Between Duties and Rights: Gender and Citizenship in Greece, *

Transcript

1 Between Duties and Rights: Gender and Citizenship in Greece, * EFI AVDELA In recent scholarship, the Greek Constitution of 1864 in which adult male suffrage was established is described as the founding institution of liberal parliamentarism in Greece, based as it was on the principle of popular sovereignty. 1 In another reading, the 1864 Constitution provided Greek men with political rights, their civil rights being safeguarded by the very establishment of the nation-state and the state-sponsored rural small holding, while the absence of their social rights was at least covered by family relations. 2 In fact, the early and growing predominance of petite-bourgeoisie or smallholders in both country and town in the form of small family-based productive units and selfemployment, and its centrality in the economic, social and political developments of Greece constitute a recurrent theme of recent historical research into the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Greece. The relation between the predominance of smallholding and the early by European standards establishment of adult male suffrage has often been addressed by historians. 3 Anthropologists have attributed this predominance to a cultural model of household autonomy that they have termed the noikokireoi model of family organization, characterized by the hierarchical organization of domestic kinship and division of labour. 4 I have argued elsewhere that this model, which aimed to secure the male head of the family a livelihood independent of both waged work and state regulation, has played an important role in the formation of wage earning 213

2 and professional strategies for both men and women in different social milieus. 5 In this paper I plan to investigate the institutional framework in which this model has been inscribed and more particularly the way in which the different legal status of men and women affected their citizenship rights and duties and produced differentiated and changing representations of citizenship. Despite the fact that neither the Constitution of 1864 itself nor the electoral legislation that subsequently gave precise content to its provisions stipulated male gender as a necessary qualification for suffrage, the issue of the female vote was then and for a long time after that perceived as a joke and an absurdity. 6 The absence of any protest, either within or outside of the National Assembly, against women s exclusion from political representation at that time speaks of the widely accepted view that women constituted a particular category of non-citizens defined as they were by their natural attributes as wives and mothers. It was precisely because of their specific qualities that women, independently of their marital status, property or education, were excluded from the public realm in general and from the exercise of politics in particular. Yet, while adult Greek men were being granted political rights without exception based on property or status, a new discursive field was being elaborated with respect to the role and position of women in Greek society, based on the biological foundation of sexual difference. 7 Reference to biology for the elaboration of woman s proper place, which was to dominate the debates on the woman question however, took various divergent and even competing, yet often class-bounded forms. Doctors, educators, philosophers and reformers of all sorts, men as well as women, set out to carve a new positive model for women, adapting the theory of biological determination to the needs of the ascending middle classes and the related diffusion of nationalism. As elsewhere, this model was based on the assumption that women s biological and social differences 214

3 prescribed the fulfilment of the domestic ideal as their natural vocation, yet assigned to female virtues and especially motherhood a wide social and national significance. 8 Recent international research has shown that the historical process through which women s bodies have been discursively structured as maternal has constituted the basis for women s exclusion from politics, restricting them to the domestic domain of the private sphere, that is, the family. The establishment of democracy coincided historically with women s exclusion from the res publica. In many cases women were denied political rights until late in the twentieth century. A female version of citizenship which was based on women s identification with motherhood was constructed in discourses as well as in practices. 9 The feminist contesting of this version and the claim to statutory equality between the sexes had limited appeal everywhere and political rights were granted to women out of political concerns that were irrelevant to their citizenship rights. 10 Greek women were not granted the vote until Yet, in the ninety years between men s and women s suffrage the issue of women s political rights was only part of a wider debate on their position and role in Greek society, a debate that was to continue long after that. This debate was in most parts centred on aspects of women s citizenship other than the vote. The educated middle class women, who first claimed rights for their sex during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, limited themselves to demands for civil and social rights, mainly the right to education and paid work, and the reform of their legal status within the family. They repeatedly qualified these demands as prerequisites for the fulfilment of the female vocation while stressing that the issue of women s votes was premature for the case of Greece. 11 The discourse of sexual difference in its varying, changing and often conflicting versions proved to be long lasting, dominating this debate throughout the period. For the 215

4 most part it defined the issue of women s citizenship in terms of duties. It was only during the inter-war years when the claim for social, economic and political equality between men and women was framed that an alternative definition of gender relations emerged for a limited period of time, focusing on the rights that derived from the common human condition of the two sexes. The distinction between the civil, political and social elements of citizenship and their historical constitution make up the core of T.H. Marshal s theory of citizenship formulated some fifty years ago. 12 As has been repeatedly noted, the influence of this theory is based on the expansion of the notion of citizenship beyond the realm of politics by the addition of civil and social elements. That is to say by focusing on the relation of the citizen to the community. 13 This version of citizenship is based on the prerequisite of citizen autonomy in the context of the legitimization and on the delimitation of the citizen rights and duties. In other words, it raises the issue of the characteristics of citizenship and therefore the problem of the inclusion or exclusion of those individuals or groups who do not possess them. The taxonomy proposed by T.H. Marshal has been under severe criticism because it identified the historical construction of citizenship with white western middle class men. 1 The historical succession of the different elements of citizenship, according to Marshal, that is, the granting of first civil, then political and finally social rights, and its relation to social class, has been demonstrated to be irrelevant for women. In most historical cases women were banned from political rights long after they were granted restricted civil and social rights. Research has also highlighted the various attempts by women to expand the narrow definition of citizenship established in European societies in the nineteenth century by demanding rights for their sex in the name either of the social duties ordained by the recognition of sexual difference or in the 216

5 name of the rights deriving from the common human condition of men and women, or more often by some paradoxical combination of the two. 15,16 In the Greek case, the historical importance of kinship in social, economic and political relations raises the question of the institutional framework on which family relations were based, that is, the legal prescriptions in respect to the rights and duties of different family members towards one another and to the community at large. In fact, women s exclusion from political rights was considered to be a natural consequence of their subordinated position in the family, where the husband and/or father was recognized as head and master. Yet the legislative consolidation of this subordination was full of equivocation. Until the establishment of the Civil Code in 1946, it seems that women s legal position in the family was determined in an indefinite manner. What I want to argue here is that with the redefinition of gender relations according to the needs of the ascending middle classes and the related diffusion of nationalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the fluidity of the legislative framework for family relations allowed middle class women to publicly formulate demands for rights presented as requirements for the performance of their duties to the community. However, the contradictions and limits of this discourse has led subsequent generations in the inter-war period to the explicit claim of political equality for women as a right deriving from the constitutive principles of the polity and as a precondition for any improvement in their position. The indeterminacy of women s formal position in the family was illustrated by the changing demands concerning the legal reform of family relations during the long period before the establishment of the Civil Code. Legislation remained largely the same. However, the right to hold and manage property and income, to conclude valid contracts and to participate in the administration of justice, on the one hand, and the right to 217

6 education and social provision on the other hand (Marshal s civil and social rights) were more important for middle class women at the turn of the century than they were for professional women of the inter-war years. The latter put emphasis on the right to political representation and equality at work. Yet, in both cases these women s intervention built a political discourse destined to surpass their exclusion from the public realm. The fact that male adult suffrage was granted at the same time that the new domestic ideal was being crystallized led to the discursive distinction between a male public and a female private domain; it was this separation that women s public discourse repeatedly attempted to overcome. Using existing research, I will focus my investigation on two separate moments of the long period under investigation, in which advocates of women s rights attempted to expand the notion of the political beyond the narrow limits of suffrage. I will confine my investigation to women from the same social milieus as advocates of their rights, that is the educated, urban and all the more often professional women, for whom education constituted a social marker. Men and women did not enjoy the same civil rights in Greece. In fact the question of women s civil rights is rather complex. Since the establishment of the Greek state and until the promulgation of the Civil Code in 1946, their legal position remained virtually unchanged and was defined by an amalgam of local customs, Roman and Byzantine law and modern jurisprudence 17. Jurists defined women s legal position as the following: while they were subjects of law with respect to their penal responsibilities and were subject to tax payment, they were not admitted as witnesses or jurors and were not recognized as having the authority to conclude valid contracts. 18 The main discrepancy between men s and women s civil rights, however, was in their position in marriage. In 218

7 fact, as a prominent jurist put it as late as 1933, the problem was not woman s capacity in civil law, but married woman s capacity. 19 In a society where marriage was an unchallenged universal cultural and social situation, this meant that the vast majority of women, married at a very early age 4, did not have independence vis-à-vis the law. Yet, things did not seem to be as rigid as the common law doctrine of coverture dictated for English women, where it was said that on marriage a woman died a kind of civil death. 21 According to the prevailing Roman law, marriage did not prevent Greek women from autonomous ownership of their property and income. Yet, from what legal commentators assert and evidence suggests, the personal relations of the spouses were governed by the principle of men s supremacy 22 in family relations, thus recognizing their full authority over all members and things of the household. As a result, married women usually did not have the power to administer their property and income, mostly but not exclusively accorded to them in the form of a dowry; to sit on family councils; and to obtain custody of children, even if the law did not explicitly prevent them from doing so 23,24. Furthermore married women were not permitted to start an enterprise without their husband s permission 25. Economic dependence was the lot of most middle class women, since in marriage the husband was given the usufruct of his wife s property and the only professional option open to unmarried or widowed middle class women until late in the nineteenth century was teaching. New meanings of womanhood, according to the assumptions of the different natural and social vocation of each sex, were elaborated during the last decades of the century. Women s subjection to unregulated patriarchal authority in the family was to be presented by the advocates of women s rights as contradictory to the interests of the state. For the state, motherhood was a vital social and national mission for the formation of future citizens and consequently deserved to be protected. 219

8 As has already been noted, few people advocated women s suffrage before the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a period characterized by the revival of nationalism and by ideological rigidity, but also by the consolidation of liberal political institutions, educated women, both married and single, systematically put forward their claim to be recognized as members of the nation. The locus for the re-evaluation of women s attributes in general and women s citizenship in particular was what has been coined as female national action 26. Part of a wider discourse on women as mothers of the nation that had been elaborated during the same period. This development contributed to women s incorporation into the national body, while reproducing their subordinate status as second class citizens. Earlier studies have brought into focus the gendered character of nationalist discourse in nineteenth century Greece. 27 By the end of the century, in the context of the Eastern question and the nationalist fervour that overtook the country, the nationalist discourse assigned women a decisive role in the fulfilment of the civilizing mission of Hellenism and the realization of the irredentist ideal. This discourse, in the Greek case as in others, had a strong evolutionist and Euro-centric character). 28 Women were considered to be a crucial component of national edification: their assumed moralizing and civilizing qualities ascribed to their nature, defined in its turn by motherhood, meant that they regarded themselves as having the ability to rehabilitate society and, by extension, the entire nation. 29 In this context, female education became a crucial issue. The necessity of elementary education for male and female children alike had already been promoted by revolutionary intellectuals since the 1820s. 30 Yet in practice and throughout the nineteenth century, Greek women s right to education and social provision constituted an example of what Marshal has called the divorce of social rights from the status of 220

9 citizenship. 31 Historical research in Greek women s history has amply demonstrated how female education since the 1860s became the battleground for the elaboration of the new meanings of womanhood. The state s incapacity to guarantee girls elementary education, which was presumed compulsory, and its total negligence toward their secondary education which was left entirely to private initiative, generated heated debates as to the purposes and directions of women s access to knowledge. In the context of these debates the few educated and professional middle class women at the time were given the opportunity to formulate their own conceptions as to the educational prerequisites for securing women s social and national mission. For them, female education ought to prepare girls for their future duties as wives and mothers, broaden their professional options if need be and render them useful for the community. And since motherhood was acclaimed as a social mission, female education was gradually transformed from a right (dikaioma) to a duty (kathikon). Mothers had to be educated in order to ensure the appropriate education of future citizens and patriots. Considered as the prerequisite for women s intellectual and moral elevation, this education was conceived as differentiated not only across gender but also across class lines. 32 Female education, claimed systematically by the first women writers, became the starting point for educated women s public activity, initially through mixed educational societies. Inscribed in the context of a wider reforming action of the emerging middle classes during the last decades of the century in the context of nationalist effervescence, this intervention was soon extended to charitable activities and the creation of the first women s associations and ladies committees 33. By the end of the century, the three female figures corresponding to the only versions of middle class women s public activities that were not automatically condemned were the philanthropist, the teacher and the writer. They signified the integration of women s activities in the realm of social 221

10 action and their familiarization with the duties and obligations of the female citizen beyond the narrow field of party politics. As elsewhere, the emergence of the social as a separate public realm independent of the political, gave middle class women the possibility of claiming it as a locus destined primarily for the employment of their female virtues through their public intervention, and hence the path to their social citizenship. 34 Yet in the Greek case, this separation was never complete, since nationalism operated as a unifying element, cutting across both fields and allowing educated women to politicize their social activities 35. Historians have repeatedly acknowledged that the publication in 1887 (and for the next thirty years after that) of the Ladies Journal, edited by Kallirroe Parren, inaugurated the first systematic contesting of the position of Greek woman. Earlier studies identified the publication of the Ladies Journal with the rising of a feminist consciousness in Greece. 36 Yet subsequent scholarship has highlighted the discursive and ideological displacements that can be observed during the thirty years of the journal s publication with respect to the analyses and demands composed by Parren and her associates. 37 In professing women s intellectual and moral emancipation and emancipation through work, the journal put forward claims for legislative reform of women s family status, education and professional options, systematically disclaiming political rights. Inscribed in the discourse of sexual difference, the intervention of K. Parren and her associates attempted to formulate what recent research has termed the Greek version of emancipation. 38 The moderate emancipation that Parren claimed did not question women s biological and social differences. On the contrary, it aimed, in the name of these differences, to provide women and especially middle class women with a positive model of social and national citizenship. Parren called for the lifting of women s social exclusion and for the right to socially and nationally useful education and 222

11 professional activity. Basing her ideas on the concept of patriotic motherhood, Parren demanded the reform of marital relations, practical and domestic education as well as the right for professional qualifications that would secure economic independence in accordance with female virtues. Her concept of womanhood was based on the duty of all women to seek any kind of work that would ensure the prosperity of her household and the moral glory of her country. 39 With respect to women s position in the family, research has already highlighted the contradiction deriving from the analysis of the family by The Ladies Journal on the basis of sexual difference. 40 Kalliroe Parren had no doubt that women s principal vocation was marriage. She even declared in the first issue of The Ladies Journal her recognition that man s will should axiomatically prevail not only in the polity, but also in the family. 41 Women s rights depended on the particular services that women were being called to offer as mothers (to the nation, to society or to the polity). Thus, the editor of The Ladies Journal was adopting the national and social role that women of her class were accorded by the dominant ideology of her time. 42 However, from the start, in focusing on the model of middle class marriage, she denounced the terms of this marriage and the hypocrisy underlying the recurrent formula that the household is the woman s kingdom. The husband had all power even on matters considered to pertain to the competence of the wife, whose legal status was thus identified with that of minors and criminals. 43 Parren considered the treatment of women as minors, who were then exposed to the abusive use of power which the law as well as society granted men, to be even more serious than social hypocrisy. 44 The relevant writings, scattered over the years in The Ladies Journal, specified the measures to be taken. At first the demands concerned women s, that is middle class women s, the right to manage their own property and income, to the custody of their children in the event of widowhood or divorce for 223

12 liability of the husband, to participate in family councils for orphaned children and to be accepted as witnesses in any notarial act and in civil cases in general. Later the demands to protect girls from compliant parents and prospective fiancés by raising the age of majority for girls from twelve to sixteen years and making the securing of woman s property in marriage compulsory were added. In fact it was once again the issue of the pending Civil Code that was raised 45. It has already been noted how central the issue of women s work was in The Ladies Journal. It has been maintained that Parren s argumentation in favour of work was bounded by the problematic coexistence of contradictory arguments inherent in the notion of sexual difference: she conceived women s work as a right as well as a duty, insisting on the need to maintain a strict sexual division of labour. 46 In fact Parren distinguished between women s work in three class bounded categories, irrespective of their marital status: charitable, progressive and bread-winning, with the first concerning the superior classes, the second the multitudinous middle classes, while the third concerned the lower classes 11. Her main concern was for work for women of her own social position, for whom she claimed new professional options as well as more involvement in the family enterprise and whose every conquest she systematically celebrated in her journal. The concern of the Ladies Journal with the condition of working-class women was also focused on their preparation for combining waged work with being good wives and mothers. Yet, while professing the preventive character of charity, Parren repeatedly criticized the reforming public activities of middle and upper class women of the period for their insufficient focus on practical intervention. As the first wave of industrialization in the 1870s and 1880s revealed the new image of the working woman and child, Parren frequently denounced the absence of any state regulation for their protection. Together 224

13 with her associates and other ladies committees, she also set out to undertake the preparation of women of the lower classes for waged work as well as for domestic duties. 48 In fact, these women s logic was not far from the logic of the reformers who instituted protective regulations in the first decade of the twentieth century. According to these, working-class women had to be protected because of their physical weakness, but mostly in order to preserve their primary duties as potential or actual wives and mothers. In other words, they were granted protection precisely because they lacked the autonomy that was considered the prerogative of citizenship. Yet this convergence stemmed from different reasoning. While for state reformers working-class women s vulnerability derived from their physical inferiority, for women reformers it was a product of their class and gender position. 49 In the thirty years of publication of the Ladies Journal Kalliroe Parren never ceased to disclaim women s political rights. It has been recently argued that she was forced to do so in response to the constant severe reactions against any prospect of women s political emancipation that were being formulated by intellectuals, both men and women alike. 50 However, Parren did not perceive her intervention as being less political for that. From the beginning she made it clear that her aim was to prove the real vocation [of our sex] in the family as well as in the state. 51 In her view, women s politics had two distinct dimensions: first, their rights as a person and as a citizen in the name of justice and national interest 52,53 ; second, their de facto if informal mingling in party politics through the influence that they exercised on those around them. We have already mentioned the reforms that the editor of the Ladies Journal and her colleagues considered necessary for women to be able to adequately fulfil their duties as wives and mothers: they concerned education, work and family relations. Nevertheless these fields were perceived as highly political. They constituted the requirements for the construction of a 225

14 positive version of female politics, that is women s public action compatible with the vocation dictated by their sex. For Parren, women were being educated as citizens, and in fact acting in politics (politevondai) precisely through their participation in educational, charitable and national activities, and to a lesser extent in professional work. Women s politics (politiki ton gynaikon), usually corrupted by men s politics, had to undergo a radical modification in order to prove that it was actually superior to the politics of men 54. The demands that some educated middle class women formulated in the decades before and after the turn of the century were phrased in accordance with predominant definitions of womanhood. According to their logic, women s citizenship was not an abstract notion of rights, but the outcome of a vocation, a collective duty deriving from female virtues and patriotic motherhood 55. However, this duty, if it was conceived as separate from any notion of political rights, it was nevertheless considered highly political, delineating a female version of politics. This framework was only overturned during the inter-war years, with the emergence of a new movement in the context of which women s civil, political and social rights were claimed in the name of the democratic principle and universal human rights. The formulation of such a radical agenda was made possible because of the prevailing ideological assumptions and the general political and social circumstances of the interwar years. In the aftermath of the country s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 which ended a long period of effervescent nationalism, the inter-war period was characterized by liberalism, industrialization, political and social reform and the growing representation of a wider range of social groupings. Research has highlighted the differences between this period of structured feminist organizations which were affiliated to international ones and systematically claimed social, economic and political equality for 226

15 women, and the previous one 56. Feminist demands now centred around political rights and the right to equal work. Inter-war feminists based their demands for women s equality on the concept of right (dikaioma). They elaborated a view of female citizenship that stressed similarities and not differences between men and women and invoked women s inclusion in the political community. In fact, women s visibility in the public realm, in paid work as well as in social contention, was to become a constitutive element of social and political life in the inter-war years. The centrality and novelty of the issue of political rights in the discourse of interwar feminists and the vivid apprehension that it raised among intellectuals and politicians has attracted the interest of feminist historians for some time now. 57 Less research has been done in respect to other feminist demands of the period, concerning what were considered to be the necessary legislative reforms. Feminists developed a twofold strategy. On the one hand, they demanded the right to vote as a precondition to political equality. On the other hand, they viewed legislative reforms as a precondition for their civil and social equality and they especially targeted the existing laws regulating work, the family, unwed mothers, education and prostitution. The logic supporting these claims was not the same throughout the period nor amongst the different organizations. Debates on these issues reveal the slow and ultimately incomplete break with the ideology of sexual difference, concealed behind the radical novelty that represented the systematic demand for political rights. Women s restricted civil rights continued to preoccupy inter-war feminists, as middle class women entered paid work in growing numbers and female education was at last being undertaken by the state. All feminist organizations demanded that women have the right to serve as witnesses and jurors, to obtain custody of children, to participate in family councils, and to start a commercial business. 58 It is interesting to note, however, 227

16 that while the legal framework remained more or less the same, the list of demands concerning reforms in family relations and the legal status of women in general, as well as emphasis on the issue displayed noticeable differences from those of the previous period 16. Women s civil rights had so marginal a place on the feminist agenda of the period that one is tempted to speculate on the influence of social practice on the successive interpretations of an unfixed and heterogeneous legislative framework. 60 Nevertheless more radical claims were now added even if only by the more radical organizations. These were: equality of rights between parents with respect to children; equal treatment in demands for divorce; protection for the natural child and his or her mother; and pursuit of fatherhood, that is the right of illegitimate children to legally claim recognition by their father; finally the abolition of state regulated prostitution and the penalization of clients 61. The League for Woman s Rights (Syndesmos Ellinidon yper ton Dikaiomaton tis Gynaikos), was the most important active and radical organization of the period, which was affiliated to the International Alliance for Women s Suffrage. It placed these last two issues at the centre of its demands for legislative reform along with political rights and equality at work. 62 By bringing those forms of femininity that had up to then been concealed from the public gaze as shameful and unnatural to the forefront of public debates, these claims represented the novelty of the feminist analysis of gender relations. They stressed the state s responsibility to legally protect women in need or victims of male abuse, to recognize them as subjects of citizenship rights instead of as targets of charity intervention. However, issues such as the protection of unwed mothers and the denunciation of the double moral standard in the legal treatment of prostitutes, which implicitly questioned the dominant version of femininity, were met with growing resistance by other women s organizations of the period as well as by male intellectuals. 63 In fact, inter- 228

17 war feminists were mostly divided with respect to women s social rights, be it the protection of motherhood or protection at work. In a way, these divisions were reproducing the divergent position of each organization as to the appropriate strategy for attaining the vote. They all agreed that the goal of their common struggle was the assimilation of women s position to the position of men. 64 However, for some - like the National Council of Greek Women (Ethniko Symboulio Ellinidon), member of the International Women s Council, or the Socialist Association of Women (Socialistikos Omilos Gynaikon), member of the International of Socialist Women, albeit from different perspectives 65 this goal could not be attained without a long process. This process would involve the preparation of women for equality, a systematic acculturation to the notion as well as to the exercise of rights; in the meantime, they would continue to need protection in order to be able to perform their duties. For the feminists of the League, on the other hand, statutory equality was the only acceptable and rightful means for women s protection, be it as wives, mothers or workers. Therefore, they opposed any protective measure that differentiated women s position from that of men in the name of their constitutional physical, moral or social weakness. The only protection that they considered necessary and due to women was the protection of motherhood 66. The debates on the different meanings of motherhood are relevant here. If in the early 1920s some feminists could publicly claim that women s autonomous development should not be hampered by anything, not even by motherhood, the burdens of which should be undertaken by the state, they were immediately made to understand that similar views were detrimental to the feminist cause. 67 Soon most inter-war feminists came to conceive motherhood as a social service that women rendered to the polity, equivalent to military service and almost synonymous with womanhood. 68 Yet, if motherhood was a social service, it had to be protected by the state in the name of justice 229

18 and not as a female weakness: in that case protection was a right due to women for performing their duty toward the community. It was the feminist conception of social provision that ultimately linked their analysis of unwed motherhood, prostitution and family relations in a proposition of women s social citizenship, along with the main claim for political citizenship. For feminists, social provision meant that the state had to intervene legally to restore social justice and attend to its citizens in need, and that was what distinguished it from charity. They conceived social welfare as being based on social solidarity and social consciousness, on prevention and precaution. It was for this reason that, apart from the demands already mentioned, they also asked for measures to be introduced in favour of working mothers, such as the creation of a maternity fund, kindergartens, youth summer camps, sponsored messes for school children and so on.. 69 The debates on the projected establishment of a social security system in the 1930s gave them the opportunity to specify their demands for the social welfare of working mothers. They asked for the insurance of motherhood in the form of substantial pregnancy and breast feeding allowances, and promoting the payment of family allowances directly to women in person. 70 At the end of the inter-war period, the memo submitted by the Committee of Women s Organization to the Commission for Constitutional Revision demanded that motherhood should be constitutionally defined as a social function under state protection, independently of its legal status 71. All inter-war feminists considered paid work a right for women 72. Yet they were not unanimous as to its relation to the duties of motherhood. Married women s right to work, which was subjected to growing attacks in the 1930s, was an important aspect of the debates surrounding women s rights and duties, a locus where diverging conceptions of citizenship were being formulated. The feminists of the League were in the minority in opposing differentiated treatment of women workers through protective measures that 230

19 they believed confirmed their inferior position in the labour market. Feminists insisted on underlining their differences from conservative analyses of motherhood, which considered it incompatible with any kind of women s public activities, and especially paid work. 73 Furthermore, the 1931 constitution of the Revisionary Committee for the Civil Code brought married women s right to freely engage in waged work to the centre of public debates, as the prevailing opinion of its members was against it, provoking the reaction of feminists. 74,75 The feminist debates on the demands of women employees to be able to leave service before men, if married with children, illustrate the complexity of the project of equality in relation to the paradoxes inherent in women s citizenship. This was even more so since the debate concerned female civil servants whose position as citizens without rights was made all the more apparent. 76 Underlying both debates on working women s protection and on the terms of employment of female civil servants, were confrontations between two conceptions of womanhood, one based on sexual difference and the other on human equality. The consistency of this confrontation is made plain in the outcome of the feminist campaign which was disproportionate to the intensity of their mobilization. Their sole significant gain was the institutionalization of a decree in 1930, which granted women the right to vote at a municipal level. According to its provisions, however, this right only concerned literate women over the age of thirty: therefore, it actually limited potential female voters to a mere 9.6 per cent of the adult female population 78,79. The constitutional paradox of these stipulations did not go unnoticed at the time since they defined the franchise as being conditional to certain qualifications and therefore, by limiting it to a specific category of the people, they undermined the prevalent democratic principle. By then, however, the wider political context had made the claim 231

20 for women s equality increasingly irrelevant. Repetitive violations of the democratic regime, widespread attacks against the universality of male suffrage and the instituting of anti communism as a state ideology in the name of national interests, had restricted the application of the democratic principle. In a period when authoritative forms of political practice gained momentum while the principle of the sovereignty of the people became more of an empty letter, the feminist insistence on equality as a right seemed to be untimely and unattainable. As research has shown, the country s political adventures over the next twenty years brought new political priorities to the forefront, resulting in the creation of an all the more clearly differentiated progressive and conservative women s camp. Yet for both, women s allegiance was once again made in the name of female nature and patriotic motherhood. For example, for the new antifascist women s front, women s political rights were indispensable for the fulfilment of their natural areas of competence, that is, motherhood and the preservation of life and peace. 79 Women were granted the vote in 1952 and wider political rights in 1955, in an attempt to improve the country s international status in the aftermath of the Civil War. By then the subjection of married women to male authority had already been sanctioned by the Civil Code of Their subordinated position in the labour market had also been confirmed by the differentiation of minimum wages along gender lines in 1937, as well as by the existing sexual division of labour. As a result their civil and social rights were seriously curtailed. Until the equality of the sexes was constitutionally established in 1975, their only gain was the possibility to leave a public post after fifteen years of employment when married and the right to limited maternity leaves and allowances when insured. In the meantime, and one is tempted to argue since then, Greek women s civil, social and political rights have not actually been negotiated in terms of in terms of gender relations in everyday life. 232