ÆPARA èPAR@ ` 2TEXT ` $Schwimmer, Rosika1877╨1948feminist, pacifist, and writerBorn in Budapest, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary), on September 11, 1877, Rosika Schwimmer grew up and attended public and convent schools in Temesvar (now Timisoara, Romania) and Szabadka (now Subotica, Yugoslavia). She also received private tutoring in languages and music. Family financial reverses obliged her to go to work as a bookkeeper in 1896, and shortly after moving back to Budapest in 1897 she organized the National Association of Women Office Workers, of which she was president until 1912. In 1903 she formed the Hungarian Association of Working Women and in 1904 the Hungarian Council of Women and, following her attendance at the International Council of Women conference in Berlin, the Hungarian Feminist Association. From 1907 she edited the monthly journal A NÜ Äs a Tçrsadalom (╥Woman and Society╙; later A NÜ). She also wrote a number of short stories, a novel, newspaper features, and articles, and in 1906 she published a translation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman╒s Women and Economics. She became known throughout Europe as a highly effective lecturer on feminist topics. In 1913 she organized and was elected corresponding secretary of the Seventh Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest. The next year Schwimmer moved to London to serve as press secretary for the alliance, and she was stranded there by the outbreak of the European war. She immediately began organizing feminist and pacifist leaders, and in August 1914 she sailed for the United States, where she conferred with Carrie Chapman Catt, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, and President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was reluctant to follow her suggestion that he become the active spokesman for neutral nations urging mediation of the war, and in 1914╨1915 Rosika Schwimmer conducted a national tour to rouse popular opinion, especially among suffragists, to push him in that direction. She spoke in some 60 cities in 22 states in that tour. She assisted Catt and Jane Addams in forming the Woman╒s Peace party early in 1915 and played a major role in organizing and conducting the International Congress of Women at The Hague (chaired by Jane Addams) in April╨May 1915. She presented to the Congress a plan for neutral-nation mediation and was given charge of a delegation sent to sound out opinion in 14 neutral capitals. The report of the Congress and of the surveys by her and other delegates was ignored by Wilson, but in November 1915 Henry Ford expressed interest in promoting the idea of mediation. In less than three weeks he had bought the Scandinavian╨American liner Oscar II and installed an unofficial American mediation delegation, including himself. Rosika Schwimmer accompanied the delegation as unpaid expert adviser as Oscar II called at various neutral nations in Europe and gathered similarly unofficial delegations. The journey of Ford╒s ╥peace ship,╙ widely ridiculed in the press from the beginning and further burdened with an unwisely chosen American delegation, accomplished next to nothing, and Ford himself left long before it ended. In June 1916 Schwimmer led in organizing the International Committee for Immediate Mediation, and throughout 1916 and 1917 she continued to work for an end to the war. In October 1918 Schwimmer was named to newly independent Hungary╒s governing National Council of Fifteen, and the next month Prime Minister Michael Karolyi appointed her Hungarian minister to Switzerland. In 1919 she was deprived of her civil rights by the Communist government of BÄla Kun that had ousted Karolyi, and in January 1920 she fled to Vienna to escape the succeeding anti-Semitic Horthy regime. In September 1921 she came to the United States and settled in Chicago. Her hopes of establishing herself permanently were hindered by a campaign of public vilification and private blacklisting aimed at her by various patrioteering groups. She was charged variously with being a German spy, a Bolshevik agent, and a member of a Jewish conspiracy. Her application for citizenship stirred up new attacks in 1924. The federal district court in Chicago denied her application because she refused to affirm that she would bear arms in defense of the United States. An appeal won a reversal, but in May 1929 the Supreme Court ruled 6╨3 against her, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes filing a memorable dissenting opinion in her favor. Although she remained in the United States for the rest of her life, she was formally stateless. World government was the concern that occupied Schwimmer╒s last years. In 1937 she formed the Campaign for World Government. She was put forward by several nations for the 1948 Nobel Peace Prize, but her death occurred before the award was to be made; none was made in that year. Her writings other than periodical pieces, lectures, and petitions, included Tisza Tales, a collection of Hungarian tales for children, 1928, Chaos, War or a New World Order?, with Lola Maverick Lloyd, 1937, and Union Now for Peace or War?, 1939. She died in New York City on August 3, 1948. styl ` & ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ < !I Q !I e !I é !I ç !I ï 5¬ î !I !I ▐ $ !I ' !I : !I % 5¬ & !I K !I ▐ ^ !I · 5¬ √ !I !I ▐ !I
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