526Chapter 26Feminists also concentrated on other targets. Many
favored modernization of legal codes, such as the
Napoleonic Code in France or the Pisanelli Code in
Italy, that made wives subordinate to husbands. The
most basic reform sought was a Married Woman’s Prop-
erty Act, such as the British had adopted in stages be-
tween 1856 and 1882, and several countries (chiefly in
Scandinavia) followed. French women obtained this
right with the Schmahl Law of 1907; German women
did not win it before the war. Most women’s rights ad-
vocates also sought the legalization of divorce. This
was permissible in the German Lutheran tradition and
had been established in British law in 1857. The cam-
paign was more difficult in Catholic countries because
Pope Leo XIII stongly opposed divorce and issued an
encyclical in 1880 stating that “[d]ivorce is born of per-
verted morals.” French women won a limited form of
divorce in 1884; Spanish and Italian women did not.
Women’s rights advocates generally had more success
in seeking educational opportunities. The University of
Zürich became the first to open to women (1865) and
other Swiss universities followed in the 1870s. Russian
women briefly won a series of university rights but they
were rescinded in 1881 because of the involvement of
some women in radical political groups. Germany,
home of the most highly praised and emulated universi-
ties of the late nineteenth century, resisted higher edu-
cation for women. The state of Baden was the most
progressive, offering women a secondary school cur-
riculum to prepare for universities in 1893 and then
opening higher education to them in 1900. The Prus-
sian Ministry of Education was more conservative and
perpetuated a secondary school curriculum stressing
“Household Arts” to teach “feminine precision, neat-
ness, and patience” while denying young women the
prerequisites for entering universities. The distin-
guished University of Berlin thus remained closed to
women until 1908. In 1914 German universities en-
rolled a combined total of slightly more than four thou-
sand women, who formed 6.2 percent of the student
population. The situation was only slightly better for
women in France, where 4,254 women students (10.1
percent of enrollment) studied in 1913.
European Culture During
the Belle Époque
The Belle Époque was a period of great cultural creativ-
ity, but no single style dominated the arts and typifiedthe era. Unlike the baroque and classical styles of the
eighteenth century, or the romanticism of the early
nineteenth century, no style summarizes the cultural
trends of the era. Instead, the Belle Époque was an age
of vitality expressed in conflicting styles. In painting,
the realism of 1870 gave way to a succession of new
styles, such as impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and ex-
pressionism. Realism lingered in novels and drama of
social comment (such as Emile Zola’s novels of ordinary
life in France or Henrik Ibsen’s plays of angry social
criticism), a style known as naturalism, but poetry
evolved into an introverted and sometimes mystical
style called symbolism. Music, architecture, philoso-
phy, sculpture, and the decorative arts produced no
style that dominated the era.
The best remembered cultural style of the Belle
Époque was impressionism, a style of painting that
originated in France in the 1860s–1880s. Impressionism
produced several of the greatest artists of the century,
such as Claude Monet, whose painting entitled Impres-
sion: Sunrise(1874) led to the name. And impressionism
influenced the other arts, from music (Debussy is some-
times called an impressionist) to poetry (the symbolist
poets are also called impressionists). But the Belle
Époque was an era of so much change that it cannot be
called the “age of impressionism.”
Belle Époque architecture illustrates both the jum-
ble of cultural styles and the emergence of the dramati-
cally new. Late nineteenth-century architecture first
suggests an age of revivalism, because almost all past
styles were exploited: Bavarians built another great cas-
tle in neorococo style, the most noted new building in
central Vienna (a theater) was in neobaroque style, the
Hungarian Parliament on the banks of the Danube in
Budapest was neo-Gothic, the most discussed new
church of the age in Paris was neoromanesque, the
Dutch national museum built in Amsterdam was neo-
Renaissance, and the vast Gum Department Store in
Moscow was neoclassical. Despite this cacophony of
styles of the past, an exciting architecture of the twenti-
eth century began to emerge in the closing years of the
nineteenth. The French built the tallest structure on
earth for their world’s fair of 1889 (the centennial of the
revolution), and they built the Eiffel Tower in structural
steel. By the 1890s this use of steel and the American-
born style of building skyscrapers by attaching a ma-
sonry exterior to a metal frame had begun a profound
change in the appearance of cities. Walter Gropius, a
German architect who had tremendous influence on
the visual arts of the new century, built the first steel
frame building with glass walls in 1911.