“women standing alone.” Chapter 5 considers the work of education reformer Helene Lange and social work advocate Alice Salomon. These moderates embraced a maternalist vision that limited female professions predominantly to unwed women. Chapter 6 explores the work of activists Helene Stöcker, Ruth Bré, and Lily Braun, each of whom saw radical potential in the female surplus. The Frauenüberschuß inspired these women to ask far-reaching questions regarding sexuality, single motherhood, and the viability of the institution of marriage. Chapter 7 investigates the socialist reading of the female surfeit by looking at the writings of Clara Zetkin. Building upon the work August Bebel, Zetkin considered the perceived excess of bourgeois women to be evidence of the failings of modern society, demonstrating that the industrial mode of production had forced middle-class women into competition with the working-class. The final chapter examines the unusual life and work of Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, a leader of the German religious women's movement. Gnauck-Kühne was a trained economist and statistician who saw in the surplus woman proof of the sacred female mission on earth.
As the reader embarks along the path I have set forth, a letter from one leading German women's rights advocate to another—Gertrud Bäumer writing to Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne—provides an apt reminder about the nature of historical scholarship:
I am not of the opinion that there is in the writing of history an objectivity, an objective accuracy in the sense of mathematics…In the selection, arrangement, summary, and orientation of the facts, along with other evaluations based upon perspective, each representation of history contains a certain vision of the world. From the core outward, this vision assigns the important and insignificant, the interesting and uninteresting, sees certain lines of development as emphasized above all, and judges in this way or that the manifold ambiguous questions, in which a whole complex of causes are involved.79
Undoubtedly, my own vision of the world is present in this description of Imperial German society and the lives of the women I see as important within it. As many voices have been included, hundreds more have been left out. I believe that the most interesting and significant have remained. This book does not contend that the Frauenüberschuß can explain the ‘whole complex of causes' that created the German women's movement. But I am certain that the cultural, social, and gender history of Imperial Germany cannot be understood without it.
Notes
1. Die Frau 1(1) (October 1893): 1.
2. Helene Lange, “Was wir wollen,” Die Frau 1(1) (October 1893): 1.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Goldene Früchte aus Märchenland. Märchen für jung und alt (Bremen, 1904).
6. Gnauck-Kühne, Früchte, “Die Nachtigall,” 100.
7. Ibid., 101.
8. Ibid., 102-105.
9. Ibid, 105.
10. Ibid., 106-107; Ich suche mein Leid und mein Lied.
11. Gnauck-Kühne to Augustin Rösler, 16 September 1900, in Helene Simon, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, vol. 2, Heimat (M. Gladbach, 1929), 196-197.
12. The term connotes ‘single women.'
13. See Eduard von Hartmann, “Die Jungfernfrage,” Die Gegenwart (34) (35) (1891): 113-116; 131-134; Ludwig Langemann, Auf falschem Weg. Beiträge zur Kritik der radikalen Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1913); Bärbel Kuhn, Familienstand Ledig: Ehelose Frauen und Männer im Bürgertum (1850–1914) (Cologne, 2000), 37-100; Ute Planert, Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1998).
14. Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, eds., Handbuch der Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1902).
15. Robert Wilbrandt and Lisbeth Wilbrandt, Die Deutsche Frau im Beruf, in Handbuch, vol. 4, eds. Lange and Bäumer, 19-20.
16. Theobald Ziegler, Die geistigen und sozialen Strömungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1911), 571-572.
17. While single women's studies is expanding (see especially http://www.medusanet.ca/single-women/ [accessed 13 April 2006]), relatively little scholarship has investigated the notion of a population surplus of unwed individuals. One exception, coming from the fields of psychology and sociology, is Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord, Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question (Beverly Hills, CA, 1983).
18. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, “A Singular Past,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, eds. Bennett and Froide (Philadelphia, 1999), 4.
19. Ibid., 7-13.
20. Ibid., 14, 15.
21. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1985), 6.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York, 1990), 3.
24. Ibid., 19.
25. Rita Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration (New York, 1999), 131.
26. Ibid., 174; emphasis in text.
27. Ibid., 178.
28. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994), 154.
29. Ibid.
30. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siècle France (Chicago, 2002), 247.
31. Ibid., 246.
32. For an overview of historical analysis of national identity, see Nancy Reagin, “Recent Work on German National Identity: Regional? Imperial? Gendered? Imaginary?,” Central European History 37(2) (2004): 273-289.
33. On the evolution of sexual scholarship in central Europe, see Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000); on the influence of social science in imperial Germany, see Erik Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany, 186^1894 (New York, 2003).
34. On the impact of decreasing birth rates on the women's movement, see Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890-1970 (New York, 2005), 10-11.
35. On the crisis of surplus women in post-World War II Germany, see Elizabeth D. Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 108-136.
36. Roberts, Civilization, 6.
37. Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (Beverly Hills, CA, 1976).
38. Ute Frevert, Women in German History, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (New York, 1989), 119.
39.
