that the demographic data likely do not support the notion of a distinct and new oversupply of women at the turn of the century.53 Her work confirms the notion that “the perceived reality was that many German bourgeois women were destined to remain spinsters.”54
In her history of German Women for Empire, Lora Wildenthal sees the female surplus as a significant justification for a female presence in the colonies of Wilhelmine Germany. Wildenthal describes how “feminists and other commentators on the ‘Woman Question’ fretted over a supposed surplus of women who remained unmarried, lacked careers appropriate to their social station, and would waste their maternal energies.”55 Both radical reformer Minna Cauer and moderate activist Hedwig Heyl agreed that placing women in German settlements to partner with men would offer a pragmatic alleviation of the female surfeit, yet their vision went beyond absorbing a problematic cohort: “Marriage was a worthy goal…but German women could not be restricted to a wifely position. They needed a larger role that would permit them to exert positive moral influence.”56 Colonial placement seemed to offer a fruitful solution to the overage of women, but such a way out evaded core questions: “The colonial Woman Question sidelined feminist demands for social change by emphasizing numbers of German women rather than the conditions of their existence. It promised that unmarried middle-class women could be converted from a social problem in Germany into a solution for the colonies.”57 Social class is thus a key element of Wildenthal's assessment of the female surplus. In the colonial context, the Frauenüberschuß elicited both sympathy and scorn; by the turn of the century, groups involved in placing women in the colonies sought ideal candidates for marriage but turned away applicants who were overqualified or who seemed too desperate to marry.58 Wildenthal's study establishes the link between conceptions of a domestic female surplus and the colonial woman question, but the book's primary engagement is with the interaction of nationalism, race, and gender.
Bärbel Kuhn's Familienstand Ledig, a comparative collective biography of German single men and women during the period extending from 1850 to 1914, confirms that the demographic notion of a female surplus was an illusion59 and asserts that “the woman question was discussed in contemporary journalism and in the public sphere as a ‘social question’ of the bourgeoisie, as the affliction of the unmarried daughters of the bourgeois classes.”60 The Surplus Woman shares its topical focus with Kühn's work. Kuhn's book approaches the topic of single marital status by emphasizing the history of everyday life, biography, and a comparison between the worldviews of single women and single men, while the present work delves into the contours of a cultural construction amid the broader context of the German women's movement. The female surplus is not the central concern of Kuhn's inquiry; as is the case with the other historical works just described, the general belief in a perceived overabundance of women is a basic assumption that sheds light on other areas of German women's history. None of these works tease out the social and cultural contours of that assumption, nor is it their intention to do so. In a wide range of historical writing on the experiences of German women, the basic importance and middle-class orientation of the Frauenüberschuß is recognized. The nature, meaning uses, and progenitors of the concept have not yet been addressed by historians. This book seeks to do just that.
Constructing the Surplus Woman
The story set forth here provides the history of the Frauenüberschuß, a concept that reflected cultural anxiety in the face of social and economic change, demonstrated the era's fascination with the findings of sexual and social science, and served as one of the most important tenets of the German women's movement. This book affirms through demographic analysis that the female surplus was not a real population event and argues that the notion was instead a cultural construction that was foundational to the moderate, radical, and religious German women's movements. At the same time, this study seeks to go beyond a narrative account of social movements in order to examine the ways in which this cultural construction emerged, shifted, and signified deep anxieties about modern life. The surplus woman was the lodestar of German women's movements, but simultaneously was also the source of renewed ridicule and anxiety about the unwed woman. Her paradoxical nature hints at the great ambivalence with which many Germans experienced the rapidly changing world around them.
Four goals guide this discussion of the female surplus. First and most basically, the project intends to demonstrate the centrality of the Frauenüberschuß concept to the ways in which Imperial Germans viewed the age of change in which they lived. The notion of an overabundance of women at once demonstrates the predominance of marriage and motherhood as the female ideal; it adds an important dimension to the link between class status and German feminism; and it clarifies the origins of the reform program pursued by the women's movement, one which emphasized educational and professional opportunities over political calls for suffrage and expanded legal rights. The female surplus both created an air of urgency that brought attention to calls for change and provided a potentially powerful group toward which to aim reform.
Second, The Surplus Woman affirms the importance of marital status as a category of historical analysis.61 Recent historical work has asserted the importance of marriage and marital status in our understanding of the past. Examining the history of US marriage, Nancy Cott has made a convincing case that “the whole system of attribution and meaning that we call gender relies on and to a great extent derives from the structuring provided by marriage.”62 Elizabeth Heineman's What Difference does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (1999) asserts “the proposition that marital status has, through much of Western history, been a basic category of difference for women, in some ways analogous to race, class, and gender.”63 My work shares in that proposition. The category of marital status provides a very useful lens from which to investigate a society's leading assumptions about gender politics. Studying the signification of married men in the Soviet Union offers important insights into the social profile of the increasingly fragile Communist state.64 Asking about the making of wives in colonial India contributes to our understanding of the turbulent interplay of custom, empire, and modernity.65 Research into the meanings attributed to marital status sheds historical light on the configuration of gender, the rule of law, the importance of tradition, and the interrelationship of religious and civil life.
Equally important is the historical fluidity of marriage as a signifying category. Does marital status matter less in a certain time and place—or does it matter, say, more for women and less for men? Do widows and widowers form their own social cohort, and do they have more power in some cultures than others? To what extent did people talk about marriage or marital cohort within a specific historical context? These questions matter deeply to our understanding of the past. In the context of post—World War II and divided Germany, Heineman has argued that, “women's marital status is a profound cultural marker; it has striking material ramifications; and it is laden with political significance. Marital status no longer defines women as sharply as it did early in the [twentieth] century, but it has undergone an incomplete revolution.”66 The Surplus Woman provides the history of the conceptualization of single women in Imperial Germany, an era in which marital status mattered greatly in defining womanhood.
The third intent of this book is to help dismantle the paradigmatic view of the German women's movement as a dichotomous entity. Beginning with Richard Evans' work in 1976, the split between moderate and left-wing camps has dominated the scholarship of organized female activism in Germany. Certainly, the ideological and programmatic tension between moderates and radicals is well documented.67 Archival material facilitates the predominance of the dichotomy, as protagonists from both sides left behind folders about the “linken Flügel (left-wing)” and the “Gemässigen (moderates).” But reliance on this bifurcated model does disservice to the two ‘camps' involved, as well as to the movement as a whole. The socialist women's movement, led by Clara Zetkin, Lily Braun, and Luise Zietz, tends to be considered separately from both the moderates and radicals.68 Women's organizations under a religious banner have also been viewed primarily as particularized entities.69
