Féminisme: Translations, Transfers, and Transformations

This chapter examines Käthe Schirmacher’s most successful book, Die moderne Frauenbewegung (1905, 2nd edition 1909), and compares it with its less comprehensive precursor, Le féminisme aux États-Unis, en France, dans la Grande-Bretagne, en Suède, et en Russie (1898), and the German book’s English translation The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement. A Historical Survey (1912). Drawing on a conceptual history approach, it analyses strategies of transfer, self-translation, and translation between these books; the chapter also discusses the transfers and transformations of the French key term ‘féminisme’ in a broader context and traces the translations of the term in German and English and of the German term ‘Frauenbewegung’ in English and French. In so doing it complicates the history of the term ‘feminism’ and argues that it changed its meaning more than once between languages and over time before becoming a clearly defined and established concept.