Relative Movement: Investigating the Entanglement of Women's Physical and Political Emancipation

This joint research project stems from our seminar "Contemporary Germany through Media and News". 2018 marks 100 years since women gained the right to vote in Germany and Austria and 47 years post-suffrage in Switzerland. To celebrate and assess this milestone, our course is focusing on women's suffrage now and then.

What does universal suffrage mean now, in a Germany with a female Chancellor and a Parliament containing a right-wing party; in a Europe that is regionalizing; in a world in which governments are in deficit while the richest avoid taxation and finance their chosen interests?

What did the vote mean then, during the heat of the struggles; when activists risked lives for more self-determination; when societies were organized around working-class women's double burdens and bourgeois women's matrimonial hearths?

Our materials of study include the following: two feature films that frame the period, Asta Nielsen's die Suffragette (1913), a perhaps ironic love story about the voting struggle in Germany, and Petra Volpe's die göttliche Ordnung (2017), a tale of a small Swiss town's decision for universal suffrage. These films are augmented by contemporary essays by women active in today's public landscape in Europe and texts that thematize women and movement.

We are each writing on aspects of women's physical and political mobility and aim to publish in the Anthology on Social Justice and Intersectional Feminism. By presenting at Inquiry@Queen's we hope both to share results and improve our work ahead of submission to this peer-reviewed e-journal in early April 2018.