The Surplus Woman - Catherine L. Dollard Monographs in German History

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for single women. As the following chapters illustrate, discussions about the female surplus did transform perceptions of women's capabilities and contributed to the broadening debate about the nature of the female calling. But the spirit of the old maid did not fade from the cultural landscape. One reason for its abiding power was simply that single women had for so long been taunted, vilified, and feared. The historical roots of the alte Jungfer went too deep to wither easily.

      Yet the signification of unmarried women as social and cultural pariahs gained new qualities and a deeper urgency in Imperial Germany. The picture of the productive spinster faded away as representations of the idle old maid gained sway. The advances of industrialization bolstered this notion of the spinster as an economic encumbrance. As embodied in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the old maid is resolutely unchangeable amidst the tides of modernity. The less useful single women were believed to be, the more extreme the characteristics attributed to them: spinsters became shrews, romantics became simpletons, beloved aunts became desperate codependents. The Kaiserreich characterization of single women as burdens provided fresh energy to the iconography of the alte Jungfer.

       Notes

      1. Henriette Davidis, Die Jungfrau. Worte des Raths zu Vorbereitung für ihren Beruf (Bielefeld, 1857), vi.

      2. Ibid., 199.

      3. Ibid., 74.

      4. On the dominance of the bourgeois family ideal in nineteenth-century Germany, see David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century. A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York, 1997), 213–214; Ute Frevert, Women in German History, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (New York, 1989), 109-112; Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866 (Munich, 1984), 114-130; and Nancy Reagin, “The Imagined Hausfrau: National Identity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History 73(1) (2001): 54-86. Peter Borscheid, in “Von Jungfern, Hagestolzen, and Singles: Die historische Entwicklung des Alleinlebens,” in Lebensform Einpersonenhaushalt, ed. Sylvia Gräbe (New York, 1994), 38–41, describes the intensification of the bourgeois marriage ideal from the “family cult” of the Biedermeier era through the turn-of-the-century escalation in anxiety about sexual morality.

      5. Amalie Baisch, Ins eigene Heim. Ein Buch für erwachsene Mädchen und junge Frauen (Stuttgart, 1893), 44.

      6. Ibid., 31.

      7. The German Civil Code, trans. Chung Hui Wang (London, 1907) § 2, 1303, 1354, 1355, 1356, 1617.

      8. Borscheid, “Jungfern,” 23.

      9. Ibid., 39.

      10. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women. Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1985), 3.

      11. Katharina Gerstenberger, Truth to Tell: German Women's Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 178.

      12. Important material for this chapter was found in Kassel’s Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewe-gung, where a folder entitled “Alte Jungfer,” compiled by archivist Jutta Harbusch, contains a historian's gold mine of newspaper clippings, short stories, encyclopedic entries, and excerpts from scientific works. For a sampling of other representations of German unmarried women, see Bärbel Kuhn, Familienstand Ledig, (Cologne, 2000), 27–58.

      13. A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (New York, 1992), 75; pp. 73-82 discuss the ways in which English prescriptive literature promoted an ideal of companionate marriage based upon mutual affection.

      14. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York, 2001), xxv.

      15. Tony Schumacher, Vom Schulmädel bis zur Grossmutter (Stuttgart, 1900), 195–196.

      16. Ibid., 196.

      17. Adelheid Weber, “Die alte Junfger von einst und das reife Mädchen von heut,” Die Gartenlaube 39, supplement Die Welt der Frau (1906): 609.

      18. See Reagin, “Hausfrau,” for a discussion of the “imagined community of German Hausfrauen.” Reagin argues that, “‘domesticity’ functioned within the German bourgeoisie as a project of class formation but also…became attached to a gendered national identity” (2001, 58).

      19. Gabriele Reuter, Aus guter Familie [1895], 27th ed., (Berlin, 1931), 16.

      20. Ibid., 374.

      21. Ibid., 378.

      22. Gabriele Rahaman, “Gabriele Reuter's Aus guter Familie in the light of Klaus Theweleit's Concept of ‘Entlebendigung,’” German Life and Letters 44:5 (October 1991): 467.

      23. Reuter, Familie, 380.

      24. Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest [1894], 11th ed., (Berlin, 1903); for a comparison of Effi Briest and Aus guter Familie, see Alan Bance, “The Novel in Wilhelmine Germany: From Realism to Satire,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, ed. Graham Bartram (New York, 2004), 32-36.

      25. Helene Lange, “Aus guter Familie,” Die Frau 3(5) (1896): 317; Helene Stöcker, “Gabriele Reuters Aus guter Familie,” Die Frauenbewegung 2(4) (1896): 38; both quoted in Linda Kraus Worley, “Girls from Good Families: Tony Buddenbrook and Agathe Heidling,” The German Quarterly 76(2) (2003): 196.

      26. Gabriele Reuter, Vom Kinde zum Menschen, (Berlin, 1921), 474; quoted in Rahaman, “Reuter's,” 467.

      27. Worley, “Good Families,” 196.

      28. Ibid., 200.

      29. Ibid., 201.

      30. See for example Marie Calm, Die Sitten der guten Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1886), 93; Julius Weiss and R. Kossman, Mann und Weib in ihren Beziehungen zur Kultur der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1908), 420.

      31. Calm, Sitten, 93.

      32. Ibid., 94.

      33. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. “Spinster.”

      34. Calm, Sitten, 95.

      35. Amalie Baisch, Aus der Töchterschule ins Leben (Stuttgart, 1890), 8.

      36. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Die Familie, vol. 3 of Die Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Socialpolitik, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1855), 106; cited in Borscheid, “Jungfern,” 42.

      37. A. Kühne, Giebt es ein Mittel, die Lage der unversorgten Mädchen und Wittwen in den Mittelständen zu verbessern? (Berlin, 1859), 3.

      38. Emma Vely, “Die unverheiratete Frau in früheren Zeiten und heute,” Illustrierte Sonntags-Zeitung 42 (1898/1899): 659-660.

      39. Kühne, Giebt es ein Mittel, 8-9.

      40. Gisela von Streitberg, [pseud. Gertrud Bülow von Dennewitz], Die Verehelichten und die Ehelosen Frauen (Berlin, 1891), 82.

      41. Carl Reclam, Des Weibes Gesundheit und Schönheit, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1883), 266.

      42. Eduard von Hartmann, “Die Jungfernfrage: Schluss,” in Die Gegenwart 35 (1891): 131.

      43. Weber, “Alte Jungfer,” 610.

      44. Weiss and Kossmann, Mann und Weib, 416.

      45. Streitberg, Verehelichten, 67.

      46. Andrea Pauloff, “Alte Jungfern,” in Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 602.

      47. Die Frauenfrage und ihr Kern: Das Leben einer alten Jungfrau (Gütersloh, 1873), 30-31.

      48. Ibid., 31.

      49. Weiss and Kossmann, Mann und Weib, 416–417.

      50. Hermann Heinrich Ploss, Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde,

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