The period from the Ausgleich of 1867 until the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy was one of unprecedented expansion in associational activity across the empire. Among the new voices in public life were those of women's rights activists, who fought for equal access to education, professional advancement, equality within marriage, and political representation. The story of these early Central European feminists is often told in a national idiom, as proponents typically situated their aspirations for greater civic participation in the context of a nationalist emancipatory agenda. Angelique Leszczawski-Schwerk challenges this paradigm, examining the multiethnic landscape of women's rights activism in the Galician crownland within a consciously transnational, comparative framework that includes Polish, Ukrainian, and Zionist organizations. She traces patterns of interaction among early feminists united in their common status as subaltern members of “nations without states” whose countrymen were subject to other empires. The study is meticulously researched and includes a rich catalog of associations, educational establishments, and periodicals run by and for women across Galicia. Yet except for a few umbrella associations such as the Lemberg Union of Equal Rights for Women founded in 1908, the majority of these entities were structured along ethnoreligious lines, suggesting some of the challenges of writing transnational history with an institutional focus even in a multicultural context such as Galicia.

“Die umkämpften Tore zur Gleichberechtigung” – Frauenbewegungen in Galizien (1867–1918) is part of a recent academic effort to capture the multiethnic vitality of the Galician crownland. Leszczawski-Schwerk depicts the differential paces at which feminist organizations developed, with Polish women initiating their activity in the 1860s, Ukrainians in the 1880s, and Zionists only in the 1890s. She draws on social movement theory to accommodate this asynchrony, arguing that the movements passed through similar organizational phases, beginning with tightknit groups of ideologues focused on charitable work and educational advancement, followed by the establishment of more permanent structures and wider membership bases, and ending with the battle for political rights. (Zionist activists avoided this last phase, however, as women were granted voting rights within the party in 1898 and did not aspire to participate in crownland bodies.) Much of the early focus, of course, arose out of Habsburg regulations barring women from membership in political associations while permitting them to take part in charitable or educational endeavors, a requirement that forced feminists to act politically under the cover of cultural institutions. In all three cases, women's activism was heavily imbedded in the liberating promise of nationalist movements, which provided the form, the content, and many of its early goals.

Nonetheless, this is a story that is transnational in its basic outlines. The narrative unfolds with reference to parallel, though much less successful, efforts amongst conationals in adjacent empires, and in the wider context of West European women's movements and Galician activists’ relationships with their counterparts in Vienna. Leszczawski-Schwerk shows how women transformed urban public spaces such that cities like Cracow and L'viv became “showplaces of the modern” (127), where demonstrations, petitions, and university life allowed them to transgress social and ethnic boundaries. It is through such public agitation that she sees the “mass mobilization” of women into the equal rights movement. Yet from this depiction, it is difficult to envision the “popular” stage of any of these movements. The largest association listed peaked at 400 members, including a high percentage of male activists, and only one of the dozens of periodicals reviewed boasted more than 2,000 subscribers in contrast to leading crownland press organs that circulated in daily runs of more than 20,000. The relatively elite membership in these organizations reflects the broader reality of early feminism across Europe and North America, which struggled to mobilize working-class and peasant women, many of whom would eventually find a home in class-based socialist organizations. Much of the action in this account unfolds in Lemberg, the site of Galician local government, yet the author notes that many more female-operated publications were based in Cracow, a setting that receives only limited attention.

In the end, Leszczawski-Schwerk's effort to inscribe fluidity on nineteenth-century women's movements and to trace a transnational space of female activism in Galicia is only partially successful. Certainly, as she concludes, the borders of these ethnofeminist organizations were affirmed in the few cases in which activists crossed them and interacted on common issues. However, the very disjuncture between the timing of the separate phases through which each movement developed, along with the inherent social hierarchy of a dominant Polish movement and more marginal Ruthenian and Zionist associations, further circumscribed the potential for cooperation. Leszczawski-Schwerk makes it clear that national affiliation remained an important organizational constraint even as we seek to understand associational dynamics that crossed ethnic lines.