’ groups as well, such as Mánes, Umělecká beseda (Artistic Forum), the Prager Secession, Hollar, the brněnský Kruh výtvarný umělců Aleš (Aleš Circle of Brno Visual Artists), and so forth.²⁰ These women certainly exhibited actively both within and outside of the KVU—some also internationally—but for the most part their exhibitions were best publicized in periodicals directed toward women, such as Eva and Ženský svět (Women’s World). It appears that they were best known in Czech feminist circles, and that due to their feminist ties, interest in themes relating to women’s lives, and tendency to exhibit in all-woman shows, overall their work was categorized as “feminine” art.

Furthermore, the collective and cooperative nature of the women’s exhibitions made it difficult for individuals to stand out in the crowd. While the modern woman was seen by many artists and intellectuals of both sexes as a symbol of First Republic progress, this did not translate to a wide interest in the work of Czech women artists, whether traditionalists such as Jožka Kratochová and Helena Emingerová or modernists like Linka Procházková, Zdenka Burghauserová, Vlasta Vostřebalová-Fischerová, Milada Marešová, or Marie Stachová, who prepared a series of collages satirizing the Czech surrealists for an April Fool’s Day issue of the mainstream magazine Světozor.

Thus, the Czech feminist movement had created an atmosphere encouraging to women’s artistic ambitions, but we will see that it was the camaraderie, relative openness, and political radicality of the interwar Czech avant-garde that provided a space for Toyen’s development as an

19 The KVU became independent from a larger women’s group (Martina Pachmanová, Neznámá území: Českého moderního umění: Pod lupou genderu [Prague: Argo, 2004], 98–99).

20 On these groups of women artists, see Martina Pachmanová, Neznámá území: Českého moderního umění: Pod lupou genderu (Prague: Argo, 2004).

avant-gardist with an erotic turn of mind. Other women artists, meanwhile, lacked the benefit of such established male peer groups, and formed something of a female art ghetto.