directly through calls for political and social reform or indirectly as a result of cultural anxieties about the unattached female as a threat to social order.
Martha Vicinus' Independent Women identifies the advent of the nineteenth century as a turning point in the lives of single women in that “for the first time in history a small group of middle-class women could afford to live, however poorly, on their own earnings outside heterosexual domesticity or church governance.”21 Vicinus' study identifies a “unity of purpose” among independent women seeking to reconstitute constructions of femininity in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The present study of the German surplus woman is a scholarly descendant of Vicinus' work in its topical orientation, but it does not share her emphasis on residential institutions as a central theme.22 This book instead examines the cultural construction of the single woman as both object and creator of social reform—and thus, as a destabilizing force in turn-of-the-century gender norms.
In interpreting the discourse surrounding surplus women as a signifier of conflicting attitudes about changing gender roles, The Surplus Woman thematically echoes Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy, a work which examined “the myths, metaphors, and images of sexual crises and apocalypse that marked both the late nineteenth century and our own fin-de-Siècle, and its representations in English and American literature, art, and film.”23 My work shares Showalter's view that “odd women” served as a source of sexual anarchy in turn-of-the-century European culture.24 Showalter treats single women as one component of a broad range of symptoms indicative of apocalyptic anxiety.
In The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration, Rita Kranidis also offers an integrated reading of literature and history. Employing a perspective derived from postcolonial literary criticism, Kranidis traces the history of British female colonial emigration while arguing that “the colonial emigration of spinsters is analogous to the displacement and dispossession of the poor.”25 Kranidis is particularly interested in teasing out the “cultural value” of the bourgeois female unwed: “If the middle-class Victorian woman's value was seen to lie in her perfect domestication, and if the unmarried working-class woman's value in her sexuality, then the middle-class emigrant spinster emerges as a hybrid: Where might her value reside?”26 She answers that question by “conceptualizing the emigrant female as an already commodified cultural subject.”27 Identifying middle-class spinsters in exile as commodities provides Kranidis with a way of linking the histories of colonialism, class, capitalism, and the woman question. Yet it is precisely this theoretical description of the commodification of unwed women that precludes a more evidence-rich reading of the lives of real single women.
Mary Louise Roberts' books, Civilization without Sexes and Disruptive Acts, provide the most comprehensive look at the experience and representation of single women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. Civilization without Sexes identifies three female icons (the modern woman, the mother, and the single woman) that dominated the postwar discourse surrounding gender. Roberts argues that the unwed woman occupied unique rhetorical space in the decade following the Great War: “the single woman became a focus of debate because she symbolized shifts in the social organization of gender.”28 Unmarried women simultaneously stood as pathetic objects of scorn, subjects of political debate, and figures that presaged a new age.29 Disruptive Acts investigates the nature of female performances in the venues of Third Republic theatre and journalism. Roberts portrays women who “simply and often unwittingly [were] trying to think themselves out of the corners into which they had been painted.”30 In recognizing the confining nature of those corners, these women—in dangerous ways—reasserted the resonance of the labels (old maids, whores, shrews, viragos) that they had been trying to escape, even as they forced public reappraisal of both womanhood and singleness.31 My work has been influenced by Roberts' interpretation of the discourse surrounding unmarried woman as a signifier of cultural anxiety.
Yet Imperial Germany provides a significantly different context for the study of single women. After a series of victories in Prussian-led wars, German national unification in 1871 initiated an era in which the elusive goal of national cohesion was pursued and in which debates about the contours of German national identity were widespread.32 The Kaiserreich occupied an age of extraordinary economic and demographic growth. The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained examination of the ways in which Germans conceptualized anxiety about marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times. Unmarried women served as potent threats to social order during this time of change; thus, appropriations of the Frauenüberschuß were contested by women's rights advocates and their opponents.
The surplus woman debate was uniquely German. Certainly, debates about the role of bourgeois single women took place in other national settings. But the politics, laws, and culture of the Kaiserreich provided an exceptional context for interest in and engagement with the contours of female marital status. First, suffrage played a less consequential role in the German women's movement than it did elsewhere. Universal male suffrage existed only in the national elections of Imperial Germany; most German states (including Prussia, the largest and most dominant federation) featured voting systems based upon property and wealth. Moreover, until 1908, German women could neither join political parties nor attend political gatherings. Given these restrictions, female suffrage was viewed by many German activists as a proposition that was simply out of reach. The political crucible in which the German women's movement was formed dictated a reformist path emphasizing paths of reform beyond the vote, including education and vocation. Second, the laws of the individual states of the German empire by and large prohibited married women from working in professional fields such as education, law, medicine, journalism, and engineering. Because married women were excluded from white-collar professional life, discussion about bourgeois female work necessarily centered upon single women.
Finally, the culture of Imperial Germany featured spheres of intellectual engagement that enhanced interest in single women. The realms of sexology and social science, both fields of Wissenschaft (knowledge) that underwent significant development during the German Kaiserreich, provided fertile scholarly ground from which to examine female marital status.33 Psychologists, anthropologists, and physicians interested in sexuality discovered a pathology of aberrance in the unwed—and presumably unsexed—female. While central European sexologists lamented the atrophying old maid, demographers explored her social underpinnings. New developments in population analysis, accompanied by eugenically fueled anxiety about decreasing birth rates, informed the German understanding of the surplus woman problem.34 Though these statistical studies tended to overemphasize current conditions and did not examine thoroughly the change over time, they still lent an air of empirical credibility to discussions of the Frauenüberschuß. In this way, Kaiserreich fascination with the distaff unwed foreshadowed the twentieth-century postwar Germanies, in which demographic inequities fueled discussion of abundant women as a “problem.”35
The postwar demographic surfeits of unmarried women had no parallel in Imperial Germany. As chapter 3 elucidates, the German Kaiserreich experienced no significant change in marriage rates or in terms of the unmarried proportion of the female population. This book provides the history of an assumption—and it shows that the assumption was a mistaken one. Yet the nonexistence of an intensifying demographic surfeit of unwed women makes the discourse surrounding the Frauenüberschuß all the more important to understand. In the French context, Roberts has observed that “regardless of whether these anxieties were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…they did preoccupy, worry, and even traumatize French men and women. For this reason, they are cultural realities in themselves and warrant our closest attention.”36 This project similarly asserts that despite the lack of clear demographic evidence of a female surfeit—in fact, because of such a lack—it is essential to understand the ways in which the surplus woman became an important emblem of change in German culture. The facts of population did not create the interest in single women.
