own are pushed outside of the family to stand desolately in the selfish . world, unoccupied, destitute, [and] mercilessly damned…to a failed, aimless life?” Offering no demographic evidence of the mounting legions, Riehl's tone was sympathetic as he noted that the aimless unwed had not purposely pursued such a pointless path. But his rhetorical solutions sounded a more unfeeling note: “Should they be barricaded in the cloister?…Should the surplus of family-less females be sent across the sea to Australia? Should they be struck dead?”36 One can only hope that his hyperbole was intended as a sad attempt at humor. The most practical solution to the plight of the unwed, Riehl suggested, was a familial culture that would provide loving sanctuary to their single sisters. Ironically, precisely those families who pushed her out into the cold world were to act as the saviors of the surplus woman.
Most observers of old maidenhood shared in the belief that other family members would likely be forced to carry the burden of the unattached woman. And some of them viewed their unwed relatives not only as intruders into the social realm, but, far worse, as parasites on limited family resources:
The evil exists, who can deny it? It is large and widespread and it seems to grow from year to year. In certain levels of society, there is hardly a family that will not be affected by it. I know no one who does not have among his nearest relations an aging aunt, cousin, or sister-in-law, who without support is more of a burden than a help to her family. Here live grown daughters as dilettantes, busying themselves with books and notes, an endless worry to advancing parents; there we find a sister as the hostess for her brother who for her sake denies himself fulfillment of the most passionate desires of his heart; in another place the sister of the wife is lodged in the house of her brother-in-law as a controlling biddy, a thorn in the flesh of the children.37
While this portrayal exudes hostility, its themes are not unusual. Male relatives had been forced to sacrifice and suffer because of the unexpected addition to the family sphere. The uselessness of the surplus woman was most offensive to those who had to work to support her. She was less a person than an object, “a piece of house furniture, an accessory that one reluctantly and with difficulty drags along, a necessary inconvenience to the family.”38 Such depictions transformed the image of the Alte Jungfer from a sheltered figure to a troublesome, dehumanized object that obstructed normal social and economic intercourse.
The objectification of the single woman implies both intractability and inertia. In some of the most damning accounts of old maidenhood, the forsaken women were charged with willfully creating their onerous status. These arguments maintained that middle-class surplus women did not desire to transform their dependency, but instead relished the life of leisure provided by aimlessness. Such women concerned themselves with “the dilettantish collection of music, French, literature, and often are also busy with extremely quiet hopes, but incidentally—they are perfectly useless.” A solution followed: “What means should be employed to remedy this evil? I think it is the means that the poor employ, that is—work.”39 Vilified as a lazy supplicant existing solely on the goodwill of others, the spinster in this vein was a freeloader who consciously created her own neediness. Victimizer rather than victim, she was to be condemned rather than pitied. Such a character stood in opposition to Reuter's Agathe Heidling, who had constantly sought to be useful, but had been held back due to parental prohibitions.
Instead of noting the real hardships that faced middle-class women seeking independence, such commentators blamed single women themselves for the lack of professional and educational opportunities that they faced. The aphorism “whoever wants to work can always find work” characterized assessments of idle unwed women.40 The charge of selfishness sometimes extended into a medical diagnosis. Leipzig physician Carl Reclam asserted that in order to improve what he believed to be the generally weak health of old maids, “the best remedy is work; mental and physical activity in daily succession, serious exertion towards a goal,—in this manner one forgets one's own ‘I’ and its petty troubles.”41 But philosopher Eduard von Hartmann doubted that unmarried women of means had the capacity to work: “They now know well the tediousness of unemployment, but not the tediousness and exhausting monotony of all professional work.”42
Such representations held that an unmarried woman could only overcome her egocentrism if she renounced the comforting prospect of family support. But these critics did not consider the impediments that family placed before single women seeking independence, nor the shame that bourgeois society attached to women truly standing alone. Condemnations of the alte Jungfer relied upon a double standard. The old maid was a cast-off, left barren by the vagaries of the marriage market and betrayed by her dreams of a happy future, yet she was simultaneously also the crafty engineer of a lifetime of ease and dependency. The unmarried women was thus both ridiculed and feared. Portrayed as deliberately desperate, the alte Jungfer was a cultural construction central to the debates about the position of women in Imperial Germany.
The Shrew, the Romantic, and die Tante
It was difficult for contemporaries to reconcile consistently the images of heartbroken girls such as Agathe Heidling with the portrayals of dilettantes who lived a leisurely life oblivious to the burden placed on those families who worked to support their whims. While views on the origins of single status differed, many observers of the day agreed that once a girl became a spinster, her character, her belief system, and even her body altered dramatically. The resulting old maid was a stock character in the cultural panorama, though the specific characteristics varied to accommodate both victims and lazy dilettantes. In 1906, the novelist Adelheid Weber offered a threefold characterization of traditional alte Jungfern: the bitter shrew; the simpering, foolish romantic; and the beloved aunt. While Weber viewed these caricatures as fading remnants of a judgmental era, a review of the literature suggests otherwise.
The most widespread parody of the alte Jungfer was that of vile harridan. Weber described her in the following manner: “[She is] large, gaunt, with a pointy nose and stabbing eyes. She has a small inheritance, lives alone with a herd of cats and a lapdog, despises children with a dry, grim, merciless hatred and horrifies the young girls whose reputations and happiness she pitilessly attacks. Lonely, hated, and hateful she lives and dies. And yet she had so much love to give that no one ever coveted. This she gave to her cats and dogs.”43 Notorious for both her physique and her character, this figure is malicious. Yet she is also tragic in Weber's eyes, for her life has been determined and destroyed by lack of love. Other accounts were not so charitable, inspecting every physical characteristic in relentless detail: “A young girl becomes old and ever older, the desired deliverance from virginity never comes. Youthful freshness is lost, rosy cheeks pale, skin wrinkles and folds; hair that framed a cute, sweet face used to be full and opulent, but now it becomes thin—the mop almost looks like a wig (and sometimes it really is one); the face develops an angular form with plunging eyebrows, a pointy nose, a yellowed complexion, dried lips, all of which sit atop a neck that is sometimes narrow and long, sometimes short and fat.”44 While the physical aspects depicted might be attributed, however harshly, to the benign process of aging, the description explicitly links her appearance to the unfulfilled calling of the unwed woman—never achieving true womanhood as a wife and mother, her body has betrayed her literal and figurative fruitlessness.
Yet physical decay is only one aspect of a much greater deterioration. The old maid of this first type is utterly consumed by bitterness. The aged incarnation of the selfish dilettante, the spinster nag sees nothing but her own pain, lashing out at everyone and everything around her. Disappointment is the central component of her unhappiness, but a lifetime of stigmatization and ostracization has made her malevolent as well. Gertrud Bülow von Dennewitz, an advocate of women's rights who wrote under the pseudonym Gisela von Streitberg, saw the origins of such nasty creatures in the culture of bourgeois youth. A girl terrified of never marrying knew well “the heartless mockery of young girls toward unmarried old women of harmless nature who might here and there show some peculiar traits.” Such adolescents dreaded a similar fate: “[They] know only too well how soon they themselves will be written into
