“The right to speak is a form of wealth,” writes U.S. cultural historian Rebecca Solnit. In a democratic—and thus feminist—society, this wealth is redistributed. Those who can tell their story leave traces, remain in memory—even for centuries. Who is heard, and who is not, defines the status quo of our society. Voicelessness and powerlessness go hand in hand. Only those whose voices are heard can participate, take part in democracy, and help shape politics. For a long time, politics and historiography were the domain of great men and their deeds—kings and warlords, founding fathers and inventors. Bertolt Brecht criticized this dominant narrative in his “Questions of a Reading Worker.” But it was only the women’s movement that posed the questions of a reading working woman and made room in history for those long confined to the private sphere, excluded from public life.
Centuries of women’s voicelessness and powerlessness have become embedded in everyday life, and the gender-equitable redistribution of public space—this wealth of visibility and agency—is far from complete. Despite recent efforts to commemorate the women of Vienna, their exclusion still reverberates. Nearly 90 percent of Vienna’s streets are named after men; almost all monuments depict men. But why is it important for women’s names to appear on street signs, for monuments to honor women as well? Why, especially in the Strauss year, should the female characters in his operettas be remembered?
It’s about identification, role models, encounters in everyday life, and what we consider normal. Is a female chancellor taken for granted? A woman composer? Women—and not only women, but other underrepresented groups in politics and public life, such as people with a migration background—still too often experience themselves as outsiders or exceptions. Their womanhood is emphasized precisely because it is not the norm.
Statistics paint a clear picture: just look at the number of female mayors in Austria, or the number and speaking time of women in the National Council. Surveys confirm the persistence of gender stereotypes: even people who are generally willing to vote for a woman impose explicit requirements on her qualifications—requirements they take for granted in a man. Women must first prove themselves capable of politics and public life, while men are assumed to be so by virtue of their gender. “Good Girls go to the Polling Booth, Bad Boys go Everywhere,” as a well-known political science study summarized the situation: even with universal suffrage, conditions remain unequal for men and women in public life.
Women already resisted these inequalities in Johann Strauss’s time. In the Biedermeier era, thousands of Viennese women—beyond the lower classes—were employed. The historian Waltraud Schütz has recently documented many entrepreneurial women in the pre-March period. Yet it was only after the 1848 Revolution that women could collectively and publicly raise their voices. The months without censorship allowed them to spread their political demands—active and passive suffrage, access to universities, equal pay, and social security—through newspapers and pamphlets. With the Vienna Democratic Women’s Association, a distinct women’s group emerged—one that pursued political, not charitable, goals. Its members demonstrated, petitioned, and defended the revolution against imperial troops. Though it was active for barely two months, it is considered the starting point of the Austrian women’s movement. The struggles of that time—for press and freedom of expression, for constitutional government, for equal participation of groups previously excluded from public life, such as women and workers—marked the beginning of a long process of democratization that is still ongoing.
Many of Strauss’s female characters broke out of the traditional roles assigned to them, often playing “trouser roles” that gave them, even symbolically, greater freedom of movement; they acted as playmakers in the operettas and claimed male domains for themselves. Yet events like the “women’s regiment” in Der lustige Krieg were so exaggerated and farcical that the censors saw little subversive potential. The validity of traditional gender concepts and hierarchies was never really questioned, as theater scholar Marion Linhardt notes. Police reports of the time dismissed revolutionary phrases like “sovereign people” rather than taking them seriously.
On Strauss’s stage, women could be part of that “sovereign people”—a privilege denied them in the real world for a long time. Even though some women in Strauss’s era were eligible to vote based on property or tax contributions, they were not allowed to cast their own ballots or even enter polling stations. This form of public participation was denied even to upper-class women. Good girls didn’t even go to the polling booth… It was not until 1918 that all women gained universal and equal suffrage—and thus the right to be elected to parliament and help shape society.
The retreat into Biedermeier domesticity or the conquest of public space will be renegotiated in 2025—when, for example, “tradwives” on social media display old role models, reversing Strauss’s trouser roles as entrepreneurs (and influencers are nothing less) stage the illusion of the contented housewife. Public space—whether experienced virtually or physically—remains essential for a democratic society. It is where people can be, regardless of social status, where we encounter one another without prior arrangement, where chance conversations expose us to and challenge us with different perspectives. Streets, parks, squares, and virtual spaces must be understood as part of the infrastructure of democracy.