Women's emancipation and the RURP ID: 269

The Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical Party was perhaps the only Ukrainian party in Galicia that supported the women's movement. The party's leaders, Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk, collaborated with Galician female activists and tried to instrumentalise the women's movement for political purposes.

Story

From the very beginning of its existence, the Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical Party members supported the idea of equality between men and women in the Austrian Empire in general and in Galicia in particular. The reason for this position was the personal beliefs of the RURP members and their contacts with famous Galician and Bukovinian women: Natalia Kobrynska, Yevhenia Yaroshynska, Sofia Okunevska, Yaroslava Chaikovska, Solomia Krushelnytska, and others. The desire to include the women's cause in the national project and to instrumentalise the women's movement for their own interests played an important role. The views of Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk, the party's key figures, were probably shaped by their closest family members — Franko's wife Olha and Pavlyk's sister Anna. The RURP's ambitious plans for equality failed to materialise because of different visions of how to implement it and personal misunderstandings between party members and women.

Equality for men, nationality for women

The turn of the 20th century was marked by emancipation and the development of the women's movement. More and more often, women demanded to join the public space and to receive voting and educational rights. The RURP programme was perhaps the only one that' about the women's cause in the Ukrainian environment: "full freedom of person, word, assembly and association, press and conscience, ensuring for every individual, regardless of sex, the fullest influence on all issues of political life." In addition, Mykhailo Pavlyk advocated the creation of scholarship funds for girls' education and their right to vote. The latter issue was discussed at a general meeting in Lviv City Hall on 14 December 1890, organised by the Galician Workers' Party and the RURP. Most of the women present were Jewish members of the Scientific Reading Room (pol. Czytelnia naukowa). The views of Galician women were represented by a Polish woman, Mrs Lewensztejn, whose text was later published in the Narod periodical. Natalia Kobrynska sharply criticised Pavlyk for this: "...the whole party sins by overemphasising the Poles' progress, which they mostly use only as a fashionable drapery before Europe, but in reality they use it to cover their grossly retrograde and uncultured aspirations." Although Kobrynska shared the party's views on the women's cause, which was seen as a social and class one, the multinational views of the RURP members weakened their relationship. Kobrynska and her entourage aimed to work exclusively for their own nation.

Is the women's cause to be promoted only by women?

According to Pavlyk's plan, the primacy in solving the women's issue (not only its Ukrainian segment) was to belong to Lviv as the 'capital city' of Galicia. It was from here that the ideas of the RURP were to be spread throughout the province, women being their retransmitters among the uneducated population. Perhaps in this way it would also be possible to involve women in political life. Ukrainian women, however, had their own plans. With the assistance of Kobrynska, a women's assembly was held in Stryi on 1 September 1891, with no men allowed. This frustrated the editors of the Narod periodical, who published texts by women and helped women's cause go far beyond Lviv and Galicia. They believed that such a move would not help, but rather harm the women's cause. The creation of the Ruthenian Women's Club in Lviv in 1893 and the refusal to admit men and women of other nationalities triggered criticism from the RURP and Olha Franko. Mykhailo Pavlyk did not understand the narrow national approach of Ukrainian women and kept in touch with the Polish-Jewish society Ognisko Kobiet (Lviv, 1893). He even gave a lecture on Drahomanov for them, while in a letter to Lesia Ukrainka he wrote: "I'm going to give a lecture to the Ogniskokobiet — they are somehow more humane than Ruthenian women and more eager to progress." The desire to subordinate women's affairs to party affairs and constant disputes with Natalia Kobrynska resulted in a boycott of the latter. The dispute over a women's publication became the cornerstone. Franko and Pavlyk accepted Olha Ozarkevych's idea to publish a women's newspaper and rejected Kobrynska's proposal for a women's almanac. From that time on, the radicals stopped publishing Kobrynska's works in their periodicals. 

Followers and sponsors of the RURP

It is not known how many women were members of the party. Their status was determined by the Postup, the RURP's cultural and educational society, which functioned on the basis of membership fees of 50 kreutzers per year. It is not known what opportunities the membership opened up for women, but the party had some means of subsistence from this. The views of the RURP were shared by Lesia Ukrainka, who provided one-time financial assistance to the Postup Society and hoped to become a real (not just a formal) member of the party one day. Solomia Krushelnytska also expressed her sympathy for the RURP. At Mykhailo Pavlyk's request, she sent 225 guilders to the RURP's campaigning and publishing business, the amount being equal to, for example, 10 months' rent for an average apartment. Krushelnytska promised to send money when she was able; however, she did not ask for membership. Her position was not so much a desire to become a full-fledged activist in the political movement as an emancipated woman’s reaction to Western models. Probably, the financial support of women, who praised the development of the party's periodicals and the availability of women's texts, contributed to the interest of the RURP in addressing the women's issue. In addition, the joint efforts of the party and the women's movement helped to achieve equality and strengthen their political positions in Lviv and Galicia. The focus on different political centres — multinational Lviv and Ukrainian Stryi — as well as different views on coexistence prevented the achievement of this goal.

People

Ivan Franko was one of the RURP founders 

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