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

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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 second section offers a collective biography of seven prominent “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

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