(Weinheim, 1985), 23ff.
40. Amy Hackett, “The Politics of Feminism in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1918” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), 40.
41. Ibid., 66.
42. James Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women, Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1988), 99.
43. Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991), 99, 171.
44. Ibid., 171-172.
45. Patricia Mazón, Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865-1914 (Stanford, CA, 2003), 51.
46. Ibid., 51-52.
47. Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, Weibliche Kultur und soziale Arbeit; Eine Geschichte der Frauenbewegung am Beispiel Bremens, 1810-1927 (Cologne, 1989), 77.
48. Ibid.
49. Evans, Feminist Movement, 1.
50. Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 189^1933 (Göttingen, 1981), 46, 47.
51. Ibid., 47.
52. Ibid.
53. Nancy Reagin, A German Women's Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880-1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), 101, 277.
54. Ibid., 101.
55. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Durham, NC, 2001), 6.
56. Ibid., 135; the citation specifically addresses Cauer's activism, but describes Heyl's vision as well; for a description of Heyl's views, see 162-168.
57. Ibid., 6.
58. Ibid., 164.
59. Kuhn, Familienstand, 39.
60. Ibid., 37-38.
61. Joan Wallach Scott's influential essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 28-50, made the case that “gender…provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction” (Ibid., 45^6). Both as a function and a creative factor of gender, marital status is a category that “legitimizes and constructs social relationships” (Ibid., 46).
62. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 3; emphasis in text.
63. Heineman, What Difference, xii.
64. Francine du Plessix Gray, Soviet Women (New York, 1989), 7-9, 32-39.
65. Antoinette Burton, “From Child Bride to ‘Hindoo Lady’: Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain,” American Historical Review 103 (4) (1998): 1119–1146.
66. Heineman, What Difference, 246.
67. See Evans, Feminist Movement, 35ff.; Ute Gerhard, Unerhört. Die Geschichte der deutsche Frauenbewegung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1992), 138-162, 216-279; Greven-Aschoff, 87-107; Hackett, 151-171. On the historiography regarding the division between moderate and radical feminism, see Jean Quataert, “Writing the History of Women and Gender in Imperial Germany,” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997), 51-55.
68. See Karen Honeycutt, “Clara Zetkin: A Socialist Approach to the Problem of Women's Oppression,” Feminist Studies 3 (1976): 131-144, and “Socialism and Feminism in Imperial Germany,” Signs 5(1) (1979): 30–41; Alfred Meyer, The Feminism and Socialism of Lily Braun (Bloomington, IN, 1985); Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917 (Princeton, 1979).
69. See Ursula Baumann, Protestantismus ud Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland, 1850-1920 (Frankfurt, 1992); Alfred Kall, Katholische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Paderborn, 1983).
70. See Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 119-128.
71. Reagin, Women's Movement, 185.
72. Raffael Scheck, “Women against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 22(1) (1999): 33.
73. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 5; for a case like that described by Allen, see Renate Bridenthal, “‘Professional’ Housewives: Stepsisters of the Women's Movement,” in When Biology became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), 153-155, in which it is argued that “German bourgeois feminism meandered through the early twentieth century with an ideological profile so low as to bring its feminist credentials into question” (154) .
74. Allen, Feminism (1991), 11.
75. Margit Göttert, Macht und Eros: Frauenbeziehungen und weibliche Kultur um 1900—eine neue Perspektive auf Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer (Königstein, 2000), 10.
76. Repp, Reformers, 13.
77. Ibid., 14.
78. Ibid.
79. Archiv der Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund, Nachlass Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Ordnen 15; letter undated, context suggests 1912.
PART I
Der Frauenüberschuß
THE FEMALE SURPLUS
The surplus woman was a cultural icon of the Kaiserreich. The following four chapters describe the construction of her iconography by examining cultural and literary readings of the German old maid; the impact of the field of sexology on single women; the imagined demography behind the crisis of the bourgeois female surfeit; and the effort to convey the unwed female as a “spiritual,” if not biological, mother.
Chapter 1
THE ALTE JUNGFER
In mid-nineteenth century Prussia, an etiquette book for young ladies promised its readers that it would guide them toward acquiring the proper disposition necessary for a successful marriage. The author, Henriette Davidis, was a prolific writer of cookbooks and other forms of female prescriptive literature. Davidis offered an extraordinary range of counsel, instructing her readership on the importance of prayer and moral character, advocating a strict schedule (no more than twenty minutes spent on dressing in the morning; every Monday as laundry day), and detailing the steps toward keeping home and body clean and healthy. Davidis maintained that because of “the heightened demands and increasing requirements of our time, it is of decisive importance that the young lady fundamentally prepares herself for her later calling of a housewife”; if she did not, the
