By Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner

“Schwimmer and her co-workers at NOE and FE were associated with no less an achievement than the creation of the modern women’s movement and the spreading of its innovative ideas in Budapest, then in provincial cities in Hungary. Her closest associates, who, in addition to coordinating the everyday affairs of NOE and FE, also supported Schwimmer in building her international career over a number of decades. One of them, Vilma Glücklich (1872, Vágújhely [today Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Slovakia]–1927, Vienna) noted, half joking, in late 1906, “what an international star of a lady you will become.”^[5] With this she was referring to the guile with which her colleague, still in her twenties or thirties, was establishing her connections within the international network of the women’s movement. Thanks to her journalistic vein, her astonishing motivation, and her excellent capacity for languages, Schwimmer was already in the early 1900s publishing her articles in eminent Austrian and German journals. She used this to establish close friendly connections with, among others, the leaders of the women’s organizations in Holland and the US.“

Rosika Schwimmer is probably the most established Hungarian women’s movement activist from the first half of the 20^th century. In November 1918, she even stepped onto the international political stage when the government of Count Mihály Károlyi (1875, Fót, Hungary-1955, Vence, France) made her Hungarian envoy to Switzerland. As an emigrant to the US, she was awarded the World Peace Prize in 1937 in recognition of her work, and she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949. Thus, in order to understand the Hungarian feminist movement and its transnational relations, it is essential to examine the most important turning points in her life and her work as an activist, not only in the pre-1918 period, but also during the years she spent as an émigré in Vienna and the USA.

Rosika Schwimmer was born on 11 September 1877 to a non-observant Budapest Jewish family.^[1] After the failure of her father’s business, her parents moved to Temesvár with her and her younger sister Franciska (1880–1963) and younger brother Béla. We get a picture of young Schwimmer’s personality from the letters she exchanged with her childhood friend from Temesvár, and with Aletta Jacobs (1854, Sappemeer–1929, Baarn), leader of the Dutch women’s movement and later mentor and friend to Schwimmer. The latter once reflected on Schwimmer’s morphine addiction,^[2] while on another occasion her sexual orientation was the subject of discussion:

I would be glad if one fine day you would report that you had found a good boyfriend, and only after that would you have to tell me whether, in a sexual sense, you are normal or abnormal. You don’t have to consider marriage for a long time, but you could, and indeed should, take a lover.^[3]

The young Schwimmer, who struggled to find her place in the world, and who often had suicidal thoughts, made a home for herself in Budapest in the mid-1890s. She initially earned her living as a governess, which seemed to her a favorable state of affairs, as her employers provided her board and lodging in the capital, which even at this time appeared prohibitively expensive compared to the provinces. Following what must have been a romantic disappointment (with a man), Schwimmer gravitated towards a career as office worker, one that, with Budapest’s economic boom, a growing number of women were opting for. This was when she her associates, with whom, first within the framework of National Association of Women Office Workers (Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete, NOE Budapest, 1896–1909) than that of Feminists’ Association (Feministák Egyesülete, FE Budapest, 1904–1949), she would place the Hungarian women’s movement on a new foundation. Indeed, she would even participate in the founding of the Hungarian Working Women’s Association (Magyarországi Munkásnő Egyesület) in 1903.^[4]

Schwimmer and her co-workers at NOE and FE were associated with no less an achievement than the creation of the modern women’s movement and the spreading of its innovative ideas in Budapest, then in provincial cities in Hungary. Her closest associates, who, in addition to coordinating the everyday affairs of NOE and FE, also supported Schwimmer in building her international career over a number of decades. One of them, Vilma Glücklich (1872, Vágújhely [today Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Slovakia]–1927, Vienna) noted, half joking, in late 1906, “what an international star of a lady you will become.”^[5] With this she was referring to the guile with which her colleague, still in her twenties or thirties, was establishing her connections within the international network of the women’s movement. Thanks to her journalistic vein, her astonishing motivation, and her excellent capacity for languages, Schwimmer was already in the early 1900s publishing her articles in eminent Austrian and German journals. She used this to establish close friendly connections with, among others, the leaders of the women’s organizations in Holland and the US.

Of the editors of and contributors to Hungarian feminist journals, Schwimmer was the first to publish not just in her home country but also internationally, and the first who was from the mid-1900s able entirely to survive on her income as a journalist and from her annual lecture tours.^[6] The place of her first attempts to test her journalistic skills was Frauenleben, which was also followed by women’s organizations outside the monarchy.^[7] NOE and particularly FE profited greatly from the results of her distinctly intentional building of her international career. Even the leaders of International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA, Berlin, 1904–), to which organization Hungary joined officially in 1906, proved to be open to her innovative insights: it was at Schwimmer’s initiative that the organization had its badge and brooch made, and it was she who suggested the publication of its official record, Ius Suffragii, in 1906.^[8]

For Schwimmer, the period after the founding of FE was, apart from her duties on the official organ of the association titled A Nő és a Társadalom as editor, mostly spent on her lecture tours of Western and Northern Europe, and with attending women’s congresses. Of course, Schwimmer was not always present when the issues of A Nő és a Társadalom were in preparation. In summer 1907, for example, she coordinated the editing work from Strasbourg, remaining in constant contact with Vilma Glücklich and with Janka Dirnfeld, secretary of FE. In these letters, Glücklich jokingly called Schwimmer “Respected Editor.”

Schwimmer’s doubts as to her sexual orientation seemed to be put to rest for a while by her marriage in 1911 to journalist Béla Bédy, but after two years the couple decided to divorce. As her sister Franciska Schwimmer, together with her secretary, Edith Wynner (née Weiner, 1915, Budapest–2003, New York), carefully removed Bédy’s letters from the correspondence, the reasons for the betrothal being annulled can only be guessed. The divorce can have been a product of Schwimmer’s tempestuous nature, or perhaps her constant foreign travel.

It is surely thanks to Schwimmer’s network of contacts that in 1913 Budapest could be home to IWSA’s seventh congress. This event, which reinforced FE’s convergence with Western organizations, put Schwimmer into the limelight for a prolonged period, as this was when she was elected one of the leaders of IWSA (its press secretary). She filled this post from January 1914, in London, which did not prevent her from following the work of her colleagues back in Budapest from a distance.^[9]

After she moved to London, Schwimmer handed over her editorial tasks at the successor journal of A Nő és a Társadalom, titled A Nő. Feminista Folyóirat (The Woman. Feminist Journal, Budapest, 1914–1928) over to Júlia Kende (1864, Pest–1937, Budapest), wife of Count Sándor Teleki, a.k.a. Szikra (“Spark”) and to Paula Pogány, who were both active board members of FE. Schwimmer herself remained editor-in-chief at the new journal. It is evident from the sources that Schwimmer really did step back for a while from coordinating the everyday affairs of the association and from publishing its journal. In 1915/1916 she was only listed as the author of one or two articles in the publication.

In response to the outbreak of war, Schwimmer’s pacifist views were rekindled even more markedly. Following the mobilization, she gave up her leading role in IWSA at once,^[10] and put all her contacts, in Europe and further afield, to use in the interests of a peace treaty being agreed as early as possible. In addition to the Peace Ship financed by US magnate Henry Ford 1863, Springwells, USA–1947, Dearborn, USA), Schwimmer held talks in many countries, representing IWSA, then, during 1917/1918, Mihály Károlyi. She sent warm, affectionate letters to her co-workers back in Hungary reporting on her achievements or rather the lack of them. This is what she was doing on 4 December 1915, when the Ford Peace Ship (Oscar II), with her and members of the US elite on board, left New York harbor, and indeed when, a few months later, the mission proved to be a complete failure. Following this, Schwimmer returned home to Hungary, and “again takes on the editorial tasks at A Nő, but is not willing to accept the fee due her for this. Our association sees it as its obligation to honor her highly significant efforts not merely with moral recognition.”^[11]

We cannot fail to mention that after the end of World War I the government of Mihály Károlyi in Hungary sent Schwimmer on a diplomatic mission to Switzerland, making her the world’s first ever female envoy, albeit one with no accreditation. She performed this role in 1918/1919 in Bern, but, despite her excellent network of contacts, she was, as a woman, unable to deliver on Károlyi’s expectations of her. In the end, she was forced to resign her position in the last days of 1918. This short-lived Berne mission – from which Schwimmer would return to Hungary in the last days before the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Councils was announced at the end of February – would cast a shadow over her entire life. In January 1920, with the help of a friend of the family, who is not named in the sources, she escaped to Vienna under the pseudonym Ilona Kovács.^[12] She continued her emigration into the first half of 1921, then, after travelling through Rotterdam, she stepped onto US soil in the first days of September by entering Ellis Island in New York, the location of the federal immigration checkpoint for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.^[13] Her journey and her taking up residence in the United States was supported by the well-known peace movement activist Lola Maverick Lloyd (1875, Castorville–1944, Winnetka), who would continue to send her and later to her sister and mother, who followed her to the USA, various sums of money as long as she lived. Rosika and Franciska Schwimmer could not be granted US citizenship on account of their pacifist beliefs, and so their documentation would henceforth always describe them as “stateless.”^[14] They thus had to continue their lives as citizens of nowhere, knowing they would never see Hungary again.

As many, in both Schwimmer former homeland and her new one, considered her to be a Bolshevik spy, it was not easy for her to settle in. The sisters first lived in Chicago, then in New York, where, in addition to the assistance from the Lloyd family, they tried to make ends meet with the fees paid to Schwimmer for her articles and lectures and with the piano lessons that Franciska gave. Even now, Rosika Schwimmer did not neglect her activities in the women’s and peace movements: in addition to her colleagues in Hungary and the leaders of the Western European women’s movement, she was also in close contact with leading members of the international women’s associations such as IWSA and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (The Hague, 1915–). Among her correspondents we find not only women’s movement activists but also politicians, as Herbert Hoover, Lenin, Winston Churchill, artists as Thomas Mann, and, within the Hungarian world, the liberal politician Anna Kéthly, the composer Zoltán Kodály or the poet Endre Ady. She exchanged letters with Karl Liebknecht, Charlie Chaplin, and Albert Einstein. She was in close contact with US activist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger,^[15] who, as well as popularizing contraception devices and forced sterilization, dealt with sex education.^[16] From the end of her Swiss fiasco to her death, Schwimmer continued to correspond with Mihály Károlyi and his wife. She also established a broad network of contacts with those Hungarians who had emigrated to New York and to other parts of the United States.

Neither did Schwimmer, as an emigrée in the United States after 1921, turn her back on her Austrian contacts: from her correspondence with Renée Lovas, a women’s movement activist living for a while in Vienna, we can build a picture of how FE assisted women of Jewish extraction in their university studies in Vienna or elsewhere in Austria. Meanwhile, from the letters Schwimmer exchanged with her younger brother Béla, who also lived in Vienna, we see that she kept her eye on domestic politics in Austria, which she regularly touched upon in her diary notes. She did not break off communication with the leadership of the Austrian women’s associations.

Following her USA immigration in 1921, the year 1927 was another turning point in Schwimmer’s life. This was the year that brought the death of Vilma Glücklich, who for decades had been her closest co-worker and confidant in Hungary. In the letters they exchanged about A Nő, Glücklich from January 1926 regularly complained that she did not have time even “to write a single decent article” for the journal, while on one occasion she mentioned that “you would laugh at me if you saw how much I struggle with it [the editing of the publication that after 1925 she did together with Mrs. Szirmay] and how poor it is!”^[17]

Even in her new life as an emigrée in the US, Rosika Schwimmer continued her extensive work on publications and for the peace movement: as well as her vast number of journal articles, the texts of her lectures in the US have also survived. She wrote a long treatise on marriage, but also authored a children’s book. We have to recognize that her personal tragedy was not necessarily in the form of her life in emigration, but rather in the way that posterity would almost entirely forget about her. This despite the fact that she did everything in her power to avoid this taking place: she documented almost every moment of her life in the United States, first in Hungarian, then in English. In her estate besides the texts of her articles, speeches, and documentation of the lawsuits she had during the 1920s, we find receipts, shopping lists, and her notes on what she read, on her outgoing and incoming mail, and of her telephone calls. We even learn what diet she had to follow because of her diabetes – usually without much success. Her notes on the state of her physical and mental health, kept from 1926 onwards under the title “Medical records” and updated every few months or twice a year, reflect her capacity for self-reflection. The conclusion of these reports is usually that she is always hungry and feels old.^[18] The last entry in these reports, meanwhile, speaks volumes: “It would be much more useful if I wrote my article [instead of these notes on the state of my health]. Everyone reads articles, but no one will read these…”^[19] After lengthy treatment in hospital and at her home, Rosika Schwimmer passed away on 3 August 1948, of complications from diabetes, at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

When Schwimmer passed away, the world lost a feminist and women’s movement activist who had been a leading figure in the struggle for women’s emancipation in Hungary from the outset. She had made substantial contributions to the founding of the first modern women’s associations and had actively participated in these associations as a leading figure. Her commitment to her ideals and her temperament, however, often made her life complicated and sometimes led to conflicts within IWSA and WILPF, but she was nonetheless one of the key figures of the 20^th-century women’s movement.

Further reading

Glant, Tibor: Against All Odds: Vira B. Whitehouse and Rosika Schwimmer in Switzerland, 1918. American Studies International, 40. (2002): 1. 34–51.

Haan, Francisca de et al.: Women’s Activism. Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present. Routledge, London–New York, 2013.

McFadden, Margaret: A Radical Exchange: Rosika Schwimmer, Emma Goldman, Hella Wuolijoki and Red-White Struggles for Women. In: Saurer, Edith (ed.): Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-Communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Böhlau, Köln–Wien, 2006. 494–504.

SchwimmerBlog: https://schwimmerblog.com/

Szapor, Judith: Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War; From Rights to Revanche. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018.

Zimmermann, Susan–Major, Borbála: Róza Schwimmer. In: Francisca de Haan et al. (eds.): A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminism: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern European, 19th and 20th Centuries. CEU Press, Budapest, 2006. 484–491.

Image sources

Portrait of Rosika Schwimmer (Source: New York Public Library, Rosika Schwimmer Digital Collection)

Group photograph with the invitation to the IWSA congress in the background (Source: New York Public Library, Rosika Schwimmer Digital Collection)

Portrait of Vilma Glücklich, 1912 (Source: New York Public Library, Rosika Schwimmer Digital Collection)

Author biography

Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner is research fellow at the HUN REN Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History, Budapest, Hungary. She earned her PhD in 2020. She studies the development of the Austrian and Hungarian bourgeois-liberal, feminist movements, their international connections, and their press activities from the 1890s until the end of the 1940s. Most recently, she has been researching the history of the Hungarian Feminist Association during the interwar period and the life and career of Rosika Schwimmer, especially Schwimmer’s work in the women’s and peace movements and her international network of contacts.

Academia: https://tti.academia.edu/D%C3%B3raFedelesCzeferner

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dora.czeferner

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[1] In the Hungarian-language literature her name appears as Róza Schwimmer or Rózsa/Róza Bédy-Schwimmer, while in other languages it is written as Rosika Schwimmer.

[2] Letter from Aletta Jacobs to Rosika Schwimmer. 16 February 1905. Rosika Schwimmer Papers. New York Public Library Manuscript and Archives Division. MssCol 6398. Series I. Box 7. (In the followings: NYPL RSP)

[3] Letter from Aletta Jacobs to Rosika Schwimmer. 20 April 1905. Ibid.

[4] NYPL RSP I. Box 6–9.

[5] Letter from Aletta Jacobs to Rosika Schwimmer. 8 November 1906. NYPL RSP I. Box 10.

[6] We know this from those pamphlets whose income and expenditure she recorded. NYPL RSP I.A.

[7] The letters she exchanged with Aletta Jacobs also tell of this. E.g. a letter from Aletta Jacobs to Rosika Schwimmer. 1 August 1902. NYPL RSP I. Box 2. She first published in the journal in September 1901. Postcard from the editors of Frauenleben to Rosika Schwimmer. 7 September 1901. Ibid.

[8] NT, (1907): 64–66.

[9] Minutes of the FE committee meeting on 28 February 1914. MNL OL P999, box 2, item 3.

[10] Rupp, Leila J.: Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997. 16–18, 28.

[11] Minutes of the FE committee meeting on 29 January 1917. MNL OL P999, box 2, item 3.

[12] For Schwimmer’s fake passport and the official documents relating to her emigration, see RSP X. Box 554, 555.

[13] Schwimmer’s journey can be reconstructed using her letters written to FE members and her diary notes: she travelled on the boat in a first class cabin, in “fairy-tale” conditions, eating “a lot, and well,” reading, and attending concerts. An interesting anecdote is that, during processing at Ellis Island, one immigration officer asked her: “Are you the celebrated Mme. Sch.[wimmer]?” Rosika Schwimmer’s letter to her family from the boat across the Atlantic. 25 August 1921. NYPL RSP I. Box 130. Rosika Schwimmer’s letters to her family from Rotterdam and from New York. 6 August 1921; 26 August 1921. Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] NYPL RSP Index.

[16] Solinger, Rickie: Pregnancy and Power. A History of Reproductive Politics in the United States. New York University Press, 2019. 87.

[17] Letters from Vilma Glücklich to Rosika Schwimmer. 15 January 1926, and 14 May 1926. NYPL RSP.

[18] On this see e.g. Medical records. January, May, December 1926. NYPL RSP I. Box 159–161.

[19] Rosika Schwimmer’s diary note. 21 June 1948. RSP X. Box 586.