Meta Berger - A Milwaukee Womans Life on the Left: The Autobiography of Meta Berger

Meta Schlichting Berger (18731944) lived a life of service, and in her autobiography she left a significant legacy to serve anyone with an interest in womens history or socialism and other reform movements whose imprints remain strong in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. The State Historical Society of Wisconsins publication of Meta Bergers manuscript ensures a wider audience for the lessons bequeathed by this school commissioners daughter who became a school board president and educational reformer who educated her city and stateand to some extent, her countryto reforms that continue to revolutionize classrooms today.

By Meta Bergers time, Milwaukee was among the most ethnically heterogeneous cities in America. Foreign-born immigrantsamong them her parentsand first-generation Milwaukeeans comprised more than half the citys population. More than half its newspapersincluding her husbands first effortwere published in languages other than English, and many children were educated in bilingual schools. The task then was to build bridges between more than centuries. Meta Berger was among the Socialists who showed their fellow citizens how to span both ethnic traditions and assimilationism without sacrificing a rich, multicultural heritage. In the twenty-first century, Milwaukee could do worse than to emulate her example and become once more a model of urban progress.

Meta Bergers reminiscences are noteworthy because she scored so many important firsts for women, not only in Milwaukee and Wisconsin but also nationwide. Such achievements by women pioneering in public office, well before they won the ballot, became persuasive arguments wielded by the woman suffrage movement to win the ballot for all womena movement in which she was a leader in Wisconsin. Her story serves as a reminder that major political reforms are achieved at the national level only after many obstacles are overcome and many milestones passed at the state and local levels. It was, and is, difficult for women to win elective office in Wisconsin, but Meta Berger was one of the first women in Wisconsin to do so, even at the local level, just seven years after Wisconsin women finally secured the limited right to vote in school elections. To put her achievement in perspective, it bears pointing out that almost another ninety years would pass before Wisconsin elected a womanto Congress. And Meta Berger won reelection for more than thirty yearsa record rarely matched in the state.

That Meta Berger and others of her era won heroic as well as historic victories does not, of course, mean that they lived heroic livesnor that, with publication of her autobiography, she ought to be enshrined. Many of our heroes were not born to greatness, or even to great goodness, but instead were self-made. Understanding this, we too can realize change as reformers did decades ago. Luckily, Meta Berger left us many useful lessons on how to win against the odds and obstacles and how to transform a city, a state, even a Constitution.

Meta Berger met obstacles in both her public and private lives. She overcame many of thembut not all. In her autobiography, she writes primarily of her private life, yet reveals little of a truly personal nature. Her account of a childhood of genteel comfort suddenly ended by the death of her father, followed by her mothers endless work and worry to avoid poverty and provide for her daughters, suggests clearly that this was a formative experience. In Meta Bergers brief career as a teacher, she saw her students confront similar obstacles and learned lessons she later would bring to her study of socialism. But she wrote most about her many years of marriage and motherhood, especially of her husbands instruction on the role of socialismand of her years as a housewife and mother. She did not shrink from the role of hausfrau, if she chafed under it. She loyally served a husband who knew little and cared less about housework, shopping, or doing the dishesand who was mildly disappointed when their firstborn was a girl. In time she became something more than Mr. Bergers house-keeper, in her own words, and achieved a true partnership in her marriage.

Eventually she evolved a new role as a leader among women in Socialist Party politics andalthough belatedly and brieflyamong Wisconsin women in suffragist politics. But she had waited to be asked to join the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association only a few years before the end of the century of struggle for social justice to which other women had given their lives. And she had only just joined when she departed the organization for the newer National Womans Party, which had little power in local politics in Wisconsin, where women could not yet vote even in state elections. She discusses the circumstances of her switch in suffragist allegiances, but her recollection of eventsby then, decades earlierdoes not gibe with the record of her resignation from the WWSA. Nor does her account of a debacle she caused at a state teachers convention in 1917 coincide with those of other women embroiled in the internal feud that embarrassed all sides and embroiled suffragists in unwelcome publicity.

The historical record is also ambiguous about Meta Bergers work for and with women in the Socialist Party. She was swift to criticize suffragists as middle-class and conservative, but in truth she retained many such bourgeois attributes herself. Paradoxically, because she valued the bonds of marriage and family, the trappings of home and children, she surreptitiously practiced birth control so that she and Victor could afford the lifestyle to which they both aspired. They attempted to be paragons of respectability, too, and were patronizing about working-class comrades who did not dress or behave properly. She wrote that the women socialists are surely no good, that it was far easier to work with men than with women. But the latter may well have been a shrewd move on her part, owing to the subservient role of womens auxiliaries in any party. Progress is always easier to achieve when working with those who hold it, yet it could not have been easy for her. Her own husband was among the most conservative of men, both personally and politically. As late as 1910a year after her first victory at the polls, ahead of hishe qualified his half-hearted support of the Socialist Partys platform plank for woman suffrage by publicly worrying that the great majority of women were more illiberal, unprogressive and reactionary than their male counterparts.