reflected a vision of fragmentation—yet so many ‘herstorical’ paths tend to reify the organizational structure of the German women's movement. They do not allow for the consideration of commonalities, nor do they reveal the ideological complexity that guided so many disparate branches toward sometimes very similar ends.
The Surplus Woman joins with other historical works of the last twenty years that have sought to break down the model of left versus right. Nancy Reagin has rightly pointed out that the division into camps became far easier after the 1908 reform of the Law of Association, which permitted women to join and participate in the work of political parties. The 1910 split in the major leadership organization of the women's movement also sharpened divisions.70 But Reagin's work makes clear that in the city of Hanover, even after 1910, a “politically ‘neutral,’ professional women's sphere” was the realm in which most female reformers sought to maneuver.71 Raffael Scheck's historical examination of female politics in Weimar Germany has urged scholars to recognize the broad range of perspectives even within political interest groups.72 The work of historians like Reagin and Scheck compel the field to move beyond the predominance of factions and to search anew for both commonality and difference.
This book argues that a variety of women, arguing from different perspectives, shared the view that the female surplus was changing women's lives. Mainstream moderates, vocal radicals, committed socialists, and religious leaders all articulated as a reason for their advocacy the belief that the industrial age had forever altered the conditions of female existence. All responded to the perceived crisis by suggesting that single women had something unique to offer the greater German society, be it via the professions; through maternal influence; as exemplars of the abuses of capitalism; or as living emblems of Marian purity in the modern world. These very distinct responses reflected different ideological bases, but commingled in a prevailing belief in the innate power of women. A shared vision of female potentiality—rather than a common feminism—united the branches of the German women's movement. Analysis of the female surplus demonstrates a strong intellectual and spiritual connection, albeit structurally weak, between camps traditionally viewed as divided. Only when historians shed the prevailing paradigm of the dichotomous women's movement can the examination of other possible common threads commence.
The fourth aim of this project is, as much as possible, to examine the German women's movement in the terms of the world in which it emerged and which it sought to change. In this regard, my work follows in the path of historian Ann Taylor Allen, who has argued against “the tendency to judge the history of feminism according to criteria derived from the present.”73 Her study of ‘spiritual motherhood’ as a pillar of German feminism asks it readers to consider the “context of a specifically German national culture and German conceptions of citizenship.”74 Sociologist Margit Göttert, in a historical study of Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, has described an “emotionale Uberschuß (emotional excess)” that can arise when modern feminists confront the historical legacy of the first German women's movement. Göttert believes that such emotion “is not only a sign of disappointment over a ‘politically incorrect’ biography…It also refers to the [historical] individuals themselves, whose life plans, activities, and political concepts are not so entirely comprehensible to the modern feminist vision, because they do not seem to fit into a conventional pattern.”75 Many leading figures of the women's movement argued from the standpoint that women are fundamentally different from men. Maternalist values, the sanctification of marriage, and despair over the prospect of diminishing marital prospects were all legitimate grounds from which the women described in this book argued for female liberation from subjugation. Such a posture is paradoxical when viewed from the vantage point of twenty-first century feminism. But in order to listen to the voices of the past, we must attempt to hear their original intonations.
Another historical work which has contributed to the historical approach of The Surplus Woman is Kevin Repp's Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives. Repp's book identifies a reformist generation of the 1890s composed “of intellectuals and activists who stood firmly on modern ground at the fin-de-siècle but who were determined to reform that modernity in order to free it from darkening shadows already plainly visible on the horizon before the First World War.”76 Repp's reformers “felt just as at home with the discourse of cultural despair as they did with the discourse of progressive optimism.”77 The progenitors of the female surplus fit well into the reformist milieu described by Repp. Belief in and discussion about a Frauenüberschuß reflected the despair of a society wracked by extraordinary demographic and economic change. But the solutions to the surfeit offered by women's rights advocates also revealed a belief in social improvement borne out of reformist activity. Such efforts occupied what Repp has called a “quiet labyrinth of indirect avenues that led into the sub-terranean world of Wilhelmine anti-politics,” a world which included “scientific studies, detailed proposals, legalistic reports…professional careers, personal connections…popular education, alternative lifestyles, and many other strategies designed to make an immediate, palpable difference in the quality of people's lives.”78 Most of the reformers identified in this book were active primarily in the sphere outside of and beyond politics. They sought to make a difference in the life of the surplus women emerging out of the “darkening shadows” of the Kaiserreich. If they were successful, single women then might be best suited to lead the progression to a better nation and world.
The Surplus Woman assesses the female surplus as a dominant concept within the culture of Imperial Germany that helped to formulate gendered understandings of work, sex, class, and the role of marriage and motherhood in society. Cultural precepts and norms created the notion of the female surplus, and the belief in a female surplus in turn helped to reformulate the culture. The historian cannot extract the debate about ‘too many women’ from an environment in which such a statement could be made without tongue in cheek. Yet making that historical leap reveals the potentiality of the surplus woman. Organized German women of the Kaiserreich appropriated the plight of the single woman in their campaign to transform the society that had placed the unwed in such a predicament in the first place.
This book combines the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history. It is primarily a cultural history due to its engagement with the nuances of a discourse. In grappling with the ridicule surrounding unwed women, the text also provides a glimpse into what it may have felt like to live in German society as a single middle-class woman. The Surplus Woman employs the traditions of social history by examining the unwed female cohort via the lens of demography and by providing further historical evidence of the importance of social class as a fundamental predictor of experience—for the middle-class provided both the commentators who identified the perils of surplus-hood and the women who led the movement to provide rights for singles. Finally, this book builds upon the field of gender history by arguing for the importance of marital status as a category of analysis. Imperial Germans interpreted marital prospects as primarily female concerns; this study of unwed women then offers a gendered reading of German society by exploring the nature of a cohort that was simultaneously considered vulnerable and threatening.
Two main sections form the book. Because this is foremost the history of a constructed notion, the text opens with a consideration of the surplus woman as a cultural icon. Chapter 1 examines cultural and literary employment of stereotypes of the alte Jungfer, the German old maid who gained prominence in an era of economic change. The intensifying vilification of the ‘old maid’ in light of research into sexuality is considered in chapter 2. A demographic examination of the female surplus comprises chapter 3. Chapter 4 identifies the ways in which the construction of the female surplus combined with the ideology of spiritual motherhood to establish the mission of the mainstream German women's movement.
The
