Chapter 3 Gendered talk: Esperanto-speaking women and languages of egalitarianism

Finding their place in Esperantujo

Between 1900 and 1913, John Beveridge and Alice Alexandra Henderson led a busy life with their three daughters and one son in Dundee, at 8 Prospect Place and, later, at 9 Magdalen Yard Road. From both addresses, it would have been a short walk down to the docks, where one could watch whaling ships coming and going, or see steamships arriving with raw jute from Bengal. At the time, Dundee was known as a ‘women’s town’, with women making up a significant portion of the industrial workforce: around 80 per cent of working women in the city were employed in the manufacturing sector, primarily in the jute mills.⁴

The Beveridge sisters would never spend their days in jute mills, warehouses or factories surrounded by the noise of steam-driven spindles softening raw jute fibres, nor did they live the lives of working-class women in overcrowded houses with poor sanitary conditions.⁵ The eldest daughter, Heather Beveridge (1886–1940), was born on 27 December 1886 in Stow, Scotland.⁶ After the family moved to Dundee in 1900, she entered University College in Dundee – then part of the University of St Andrews – at the age of sixteen.⁷ Upon graduating with a degree in chemistry, she was appointed as a Carnegie Research Scholar and began pursuing an academic career. In 1911, John Beveridge’s and Alice Alexandra Henderson’s second daughter, Lois Beveridge (1889–1946), was recorded as a twenty-two-year-old teacher living in the family’s ten-room house at 9 Magdalen Yard Road, near the River Tay, on the edge of a park.⁸

In a brief biographical account written in English following the death of John Beveridge in 1943, the youngest daughter, Elizabeth Beveridge, paints a picture of the distinctly middle-class, international atmosphere she and her siblings grew up in:⁹

Norwegian delegates to conferences in this country were frequently our guests, while pastors, teachers and professors visiting Scotland came as a matter of course to visit and consult him. Their daughters, too, used to spend some days or weeks in our home while acquiring proficiency in English […] there were many others coming and going, so many that my childish memories of them are vague and confused.¹⁰

Elizabeth Beveridge’s account describes her father’s library, his involvement in various organisations and his travels to Norway. With the presence of a Dutch housemaid, John Beveridge’s interest in Norwegian and some family members’ fluency in Esperanto, different languages were heard in their home. Elizabeth Beveridge’s biographical notes about her father convey a busy life filled with different interests and activities, which spark the imagination for the diverse and far-reaching conversations that must have been floating around the family dinner table during those years in Dundee. These surely included discussions on Protestantism, the Scottish Beekeepers’ Association, the Red Cross, Nordic culture and, of course, Esperanto. Based on Elizabeth Beveridge’s recollection of hosting visitors, the Beveridge sisters were raised amidst stimulating intellectual and often multilingual encounters.¹¹ At least two of the Beveridge children, Lois and Heather, shared their father’s enthusiasm for Esperanto from 1906.

The Beveridge household fits well into the prevailing social profile of the first generation of Esperanto speakers: well-educated, middle-class people with an internationalist mindset and an openness to learn more about the world. This early Esperanto community largely comprised two overlapping age groups: those born in the 1850s, such as Ludwik Zamenhof and John Beveridge, and those born in the 1880s, like Lois and Heather Beveridge, who were entering early adulthood as the language gained momentum. Notably, this first generation – which brought together these two age groups – included a significant proportion of women. While this has been acknowledged in existing scholarship, little is known about who these women were and how they navigated Esperantujo.¹² Following the Beveridge sisters and other Esperanto-speaking women in Scotland and at Universal Congresses allows us to understand how they embraced Esperanto as a tool to assert themselves and gain prominence in their endeavours.

As indicated in Chapter 2, Lois Beveridge quickly became a fixture in the local Esperanto scene. In 1908, she gained the advanced diploma of proficiency in Esperanto (Atesto pri Kapableco), becoming a certified language teacher and examiner for the British Esperanto Association diplomas.¹³ In her capacity as a nineteen-year-old Esperanto teacher and one of the first in Scotland, Lois Beveridge most certainly taught people older than herself. She came to head an Esperanto Circle that met on Friday evenings in her father’s church and, later, at Harris Academy, where she studied in her college years.¹⁴

Lois Beveridge’s commitment as a teacher, convener of meetings and public speaker did not go unnoticed: in December 1912, for instance, the Esperanto club in the nearby city of Perth held a celebration in her honour. The celebration recognised that her Esperanto classes had enabled Perth residents to begin learning the language and encouraged them to establish their own club.¹⁵ Not by coincidence, a year later, Lois was elected one of the four vice-presidents of the Scottish Esperanto Federation. Hers was the only name featuring a fino (Miss) instead of a sro (Mister) prefix, which indicates that she was the only female vice-president of the Federation at the time.¹⁶

Esperanto – the language – gave Lois Beveridge a skill that others did not have. Esperanto – the community – gave her a space to shine. However, she was not only committed to the development of Esperantujo in Scotland. Along with many other women, Lois Beveridge travelled to continental Europe to participate in the highlight of the Esperanto experience: the Universal Congress of Esperanto.

The first Universal Congress to be held in Germany took place in 1908. That summer, some 1,500 Esperanto speakers flocked to Dresden.¹⁷ Like other cities hosting Universal Congresses, such as Antwerp in 1911 and Kraków in 1912, Dresden had a distinct reputation for the arts and culture. In the second half of the nineteenth century, new venues for arts and sciences, such as city libraries and museums, opened their doors.¹⁸ With higher education institutions like the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Technology, Dresden was a city of well-educated middle classes, civil servants, merchants and bankers. The capital of Saxony was well worth a visit in its own right, and the local organisers of Universal Congresses of Esperanto followed an agenda of displaying the cultural and historical highlights of their home city to visitors.¹⁹

Leaving Dundee and travelling to Dresden, mingling with Esperanto speakers of a similar age from various countries, and chatting in Esperanto in outings on the river Elbe or at a theatre performance must have been thrilling. And Lois Beveridge was by no means the only woman from Scotland to attend such a congress: the high number of women present at Universal Congresses of Esperanto, as indicated by the list of participants from the 1908 Congress in Dresden, is striking.²⁰

Three years later, a large group of Scotland-based Esperanto speakers attended the 1911 Universal Congress in Antwerp. The particularly strong cohort from Edinburgh that travelled to the Belgium congress that summer allows for a more nuanced picture of who these Esperanto-speaking women were in terms of their age and socio-professional background, as well as what attracted them to the language.

Founded in 1903, the Edinburgh Esperanto Club was one of the first in Scotland. Language classes were well attended, many members passed Esperanto proficiency exams, and regular talks and debate circles in Esperanto were held on topics ranging from Russian history and culture to the Chinese language.²¹ The club also led the organisation of the 1908 Scottish Congress of Esperanto.²²

Women played leading roles in running the Edinburgh club. In 1911, for instance, the club elected six of its members to serve as delegate councillors to the British Esperanto Association – four of whom were women: Isabella Mears, Miss Annie Robb, Miss A. B. Mackenzie and Miss I. E. McIntosh.²³ Such patterns suggest that Lois Beveridge was by no means a singular case. Many other young women – identified by the title ‘Miss’ in the announcement – took on key administrative positions, just as Lois Beveridge did as vice-president of the Federation.²⁴ Similarly, it was a woman – Jane Baird – who was the first author of the bilingual (English–Esperanto, Esperanto–English) Edinburgh Esperanto Pocket Dictionary, which was first published in 1915 and became so popular that it saw frequent new editions until 1939.²⁵

Going beyond the local club in Edinburgh, a total of sixty-five women departed from Scotland to participate in the Universal Congress of Esperanto in Antwerp. With only a month until the congress, The British Esperantist announced that there were no more beds for ladies onboard the Gibson steamer for the journey from the port of Leith (near Edinburgh) to Antwerp.²⁶ By offering opportunities such as joining this cruise ship crossing, Esperanto provided these women with a framework through which they could take on leadership positions and travel independently across borders, without being accompanied by relatives, husbands or chaperones – which was uncommon for women in Europe at the time. However, more significantly, these efforts to break free from traditional roles and subordination to family affairs is closely related to the then emerging ideal of the ‘new woman’ – a figure increasingly associated with independence, education, mobility and engagement in public life.²⁷

The new woman: nurses, teachers and stenographers in search of inclusiveness

Following the trips of these Scottish women to Universal Congresses in Dresden, Antwerp and Kraków enables an understanding of how these women fit into – or not – wider society at the time. Twenty-two of the sixty-five Scottish women (33 per cent) who attended the 1911 Universal Congress of Esperanto were listed in the attendance records as professionals, compared to twenty-one out of the forty-one men (51 per cent). While men were listed more frequently as actuaries, bankers, lawyers, city clerks, accountants, solicitors and engineers, eight women were listed as teachers, five as stenographers, three as accountants, three as nurses, and one each as typewriter, cashier and journalist.²⁸

These figures show that most women who engaged with Esperanto worked in socially reproductive jobs such as nursing or teaching.²⁹ Meanwhile, many others worked in what were at the time ‘modern’ office jobs, engaging on a daily basis with cutting-edge communication technologies like stenotypes and typewriters. Compared to their mothers, these modern women were from a different generation: they were educated and skilled in new fields, they were independent and earned a living in salaried positions.³⁰ In their professional lives, these women were performing increasingly vital office management work, including time management, bookkeeping and internal communications. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, typists, secretaries, accountants and stenographers became emblematic professions, generally occupied by women.³¹ Such professions represented the rapid structural shifts in society and economy, as well as the growth of the tertiary sector.³² A young generation of women was coming into these occupations that were increasingly essential to the modern world, not without facing resistance or hesitation from their male counterparts.³³

In the early twentieth century, Esperanto – a communication technology as modern as stenotypes and typewriters – aroused the curiosity of some of these modern women. Conversely, the skills and experiences of the ‘new woman’ in clerical work, in organising, recording and running meetings met the needs of an increasingly institutionalised Esperanto community.³⁴

In addition, photographs from local Esperanto clubs and international congresses – as shown in Chapter 2 – showcase how Esperantujo featured a mix of gender and age groups, with children and teenagers mingling with middle-aged adults, as well as women and men side by side in clubs and congresses. These photographs, as well as these congresses’ attendance records and programmes, highlight the salient presence of women in their twenties and thirties. Some of them were married and embraced Esperanto as a family affair; most were unmarried, attending these gatherings on their own; and many of them worked in modern office jobs.

Lois and Heather Beveridge belonged to this emerging generation. Respectively a teacher and an aspiring scientist, both were born in the 1880s and came of age in the era of what was referred to in the 1900s as the ‘new woman’. Their lives and careers were markedly different from their mother’s – who most likely spent her life caring for her children and assisting her husband in his parish duties.³⁵ By contrast, Lois and Heather Beveridge were part of a generation of women who strove to join the workforce, many of whom delved into professions that did not exist a generation earlier. Moreover, they were partly shaped by a broader demographic trend in early twentieth-century Britain, which was marked by a significant surplus of women in relation to men in the overall population.³⁶ Quite a few of these women remained unmarried, but gained a degree of independence by taking up salaried positions – which marked a shift in the social and economic roles available to women at the time.³⁷

The history of these women has frequently been written from the perspective of political activism – as a history of either law-breaking militancy or of social reformism.³⁸ On the more radical side, feminists like Emmeline Pankhurst led the struggle for women’s rights by demanding structural changes in society, even endorsing violence when deemed necessary.³⁹ Many others – including numerous female schoolteachers nurturing young minds and employed by the state – actively engaged in the cause for women’s suffrage, participating in demonstrations and occasionally smashing windows during demonstrations.⁴⁰ However, also among women themselves, debates persisted over how far the fight for women’s rights should go and what forms activism ought to take.⁴¹

By contrast, the perspective of social reformism drew on the lens of women-only organisations – which included, for instance, the International Council of Women (ICW), founded in the US in 1888, and the National Union of Women Workers (NUWW), founded in Britain in 1895. Among the key figures of such women-only organisations were Louisa Hubbard (1836–1906), Louise Creighton (1850–1936) and the marchioness Ishbel of Aberdeen and Temair (1857–1939). Nearly all these women – who advocated for women’s rights through doing philanthropic work and pressuring politicians to pass bills – came from affluent backgrounds, which consolidated the highest ranks of these organisations as spaces for wealthy women.⁴²

Esperanto emerged alongside a number of women-only organisations. The ICW was founded at the time when Ludwik Zamenhof published Esperanto’s first textbook. The German Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was founded in 1904, a year before the first international Esperanto congress in 1905. Even though, at first glance, ICW’s commitment to neutrality and this organisation’s strong links with Protestantism could have made it appealing to Esperanto-speaking women like Lois and Heather Beveridge, this does not seem to have been the case. After all, leadership roles in these women-only organisations were reserved for older women – thus from a different generation – and, above all, women from a different social background. The ICW led by Ishbel of Aberdeen and Temair, for instance, drew an elite social composition that was de facto, if not explicitly, closed to middle-class women such as the Esperanto-speaking women from Dundee and Edinburgh described above. Ultimately, the Beveridge sisters found in Esperantujo a more inclusive space to express themselves, gain freedom from the societal roles expected from them and take on leading roles in their local engagements with a global cause, making Esperanto a means of activism.

While the suffragettes tended to be more open to confrontational forms of activism, women-only organisations had a more elitist composition and spoke to the interests of a generation and class that did not necessarily relate to the needs of the ‘new woman’. Alongside these straightforward forms of activism, Esperanto also emerged as a means for activism: one that did not advance women’s rights per se but aided in the pursuit of more egalitarian and inclusive communication spaces. Most importantly, Esperanto became the basis to foster gender-inclusive spaces that, unlike the previously mentioned movements and organisations, were not women-only.

While the emergence of modern office jobs and the demographic surplus of women in places like Britain offered young women new opportunities to express different aspirations and take on roles beyond those of wife and mother, they continued to face widespread discrimination. Their access to the job market remained hierarchical and precarious, and several informal spaces for leisure and sociability continued to be similarly restrictive. Against this backdrop, Esperantujo provided women with a space of relative egalitarianism and inclusion – one that they struggled to find elsewhere in society.

Esperanto was by no means the only resource through which they could achieve this – see, for instance, how tennis clubs and other sports spaces at the time also took a relatively inclusive approach to gender.⁴³ Yet Esperanto was the entryway these specific women and numerous others chose in order to experiment with more egalitarian relations in which men, women and people from different social classes and age groups featured side by side. Through Esperanto, these women carved a more egalitarian microcosm in a society that they otherwise perceived as exclusionary and discriminatory.

Closed universities, open books: writing, starring and producing knowledge in Esperantoland

When Lois Beveridge arrived in Dresden, she would have met many young Esperanto speakers who had also travelled long distances. The congress reports from 1908 mention young attendees from places such as Sweden and France, also explicitly underscoring the many young women who travelled from Britain – not without a wry side note remarking: ‘that these proud young British women would bring themselves to speaking in a different language abroad other than their own idiom, I would not have deemed possible.’⁴⁴

Dresden itself had a vibrant Esperanto scene at the time. In 1910, the city was home to sixteen Esperanto clubs. At least one of them – the Damenverein (Ladies’ Club) – was exclusively for women. Some concentrated on a certain socio-professional profile, including Esperanto clubs for academics and for police officers, which may have been male-dominated. Yet the high number of female members in the numerous local clubs is noticeable: out of the 547 registered Esperanto speakers in Dresden, 198 (37 per cent) were women. Eighty of these were listed as ‘Fräulein’, indicating young and/or unmarried women.⁴⁵

Yet Dresden – or Dundee and Edinburgh for that matter – only epitomises a much broader picture. Numerous images of Esperanto meetings at this time – be they club gatherings in Perth, the Universal Congress of Esperanto in Kraków (see Figure 3.1) or the 1911 Brazilian Congress of Esperanto in Juiz de Fora (see Figure 3.2) – confirm the same pattern: a high number of Esperanto-speaking women, many of whom were in their twenties and thirties.

While women played leading roles in the day-to-day running of local clubs, many stood out in the cultural programmes of national and international Esperanto congresses. In Dresden, for instance, the German actress Hedwig Reicher (1884–1971) took the lead part in the Esperanto rendition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Iphigenie, performed at the Dresden Opera. Similarly, a group of young Swedish women took centre stage in August Strindberg’s theatre play Miss Julie in Esperanto.⁴⁶ While professional singers or actresses such as Hedwig Reicher were invited to perform at congresses and learned the basics of the language for the occasion, most of these performers were ordinary Esperanto speakers and, thus, amateur artists.

This was also the case at the 1912 Universal Congress in Kraków, when performers from the Lviv Opera House staged the Esperanto rendition of Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka, the most emblematic Polish opera of the nineteenth century.⁴⁷ These events afforded performers access to a large audience, with the combination of emblematic national works – from Iphigenie and Miss Julie to Halka – and an international language empowering women to stand out on the big stage.

However, women did not only perform. They actively contributed to the growing corpus of Esperanto literature through poetry, novels and theatre plays. Mary Jane Hare, for instance, a Dundee resident, wrote an original three-act comedy for the Sixth Scottish Congress of Esperanto in Dundee, in 1911. Titled The Foreign Correspondent, it was featured multiple times in local newspapers and Esperanto newsletters. Similarly, women gave talks at Esperanto congresses, discussing topics ranging from missionary work to the potential of Esperanto in the Red Cross.⁴⁸

With the Universal Congresses becoming a fixture in Esperantujo, literary events and competitions soon became an integral part of it. Here another key figure, already mentioned in Chapter 2, rose to prominence: Marie Hankel (1844–1929). Hankel founded the Esperantista Literatura Asocio (Esperanto Literature Association) during the 1911 Universal Congress in Antwerp and served as this association’s first president – and who, for these and other reasons, deserves more detailed attention.⁴⁹

Unlike the much younger Beveridge sisters and their ‘new woman’ generation, Marie Hankel – born in 1844 in Schwerin, northern Germany – only became interested in Esperanto in her early sixties. Her husband, the well-known mathematician Hermann Hankel, had passed away prematurely at the age of thirty-four in 1873. In 1905, Marie Hankel moved to Dresden.⁵⁰ In addition to teaching the language and founding an Esperanto club in 1906, she co-organised several Esperanto gatherings in Dresden and became one of the co-organisers of the 1908 Universal Congress.⁵¹ Not only did Marie Hankel attend all the Universal Congresses of Esperanto held in Europe between 1905 and 1913, she also attended the Universal Congress in Washington DC in 1910, the first one outside Europe.⁵² By that time, she had started publishing in Esperanto on a number of topics, from theatre to architecture and literature, while also publishing her own poetry in prestigious periodicals such as La Revuo.⁵³

Women like Marie Hankel did not dominate the pages of La Revuo but, among still predominantly male authors, they stood out as female writers.⁵⁴ While several Esperanto magazines at the time were dedicated to world news and Esperanto-related updates, La Revuo centred on literature, and thus became the leading outlet for the development of an Esperanto canon of translations and original texts. Ludwik Zamenhof himself was a driving force behind La Revuo and, in the same magazine issue that featured one of Hankel’s poems in 1908, Zamenhof contributed a translation that opened with the following lines:

La vivo de virino estas eterne brulanta flamo de amo, diras unuj. La vivo de virino estas sinoferado, certigas aliaj. La vivo de virino estas patrineco, krias parto da homoj. La vivo de virino estas amuziĝado, ŝercas aliaj. La virto de virino estas blinda kredo, ĥore konsentas ĉiuj. La virinoj kredas blinde; ili amas, sin oferas, edukas infanojn […], kaj tamen la mondo ial rigardis ilin senkonfide, kaj de tempo al tempo ĝi esprimas sian opinion en formo de riproĉo aŭ averto: vi ne estas en ordo!⁵⁵

These lines – which characterise the contributions of women as limited to their societal roles as mothers, carers and faithful companions – are the opening sentences of the novel Marta, by Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910). At the heart of the novel, first published in Polish in 1873, is the life and hardship of Marta Świcka. Widowed at a young age, the single mother to a young daughter, she desperately seeks to make ends meet with the skills she has: some education, basic French, household skills and sewing. Yet, wherever Marta tries to find a job, she is outperformed, often by men, other skilled women or cheaper foreign workers.⁵⁶

Other translations by Ludwik Zamenhof – from Shakespeare’s works to the Old Testament – may be better known, yet here in La Revuo was the Esperanto version of the work of one of the best-known Polish novelists, social reformers and literary voices for women’s rights.⁵⁷ Eliza Orzeszkowa was an early strong voice of women’s emancipation, yet a voice in Polish that was largely hidden behind a language barrier for women from other national and linguistic backgrounds. With her literary work, Eliza Orzeszkowa set the tone and the themes for women’s rights well before Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) in Britain or Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) in the US – women who spoke and wrote in English and often took the limelight as the trailblazers of the first generation of activists for women’s emancipation.⁵⁸ Through Esperanto, a feminist icon became better known beyond Polish-language circles – an icon that was later nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 and 1909.

By contrast, Marie Hankel was never nominated for the Nobel Prize. However, in 1909, at the Fifth Universal Congress in Barcelona, she won the first prize at the first poetry competition ever held at a Universal Congress for her poem La Simbolo de l’Amo (The Symbol of Love). Later, during her stint as president of the Esperantista Literatura Asocio, her collection of short stories and poems was published as Sableroj (Grains of Sand).⁵⁹

With these publications, key controversial topics of the time – such as women’s rights – gained ground in the agenda of Esperanto speakers. Adding to these debates, in the 1910 Universal Congress of Esperanto in Washington DC, Marie Hankel gave a speech on women’s rights and universal suffrage, asserting that ‘universities may be closed to women, but thank goodness books are open’.⁶⁰ Her speech defended women’s rights not by adopting ‘noisy and violent’ acts of protest, but by insistently seeking ways to make women’s voices heard and respected. Her speech was later translated into English and featured in The Washington Herald, thus reaching a far wider non-Esperanto-speaking public.⁶¹

Hankel’s words in Washington DC hint as to why so many women found their ways in and through Esperanto. In a world structured around gender inequality, spaces dedicated to creativity and the arts allowed women to express themselves. There were gender barriers in higher education and social barriers in women-only organisations. However, despite all, women were finally making it into the lists of Nobel Prize nominees, and the first woman to actually win a Nobel Prize was not far from the Esperanto scene: Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934).

The career of Marie Skłodowska-Curie was one achieved against many odds in terms of gender and social – as well as linguistic – barriers. Working in French academia meant, after all, developing a career in a language that was not her first. She published her research primarily in French and English, at a time when English was not (yet) consolidated as the de facto global language of science. Curiously, Esperanto was on the radar of the Skłodowski family. Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s elder brother, Józef Skłodowski (1863–1937) – who worked as an internist in Warsaw – took up Esperanto along with many other physicians from Warsaw. With some of these physicians, he travelled to the Universal Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. It was the Dresden congress that substantiated the appeal of Esperanto to scientists, after a number of physicians gathered and founded the Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio (Worldwide Esperanto Medical Association, TEKA). TEKA developed into a truly transnational medical association, launching its own journals and gathering over 600 members in around 100 cities worldwide in the following years.⁶²

At a time when scientific publishing was dominated by a triad of French, English and German – with some Russian interspersed – a number of leading scientists were attracted to the idea of Esperanto as a language for science.⁶³ This included Odo Bujwid (1857–1942), a Polish bacteriologist who had studied in Berlin and Paris and, in the process, had to master various languages including German, French and English.⁶⁴ Bujwid was part of the organising committee of the 1912 Universal Congress in Kraków, during which he also became a member of TEKA and later served as its president. His wife, Kazimiera Bujwidowa (1867–1932), was a leading figure in the women’s movement then, in the generation after Eliza Orzeszkowa. While learning Esperanto for the 1912 Universal Congress, Kazimiera Bujwidowa also published her works on women’s rights in Polish.⁶⁵

Among the leading scientists attracted to Esperanto as a solution for the barriers to international communication was the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1935). A vocal advocate for Esperanto as a language for the sciences, Ostwald was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 – two years before Marie Skłodowska-Curie would receive her second Nobel, in 1911. By then, there were a number of scientific journals in Esperanto, publishing medical articles as well as knowledge from fields ranging from mathematics and astronomy to music. The most successful publication in this regard was the Internacia Scienca Revuo (International Science Review), founded in 1904.

The January 1908 issue of this journal featured a scientific article titled Hidro de para-toluidino (Paratoluidine hydrate).⁶⁶ The author of this chemistry paper – which analysed water loss and weight calculations – was Heather Beveridge. By the time she published her paper – a translation of an earlier version in English also authored by her – she held a degree in chemistry from the University of St Andrews and worked at the University of Edinburgh, where she co-authored a number of journal articles with the chemist James Walker.

Getting scientific papers published is not an easy undertaking – particularly as a female scientist around 1910. Heather Beveridge may never have been nominated for the Nobel Prize, but publishing in Esperanto gave international visibility to her work. According to the Dundee Courier – which took notice of her scientific endeavour – the young and aspiring Carnegie Research Scholar hoped that, by publishing in Esperanto, her work would be read by scholars around the world.⁶⁷ Perhaps a paper in Esperanto would not make her research widely read in mainstream academic settings. However, in Esperantujo, her contributions established her career as a leading chemist, enabling her to stand out in this more egalitarian and inclusive setting that Heather Beveridge and other women forged through the use of Esperanto.

Concluding remarks

Women were drawn to Esperanto in large numbers around 1900 – and they were crucial in making this language community thrive. They led clubs, took meeting minutes, managed club membership and finance and attended congresses abroad. But they did far more than that: they sang, performed, translated literary works, organised literary competitions, debated women’s rights and published scientific articles in Esperanto. In many ways, women were an integral part of Esperantujo and, given how much time, enthusiasm, creativity and financial means they invested, Esperanto must have been an integral part of these women’s lives.

In the pre-1914 years, Esperanto provided settings in which older women from the mid-century generation met younger ones who, like the Beveridge sisters, were educated, skilled, salaried and independent. This latter generation came of age when women fought for emancipation and equal rights. Many of these women who challenged their pre-assigned societal roles of mothers, carers and wives took the route of confrontational political action, whereas others joined women-only organisations or broke into the male-dominated spaces of science and literature by being nominated to and winning Nobel Prizes.

At first glance, Esperanto may seem to only marginally fit this broader landscape of early twentieth-century political activism and scientific development. After all, in the long term, Esperanto became neither the currency of scientific knowledge production nor the ideal language for political activism and social reform. The latter were more effectively pursued through demonstrations and pamphlets in vernacular languages, targeted at local and national publics, as done by Kazimiera Bujwidowa or Emmeline Pankhurst. However, Esperanto did find its place in this scenario. Unlike women-only spaces of activism and male-dominated spaces of scientific knowledge production, local Esperanto clubs and Universal Congresses emerged as progressive spaces. As a consequence of women’s efforts in the early decades of the language, using Esperanto came to imply forging largely egalitarian spaces in an otherwise unequal society, where speaking and writing in Esperanto meant placing oneself in a common ground where men and women, as well as younger and older people, met on more equal terms. Perhaps surprisingly, a language designed to encourage cross-border communication and the bridging of national and linguistic backgrounds also became mobilised as a means to establish an alternative space, in which Esperanto speakers also bridged gender divides.

Notes

1. 1  Wendy Heller, Lidia: The Life of Lidia Zamenhof, the Daughter of Esperanto (Oxford: Georg Ronald, 1985).

2. 2  Mark Fettes, ‘The Lady, the Linguists, and the International Language’, Language Problems and Language Planning 25, no. 2 (2001): 177–84.

3. 3  Voting exceptions were rare, such as Denmark, where women were allowed to vote in local elections from 1908, and in the Grand Duchy of Finland – then part of the Russian Empire – where women were granted the right to vote and stand for Parliament from 1905. See Karen Hunt, ‘Suffrage Internationalism in Practice: Dora Montefiore and the Lessons of Finnish Women’s Enfranchisement’, in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins, eds. The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London: University of London Press, 2021), 286–7.

4. 4  This compared to less than 30 per cent in Edinburgh or in Aberdeen at the time; see Graham R. Smith, ‘The Making of a Woman’s Town’: Household and Gender in Dundee, 1890–1940 (PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 1996).

5. 5  Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Bruce Lenman, Charlotte Lythe and Enid Gauldie, Dundee and Its Textile Industry, 1850–1914 (Dundee: Abertay Historical Society, 1969); Enid Gauldie, ‘The Dundee Jute Industry’, in Scottish Textile History, ed. John Butt and Kenneth Ponting (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 112–25.

6. 6  Brief research about Heather Beveridge’s life and career as a chemist has been undertaken by Marelene Rayner-Canham and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham in Chemistry Was Their Life: Pioneering British Women Chemists, 1880–1949 (London: Imperial College Press, 2008), 276–7.

7. 7  On Dundee and the founding of the University College, see Murdo Macdonald, ‘The Patron, the Professor and the Painter: Cultural Activity in Dundee at the Close of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities, ed. Christopher A. Whatley and Bob Harris (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 199–200.

8. 8  Scotland Census, 1911, National Records of Scotland, Ref: 282/18/5, ‘1911, Beveridge, John’.

9. 9  K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (London: Clarendon Press, 1998), 334–44.

10. 10  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/15.

11. 11  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/15, 5.

12. 12  Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals, 95–8; Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 268–99.

13. 13  ‘Local Esperanto Successes’, The Dundee Courier, 11 October 1907.

14. 14  The first classes were held in 1908, and those at Harris Academy began in 1911. See ‘Dundee: Kvaronjara Raporto’, The British Esperantist, April 1911, 78.

15. 15  See The Perthshire Advertiser, 21 December 1912.

16. 16  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/16.

17. 17  Kvara Universala Kongreso de Esperanto (Paris: Esperantista Centra Oficejo, 1909).

18. 18  The Dresden Museum of Ethnology was founded in 1875, a new opera house opened in the 1870s, the Dresden City Museum was founded in 1891 and the City Library opened in 1900.

19. 19  ‘Esperanto Reaches Its Semi-Jubilee’, Dundee Courier, 4 June 1912.

20. 20  Kvara Universala Kongreso de Esperanto.

21. 21  See, for instance, The British Esperantist, February 1908, 39; The British Esperantist, March 1908, 45; The British Esperantist, April 1908, 76.

22. 22  See John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/13.

23. 23  See ‘B.E.A. Delegate Councillors’, The British Esperantist, April 1911, 79.

24. 24  See The British Esperantist, May, 1911, 98.

25. 25  Jane Baird, William Harvey and John Mabon Warden, The Edinburgh Esperanto Pocket Dictionary (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1915). See also ‘Bibliografio’, Belga Esperantisto, October, 1931, 110.

26. 26  See ‘Skotaj karavanoj al Antverpeno’, The British Esperantist, June 1911, 117; ‘Karavanoj al Antverpeno’, The British Esperantist, July 1911, 138.

27. 27  Estelle B. Freedman, ‘The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s’, The Journal of American History 61, no. 2 (1974): 372–93; Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

28. 28  See Sepa Universala Kongreso de Esperanto (Paris: Esperantista Centra Oficejo, 1912), 125–7. This statement refers to those participants who are listed with a profession next to their name.

29. 29  This socio-professional picture, however, was more varied, including professions such as dressmaker. See Scotland Census, 1911, National Records of Scotland, Ref: 685/2 44/ 20, ‘1911 Simpson, Lucy May’.

30. 30  Delphine Gardey, ‘Mechanizing Writing and Photographing the Word: Utopias, Office Work, and Histories of Gender and Technology’, History and Technology 17, no. 4 (2001): 319–52, here 320.

31. 31  Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 5–6.

32. 32  Delphine Gardey, ‘The Standardization of a Technical Practice: Typing (1883–1930)’, History and Technology 15, no. 4 (1999): 313–43; Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 17–18.

33. 33  Ken Shackleton, ‘Gender Segregation in Scottish Chartered Accountancy: The Deployment of Male Concerns about the Admission of Women, 1900–25’, Accounting, Business & Financial History 9, no. 1 (1999): 135–56.

34. 34  Kim England and Kate Boyer, ‘Women’s Work: The Feminization and Shifting Meanings of Clerical Work’, Journal of Social History 43, no. 2 (2009): 307–40, here 310–11; Graham Lowe, Women in the Administrative Revolution: The Feminization of Clerical Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

35. 35  The generational difference between mother and daughters, as well as the expectations around a mid-Victorian, middle-class wife and mother, may explain the silence around Alice Alexandra Henderson in the otherwise rich archive of John Beveridge. See, for instance, Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Routledge, 2012); Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

36. 36  Pat Thane, ‘ “Well-Bred and Conventional Ladies”: The National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland/Northern Ireland’, Women’s History Review 32, no. 2 (2023): 172–89, here 172.

37. 37  On this generation and their novel career paths, see Arlene Young, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2019).

38. 38  See, for instance, Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lucy Delap, Feminisms: A Global History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019).

39. 39  Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2002), 44–67, 96–115; June Purvis, ‘Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), Suffragette Leader and Single Parent in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 87–108.

40. 40  Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 21–4.

41. 41  Thane, ‘Well-Bred and Conventional Ladies’, 173–5.

42. 42  See Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ann Taylor Allen and Anne Cova, ‘Introduction: Transnational Women’s Activism’, Women’s History Review 32, no. 2 (2023): 165–71, here 167–8.

43. 43  Robert Lake, ‘Gender and Etiquette in British Lawn Tennis 1870–1939: A Case Study of “Mixed Doubles”’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 5 (2012): 691–710.

44. 44  As stated in the anonymous congress report in the original: ‘Dass die stolzen Britinnen sich herablassen würden, im Auslande in einer anderen Sprache als ihrem heimischen Idiom zu reden, hätte ich nie für möglich gehalten.’ Sächsisches Esperanto-Institut Dresden, ed., Bericht (Dresden: Druckerei des Esperanto-Verlages F. Emil Boden, 1908), 43–4.

45. 45  Gesellschaft Esperanto Dresden (Dresden: Gebr. Arnhold, 1910).

46. 46  Sächsisches Esperanto-Institut Dresden, ed., Bericht, 52–3. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ifigenio en Taurido: Dramo en kvin aktoj, trans. Ludwik Zamenhof (Paris: Hachette, 1908).

47. 47  Julius Glück, La Jubilea Kongreso de Esperanto 1912: Rememoraĵoj kaj oficialaj dokumentokoj (Purmerend: J. Muusses, 1912), 25–6. On Halka and the Lviv Opera House, see Philipp Ther, Centre Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), 111–32.

48. 48  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/15.

49. 49  Geoffrey Sutton, Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, 1887–2007 (New York: Mondial, 2008), 52–3.

50. 50  See, for instance, Gesellschaft Esperanto Dresden (Dresden: Gebr. Arnhold, 1910).

51. 51  See Bernhard Pabst, Marie Hankel (1844–1929): Esperanto-Dichterin, Organisatorin, Feministin (Bonn: Selbstverlag, 2002), 5.

52. 52  See ‘Parolo pri virinrajtoj’, Amerika Esperantisto, October 1910, 66.

53. 53  For instance, Marie Hankel, ‘La batalo pro la vivo’, La Revuo, III, 1908, 412.

54. 54  See Javier Alcalde, ‘Pioneers of Internationalism: Esperanto and the First World War’, in Multilingual Environments in the Great War, ed. Julian Walker and Christophe Declercq (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 44–57, here 48.

55. 55  ‘The life of a woman is an eternally burning flame of love, some say. A woman’s life is self-sacrifice, others affirm. A woman’s life is motherhood, some people vociferate. A woman’s life is entertaining, others joke. The virtue of a woman is blind faith, everyone agrees. Women believe blindly; they love, sacrifice themselves, raise children […] and yet, for some reason, the world looks at them with distrust, and from time to time they express their opinion in the form of a reprimand or a warning: You are not ok!’ ‘Marta. Rakonto de Eliza Orzeszko (el la pola lingvo, kun permeso de la aŭtorino, tradukis Dro L. L. Zamenhof)’, La Revuo, III, 1908, 49.

56. 56  Eliza Orzeszkowa, Marta (Warsaw: S. Lewentala, 1885).

57. 57  On the women’s question, see Eliza Orzeszkowa, Kilka słów o kobietach (Lviv: Rogosz, 1873); see also Barbara Noworolska, Eliza Orzeszkowa. Trwanie, pamięć, historia (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2005).

58. 58  See, for instance, Delap, Feminisms, 31–6; Ware, Why They Marched, 4–8, 64–73.

59. 59  Pabst, Marie Hankel, 8; Marie Hankel, ‘La Simbolo de l’Amo’, La Revuo, III, 1909, 92; Marie Hankel, Sableroj (Leipzig: Deutsche Esperanto Buchhandlung, 1911).

60. 60  Libro de la Sesa Internacia Kongreso (Washington DC: La Kongreso, 1910).

61. 61  ‘Woman in Esperanto Asks Equal Rights’, The Washington Herald, 21 August, 1910, 2.

62. 62  Marcel Koschek, ‘TEKA: A Transnational Network of Esperanto-Speaking Physicians’, Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 2 (2021): 243–66.

63. 63  See Gordin, Scientific Babel, 1–22, 105–30; Bernhard Struck, ‘(Plan)Sprachen und Wissen (-sordnungen) um 1900’, in Wissen Ordnen und Entgrenzen – Vom Analogen Zum Digitalen Europa?, ed. Joachim Berger and Thorsten Wübbena (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023), 27–46.

64. 64  Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, ‘From Transnationalism to Olympic Internationalism: Polish Medical Experts and International Scientific Exchange, 1885–1939’, Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (2016): 207–31.

65. 65  See Kazimiera Bujwidowa, Kwestya kobieca: czy kobieta powinna mieć te same prawa co mężczyzna? (Kraków: nakł. Towarzystwo Wydawniczego ‘Encyklopedyi Ludowej’, 1909). See also Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, ‘Polish-Jewish Female Writers and the Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Aspasia 16 (2022): 110–29.

66. 66  Heather Beveridge, ‘Hidro de para-toluidino’, Internacia Science Revuo 5 (1908), 7–11.

67. 67  Dundee Courier, 16 January, 1908.