Rosika Schwimmer

• Rosika Schwimmer
• Born: September 11, 1877
• Died: August 3, 1948

Feminist, pacifist, proponent of world government, journalist, and lecturer, was born in Budapest, Hungary, the first of three children of Bertha (Katscher) Schwimmer and Max B. Schwimmer, an experimental farmer who raised and sold seed corn, produce, and horses. Her parents came from upper-middle-class Jewish backgrounds and held strong, often unconventional views on the social issues of their day.

Rosika Schwimmer spent most of her childhood in the provincial cities of Temesvár (now Timisoara, Rumania) and Szabadka (now Subotica, Yugoslavia). Though a sickly child, she attended convent and public schools for eight years and was tutored at home in languages and music. As a teenager she made up her mind to pursue a career in journalism, which her uncle, the writer and reformer Leopold Katscher, had taught her to view as a tool for social change.

Schwimmer had to suspend that pursuit in 1895, when her father’s business failed, forcing her to take a job as a bookkeeper in Szabadka. In 1897 she moved with her family back to Budapest, where she continued to hold office jobs until 1904. There, she founded the National Association of Women Office Workers in 1897, the Hungarian Association of Working Women in 1903, and, in 1904, the Hungarian Council of Women. She saw the organizations as a means of helping women win the social, political, and economic independence she felt they needed if they were to control their lives. During these years, her political articles, often satirical, appeared in German and Hungarian newspapers and periodicals, earning her an international reputation as an advocate of women’s rights.

In 1904 an invitation to address the International Council of Women and the International Women’s Congress in Berlin led to a meeting with Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Inspired by Catt to lead the struggle for woman suffrage in Hungary, Schwimmer returned to Budapest and helped found the Hungarian Feminist Association.

A tireless propagandist, she wrote pamphlets in Hungarian and German on state child care, home economics, and marriage, and she translated Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics into Hungarian. She published short stories and a novel, and from 1907 to 1928 she edited A Nö (The Woman), the Hungarian feminists’ journal. She began making annual lecture tours of European capitals in 1906. During this period, Schwimmer married (January 16, 1911) and divorced (January 4, 1913) a Hungarian journalist named Bédy. They had no children.

At the outbreak of World War I, Schwimmer was in London, working as a press secretary for the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Britain entered the war on August 4, 1914, and that night Schwimmer drafted an appeal for “continuous mediation” by the United States and other neutrals. In the United States in September, she presented to President Woodrow Wilson a petition that showed international backing for her mediation plan. Wilson refused to commit himself, so Schwimmer toured the nation, speaking in some sixty cities in an attempt to rally public opinion. Though the tour left American officials unmoved, it spurred the creation of the Woman’s Peace party, with Jane Addams as president and Schwimmer as international secretary.

In 1915 both women attended the Hague Congress of Women, which adopted Schwimmer’s proposal to sound out world leaders on her plan for neutral intervention. A delegation led by Jane Addams carried the idea to leaders of the belligerent nations; Schwimmer led the delegation that visited leaders of neutral nations. Both delegations compared notes in the United States in September, concluding that world leaders would welcome neutral mediation.

Schwimmer decided to create an unofficial conference of neutrals after President Wilson refused to propose an official one. In November she persuaded Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer, that a private peace conference had a chance of succeeding. Ford pledged to fund it and to accompany a delegation of Americans to Stockholm, where the Ford Neutral Conference convened, for the first time, on February 8, 1916. By then, however, mocking dispatches sent by some of the fifty-four reporters aboard the Ford Peace Ship (the Scandinavian-American liner Oscar II) had shattered the mission’s credibility in the United States; Ford had gone home; and the American delegation was split into squabbling factions, some openly rebellious toward Schwimmer’s leadership. In late February 1916, Schwimmer resigned as unpaid “expert adviser” to the expedition.

Hungary declared itself a republic in October 1918 and the new prime minister, Count Mihály Károlyi, a pacifist, asked Schwimmer to join a National Council of Fifteen to run the nation. Kårolyi appointed her minister to Switzerland—perhaps the first woman to hold so high a diplomatic rank. She refused to serve Béla Kun, the Communist who ousted Kårolyi in March 1919. In August the reactionary regime of Miklos Horthy came to power, and Schwimmer found her life in danger because of her past political activities. She fled to Vienna early in 1920 and emigrated to the United States in September 1921.

Xenophobic outbursts greeted her and blocked her plans to earn her living in the United States as a journalist and lecturer. One writer called her a “German spy,” another labeled her an agent of “bolshevist organizations.” Some American Jews blamed her for provoking Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign by “swindling” Ford with the peace ship idea. Friends and admirers contributed to her support, as did her sister, Franciska Schwimmer, with whom she lived in Chicago and, after 1928, in New York City.

A United States district court denied her request for citizenship in 1928, on the ground that she would refuse to bear arms in the nation’s defense. In a six-to-three decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 1929. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s oft-quoted dissent, joined by Justice Louis D. Brandeis, called Schwimmer “a woman of superior character and intelligence, obviously more than ordinarily desirable as a citizen.” Editorialists were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of the decision. Walter Lippmann, writing in the New York World, commented: “It would probably never have occurred to the authors of the Constitution that the day would come when a woman forty-nine years of age, and otherwise qualified, would be refused citizenship because she stated under oath that ‘I would not take up arms personally if the United States can compel its women citizens to take up arms in defense of the country—something that no other civilized country has ever attempted.’” Stateless, Schwimmer remained in the United States as a resident alien, refusing to apply again for citizenship even after the Supreme Court reversed itself on the issue in 1946.

The 1930s saw Schwimmer advance a number of schemes, including one for world citizenship and another for a World Center for Women’s Archives. The Campaign for World Government, begun with her friend Lola Maverick Lloyd in 1937, dominated the final decade of her life. She tried and failed to set up an official or unofficial world constitutional convention during and after World War II.

Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948, she died, at seventy, of bronchial pneumonia, before a recipient of the award could be named. The Nobel committee found “no suitable living candidate” for the 1948 prize. Schwimmer’s ashes were scattered in Lake Michigan, near Lloyd’s home in Winnetka, Illinois.

Schwimmer was of average height, portly in middle age, with a round face, lively brown eyes, and a pince-nez mounted on her nose. She wore her thick brown hair in a bun until 1929, when she had it cut short. Her deep voice was capable of theatrical flourishes that audiences found moving.

She had many strengths—tirelessness, optimism, a quick intelligence, persuasiveness and warmth—and she enlisted them all to promote women’s rights and permanent world peace. She shaped the feminist movement in Hungary and gave a focus to peace activities in the United States and in Europe. She was not alone in believing that the ill-fated Ford peace expedition—“one of the few really rational and generous impulses of those insane years”—succeeded in strengthening peace forces in smaller neutral nations, thus helping to keep those nations out of the conflict.

Because Schwimmer wrote mainly for Hungarian and German periodicals and newspapers, little of her journalism is available in English. American publishers were inhospitable to her work after 1921, though she did publish Tisza Tales, a book of Hungarian legends for children, in 1928. She printed the pamphlets Chaos, War or a New World Order? (1937), written with Lola Maverick Lloyd, and Union Now for Peace or War? The Danger in the Plan of Clarence Streit (1939) largely at her own expense. The Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection at the New York Public Library contains the complete files and libraries of Schwimmer and Lloyd. Further material exists among the papers of other leading feminists and pacifists, including the Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and Women’s Peace Party Papers, Swarthmore College; the Lillian Wald and Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, New York Public Library; and the Louis P. Lochner and Julia Grace Wales Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society. The New York Public Library has microfilmed thousands of articles about Schwimmer’s work, many in English. Rosika Schwimmer, World Patriot (1937; revised, 1947) is a biographical portrait composed by friends and associates. Edith Wynner, her longtime secretary, wrote of her in World Federal Government: Why? What? How? (1954) and in the article “Out of the Trenches by Christmas,” The Progressive, December 1965. Wynner’s biographical sketch of Schwimmer in the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974) contains references to Schwimmer’s Hungarian writings. B. Hershey, The Odyssey of Henry Ford and the Great Peace Ship (1967) and biographies of Henry Ford refer to Schwimmer’s role in that episode. The briefs and court report on Schwimmer’s citizenship case are found in U.S. v. Rosika Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644. See also Notable American Women (1971). Her obituary appeared in The New York Times, on August 4, 1948.