T.G.Masaryk: A Radical Feminist [Volume: 10(1991), pp. 195-212]

T. G. Masaryk
A Radical Feminist
H. GORDON SKILLING
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk was preeminent among men in Bohemia in the
late nineteenth century as an advocate of women's rights. One scholar has gone so far
as to say that he was "the only Czech male intellectual concerned and involved with
the woman's question for almost three decades."' Certainly Masaryk spoke out
boldly and in radical tones against the enslavement of women in all spheres of life,
including the home and family. In speeches and articles and in his journal, Nase
doba (Our Time), he hammered away at what he considered false beliefs about the
inequality of women and criticized unjust limitations on women's place in society. In
a manner that endorsed the major claims of the contemporary women's movement
and anticipated many of the demands of the feminist movement of the future, he
called for absolute equality for women in all spheres-equal responsibility of men
and women within the family, equal access to education and the professions, equal
pay for equal work, the enfranchisement of women, and full participation of women
in public affairs. He condemned prostitution and what he called polygyny (mnohozenstvi), that is, sexual relations with more than one wife or with several women.
He was severely critical of prevalent views about the nature of love and of sex expounded both by official Catholic doctrine and by socialist theory, which, he felt,
demeaned women and distorted love and marriage, and condemned ideas expressed
in modern literature, which encouraged sexual laxity. Alois Hajn, active in contemporary Czech progressive politics, later described him as "a pioneer of the ideas on
the women's question" whose words created "a veritable revolution among Czech
youth" at the time.2
In the forming of Masaryk's viewpoint on the women's question a number of
influences were at work. The first was the position of women in Bohemian society
during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Women suffered many liabilities,
such as an inferior place in the family, discrimination in the economic sphere, limitations on educational opportunities, denial of the franchise, and discouragement from 19 5