The Surplus Woman

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgements viii Abbreviations xi Introduction: Single Women in Imperial Germany 1 PARTI

Der Frauenüberschuß—Ihe Female Surplus 21 1 The Alte Jungfer 23 2 Sexology and the Single Woman 43 3 Imagined Demography 66 4 The Maternal Spirit 93 PART II

Alleinstehende Frauen—Women Standing Alone 117 5 Moderate Activism: Helene Lange and Alice Salomon 119 6 Radical Reform: Helene Stócker, Ruth Bré, and Lily Braun 143 7 Socialism and Singleness: Clara Zetkin 164 8 Spiritual Salvation: Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne 176 Conclusion: The Surplus Woman 199 Appendix: Tables & Figures 219 Bibliography 247 Index 265

PART I Der Frauenüberschuß '[HE FEMALE SURPLUS

The surplus woman was a cultural icon of the Kaiserreich. The following four chapters describe the construction of her iconography by examining cultural and literary readings of the German old maid; the impact of the field of sexology on single women; the imagined demography behind the crisis of the bourgeois female surfeit; and the effort to convey the unwed female as a "spiritual," if not biological, mother.

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Chapter 1 c

O

In mid-nineteenth century Prussia, an etiquette book for young ladies promised its readers that it would guide them toward acquiring the proper disposition necessary for a successful marriage. The author, Henriette Davidis, was a prolific writer of cookbooks and other forms of female prescriptive literature. Davidis offered an extraordinary range of counsel, instructing her readership on the importance of prayer and moral character, advocating a strict schedule (no more than twenty minutes spent on dressing in the morning; every Monday as laundry day), and detailing the steps toward keeping home and body clean and healthy. Davidis maintained that because of “the heightened demands and increasing requirements of our time, it is of decisive importance that the young lady fundamentally prepares herself for her later calling of a housewife”; if she did not, the prospective husband might well look elsewhere.! If girls followed her advice, Davidis believed that competence would replace income as the most crucial factor in forming marriages: “With such a feminine education, respectable men without an income will be able to risk choosing disadvantaged daughters as life partners ... And certainly such a choice would not be regretted!”? Davidis guidance sought to secure for each reader a family of her own.’

Most young middle-class German women in the second half of the nineteenth century anticipated that they would marry. Their education, both formal and informal, sought to prepare them for wedlock.* Over thirty years after Davidis extended her recommendations, another book of guidance directed potential brides to develop skills that would attract exemplary husbands. These qualities included an “understanding reception of his opinions, sensitive consideration of his tastes and personal wishes in the questions which concern your mutual fu-

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ture, loving forethought on that which would embellish his strengths to achieve his life's destiny"? The primary purpose of female development was to mold the feminine nature toward embracing the beliefs and goals of the prospective husband. Marriage would be the central achievement of a womans life. Advice book author Amalie Baisch asserted that the sole life objective of a female was “to wear the veil, to prevent the terrifying old maidenhood once and for all. She will have a husband at any price, and if the husband that she has dreamed about does not come, she will take just anyone who does." Baisch warned against this sense of desperation and urged her readers to search responsibly for a husband. Still, the message was clear: marry, marry well, and marry young—in every way make oneself as desirable a future wife as possible.

In Imperial Germany, marriage—and marriagelessness—encompassed the category of womanhood, at least as far as the law was concerned. The German Civil Code of 1900 continued the centuries-old practice of defining women on the basis of marital status, making them legally beholden to husband or father.” Independent single women did not have a fixed place in the German social order. Only 7 percent of Kaiserreich residences were classified as single-person households, with most of those headed by men.’ Female singles lived in the shadows of the bourgeois family ideal which, in an age of increasing industrialization and urbanization, seemed for many to offer a protective zone outside of the competitive sphere of public life.? Law and society placed unwed independent women in a murky, marginalized realm.

The terrifying specter of the alte Jungfer, the German incarnation of the old maid, fueled the insistence on marriage as the fulfillment of the female destiny. The social and cultural construction of the old maid in Imperial Germany echoed centuries of Western thought on the proper female role. A woman belonged in the private sphere, economically dependent and physically controlled through the institution of marriage. Woman as a wife, subjugated to the husband financially and legally, secured the integrity of the family and the purity of the state. Woman unattached challenged the social order. Such ungoverned women had been subjected to various forms of persecution through the ages, including accusation of witchcraft and condemnation as moral threats. But in the nineteenth century, unwed women took on a new role: idleness. In the English context, historian Martha Vicinus has noted that “increased wealth and the consolidation of the bourgeois social values in the early nineteenth century condemned spinsters to unremitting idleness and to marginal positions in the home, church, and workplace."!? In Germany as well, conventional anxieties young women might have had about remaining unmarried intensified as the bourgeois family model gained stature and economic advancement made redundant many of the traditional domestic activities of single family members. If the middle-class single woman could not find a place in her own home and family, she had no choice but to locate herself elsewhere. And if she did not inherit an income or earn a salary, she was fated to become something of a nuisance.

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The dominant literary construction of the alte Jungfer in Imperial Germany was that of pariah. While many observers of the day expressed sympathy regarding the dilemmas that confronted single women and anticipated that derogatory depictions of old maids might become outmoded, the governing images of single women in literature and social commentary nonetheless served to label unwed females as outcasts. This form of marginalization intensified during the Kaiserreich due to the perceived displacement of the unwed woman from her stereotypical role as family helpmeet. As Katharina Gerstenberger found in a study of female autobiography at the turn-of-the-century, middle-class German women “assessed the modern age by measuring their own experience of family life against the bourgeois family ideal."!! As women and their observers began to contemplate the challenges of a life led distant from that family ideal, the advances of the industrial era transformed archaic anxieties about the old maid into contemporary threats to the greater social order. This chapter considers the social and cultural constructions of the alte Jungfer by demonstrating the ways in which single women increasingly came to be portrayed as useless personages in turn-of-the-century rhetoric.”

Family Blossom Turned Family Burden

Raised to plan and hope for a future distinguished by love and protection, many young women who did not marry confronted enormous disappointment. These despairing figures formed the prevailing literary depiction of unwed German women. While undoubtedly a fair number of unwed middle-class German women chose not to marry, authors of popular and prescriptive literature chose to ignore the possibility that singlehood might have been an elected state. Women who remained single spanned the spectrum of German women as a whole, not a group about which one could make sweeping generalizations. The representations of unwed women set forth in advice manuals and in fiction certainly could not reflect the variety and complexity of single women’s experiences, hopes, and beliefs. Prescriptive literature, in particular, trafficked in a “discourse of female subordination.” It is important not to imply a correlation between the advice given in prescriptive literature and the advice taken by its readership—indeed, it is difficult to make claims as to how carefully young bourgeois German women read the proliferation of advice manuals. This chapter follows the example of Russian historian Catriona Kelly in its approach to prescriptive literature by viewing the texts “primarily as contributions to ideology, rather than contributions to practical life.”!* In its ideological formulation, the portrait of single woman as a victim—both of the times and of her own shortcomings—predominated in the literary representation of the alte Jungfer.

A girl must be a young maid before she becomes an old one. The notion of one’s own home and family predominated in images of the future, for every girl

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“thinks about being a bride, a wife, and a mother, and imagines and pictures herself in her own home, lovingly and agreeably created and maintained.” Ihe prospective husband occupied the center of the vision: “He, the dream with marvelous qualities, suddenly stands there in any variety of shapes, and all cherished ideals and wishes take on a distinct form—the young heart loves and wants her love to be returned!" ? This expectation and desire for fulfillment was repeated and perpetuated through novels, magazine articles, and advice books. But a 1900 guidebook pointed out that, for all too many, the dream would not be realized:

Then comes the time of comprehension, for some earlier, for some later. There stands the cold, sobering reality which states: this type of happiness is not meant for each, not even for half. The yearning eyes, the heart full of love must watch as the bliss for which one had hoped turns toward another— perhaps the sister, perhaps the girlfriend, perhaps someone quite unexpected, that one never considered as worthy! From this moment on an internal struggle begins for those not chosen for whatever reason. The struggle manifested itself both in the quest to fashion a new identity and in the search for a feasible manner in which to support and fulfill oneself usefully. For the German old maid, the contrast between romanticized notions of marriage and the incipient symptoms of spinsterhood created a stark existential crisis:

How rapidly the years pass by, the only years in which happiness could come to her!—If the girl were twenty-three or twenty-four years old, a shiver passed over her heart at first quite quickly, softly, furtively: Why has he still not come? And ever stronger, longer, more icily the shudder next asks: Why will no one come to me? And not long thereafter: Why have I been rejected? Am I more wicked than the others, more humorless, more clumsy, more stupid? Because that was the worst of her vain hopes—not disappointment, although her rose had faded— not fear of a bleak future, although this fear clutched at her heart—the worst was the shame, the rejection, to be thrown away as worthless.

Descriptions of the onset of A/tjungfertum emphasized the loss of a certain destiny as much as they mourned fleeting youth. The idyllic bourgeois marriage may have been illusory, but at least a wife could come to terms with her unfulfilled expectations in the security of a home of which she was the mistress.'® Never to manage a home, never to confront the challenges of life partnership—these missed opportunities constituted failure for the archetypal spinster. The losses expanded exponentially when the forsaken unmarried woman considered that she would never be a mother.

Gabriele Reuter's 1895 novel, Aus guter Familie, demonstrates the maddening course of hopes quashed and imagination stifled. The reader is introduced to the protagonist Agathe Heidling at the celebration of her confirmation. Among the gifts she receives is a book entitled, “ The Female as Maiden, Wife and Mother.” The book might well have been a companion piece to the works of Davidis and Baisch.? But Agathe would not marry; her parents had invested their fortune in their only sons education and gambling debts, leaving no dowry for Agathe. She is fated to remain a maid becoming old, never experiencing marriage and

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motherhood. The novels tragic heroine is brought to a nervous breakdown by the gradual awareness that she will always live under the shame of having been spurned. At the moment of her collapse, Agathe reflects on the dreams of her youth: “Her whole life should have been love, love, love—nothing but love was her lifes purpose and destiny... The wife, the mother of future generations ... The root which supports the tree of humanity ... Yes—but if a girl raises her hand and wants only to drink from the glass which has enticingly been held before her lips from childhood on ... Shame and disgrace!"?? Agathe is institutionalized and treated with "baths and sleep medication, electricity and massage, hypnosis and suggestion."?! After two years she is released, but the life that follows is empty, almost a "living death."??

As the novel ends, family members try to secure a place for Agathe in a womens home, because “one can hardly take her into ones home, where there are children—a girl, who was in a clinic for nervous disorders. And Agathe perhaps has a long life before her—she is still not forty years old."?? Doomed by marital status, Agathe Heidlings story is in many ways the inversion of Theodor Fontanes Effi Briest, another enormously successful novel of the Wilhelmine era.” Both heroines suffered from the expectation of wedded bliss—Effi condemned by the marriage forced upon her; Agathe damned by the nuptials that had eluded her. Their dual tragedies highlight the tense cultural milieu of bourgeois marriage in the Kaiserreich.

Reuters novel of the alte Jungfer struck a chord in turn-of-the-century Germany. Helene Lange and Helene Stöcker, single women and ideologically disparate activists, shared the view that the novel grasped something essential in the German female experience. Lange described the portrayal of Agathe as “true, true, eerily true,” while Stöcker called the novel “a cry for help which could only be derived from the interminable, boundless martyring of a woman.”?® Reuter herself contended that *my novel had the effect of breaking through a dam behind which the floods had long been pent up ... All of Germany was preoccupied with the book.”?° While the author may have exaggerated the German obsession, the book nonetheless was a highly successful bestseller.” Agathe’s tragic tale undoubtedly resonated both with girls hoping to marry and mature women unlikely to wed. Ihe book also raised critical questions about the education of girls and the place of unmarried females in modern German society. Linda Kraus Worley has described Agathe's confining life through the lens of gender: "Agathe is denied access to ‘masculine’ pursuits, science, politics, even rational thought, and she experiences the few extra-familial opportunities open to unmarried women as one-sided and demeaning. The literal and social texts offered her are those of romantic love and dutiful filial piety.”?® But love and family offered her no return. Reuter dramatized an alte Jungfers futile search for a new identity and left her heroine with a sterile, solitary existence. Agathe's fate captures an essential component of the spinster paradigm: betrayed hope. Worley notes that Agathe’s "decay has not been caused by rebelling against the social codes, but by idealistically embracing them."?? Deluded by the promises of youth, Agathe becomes a

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despondent, forsaken adult. Reuter’s character comes to despise the childhood expectations she could never escape.

Depictions of single women repeatedly portray their development as halted at the point at which they recognize that they will not secure a man. “Alte Jungfer was a label of consensus; an old maid became such when both she and those around her expected that she would never marry.?? While that realization occurred at no single moment, the designation necessarily existed as an acknowledgement of the disappearance of youth. Only the blossom of youth offers the promise of a future. When that future became elusive, the unwed girl joined the ranks of the spinsters who inevitably looked back at the coming of age with emotions ranging from nostalgia to wistfulness to bitterness. While Reuter's Agathe came to despise the hopes of her youth, others sought to remain fixed in time: “We can forgive the aging girl the wish to extend ... youth, the desire to find happiness at the twelfth hour which seems to her to be the only thing worth striving for; but it is extremely sad to watch those efforts which each girl makes to reach that goal."?! Whether she sought to recreate her youth artificially or denounced it with sorrow, the old maid could not escape being defined by that time during which she had failed to meet her calling.

Her Beruf (vocation, calling) had been envisioned quite simply: to become wife and mother. Failing that, anything else was at best a substitute. For Marie Calm, yet another author of guidebooks for young women, the alte Jungfer was defined precisely by the fact that she had failed in pursuit of her destined Beruf: "She did not find marriage, the natural occupation of the woman, and has not chosen another one. She takes her place in life without specific duties, without real work."?? Calm advocated seeking other occupations, but single women would remain conspicuous because of their uselessness. The emphasis placed upon female utility is evident in the nomenclature. The English term “spinster” is etymologically derived from a traditional pre-industrial occupation of the single woman: spinning.” While the German terms “alte Jungfer’ and “alleinstehende Frau” are not as occupationally precise, their late nineteenth-century usage implied a fate of displacement: the oxymoronic old virgin and the woman standing alone—the modifying adverb designating her isolation as noteworthy. 'The old maid either stood alone or became a burden on family specifically and society generally.

Most bourgeois single women did establish an income, either through inheritance or work. But the onerous nature of the alte Jungfer was an essential element of the pariah paradigm. No conventional route to social interaction lay before the single woman. Marie Calm reflected that as long as she lived with her parents, she had some social security. But without a family, her conspicuousness condemned her to an uncertain fate:

O welche Lust allein zu sein!

(Oh what joy to be alone! To stand alone, oh what pain!)*4

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Standing alone, she fruitlessly sought community. In order to find it, the single woman regularly had to inflict herself on those with richer companionate lives. Amalie Baisch observed that, "if [a female] did not get a husband and along with that the only sphere of activity for which she had been raised was closed off to her, she consequently must seem to be a superfluous member of human society, useless as the fifth wheel on a wagon."

In his 1854 Natural History of the German People, historian and journalist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl asked, *How should we deal with solitary women? How should we reduce the legions, increasing daily, of those who through no fault of their own are pushed outside of the family to stand desolately in the selfish ... world, unoccupied, destitute, [and] mercilessly damned ... to a failed, aimless life?” Offering no demographic evidence of the mounting legions, Riehl's tone was sympathetic as he noted that the aimless unwed had not purposely pursued such a pointless path. But his rhetorical solutions sounded a more unfeeling note: "Should they be barricaded in the cloister? ... Should the surplus of family-less females be sent across the sea to Australia? Should they be struck dead?”*° One can only hope that his hyperbole was intended as a sad attempt at humor. The most practical solution to the plight of the unwed, Riehl suggested, was a familial culture that would provide loving sanctuary to their single sisters. Ironically, precisely those families who pushed her out into the cold world were to act as the saviors of the surplus woman.

Most observers of old maidenhood shared in the belief that other family members would likely be forced to carry the burden of the unattached woman. And some of them viewed their unwed relatives not only as intruders into the social realm, but, far worse, as parasites on limited family resources:

The evil exists, who can deny it? It is large and widespread and it seems to grow from year to year. In certain levels of society, there is hardly a family that will not be affected by it. I know no one who does not have among his nearest relations an aging aunt, cousin, or sister-in-law, who without support is more of a burden than a help to her family. Here live grown daughters as dilettantes, busying themselves with books and notes, an endless worry to advancing parents; there we find a sister as the hostess for her brother who for her sake denies himself fulfillment of the most passionate desires of his heart; in another place the sister of the wife is lodged in the house of her brother-in-law as a controlling biddy, a thorn in the flesh of the children.*”

While this portrayal exudes hostility, its themes are not unusual. Male relatives had been forced to sacrifice and suffer because of the unexpected addition to the family sphere. The uselessness of the surplus woman was most offensive to those who had to work to support her. She was less a person than an object, “a piece of house furniture, an accessory that one reluctantly and with difficulty drags along, a necessary inconvenience to the family."?? Such depictions transformed the image of the alte Jungfer from a sheltered figure to a troublesome, dehumanized object that obstructed normal social and economic intercourse.

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The objectification of the single woman implies both intractability and inertia. In some of the most damning accounts of old maidenhood, the forsaken women were charged with willfully creating their onerous status. These arguments maintained that middle-class surplus women did not desire to transform their dependency, but instead relished the life of leisure provided by aimlessness. Such women concerned themselves with “the dilettantish collection of music, French, literature, and often are also busy with extremely quiet hopes, but incidentally—they are perfectly useless." A solution followed: “What means should be employed to remedy this evil? I think it is the means that the poor employ, that is—work."?? Vilified as a lazy supplicant existing solely on the goodwill of others, the spinster in this vein was a freeloader who consciously created her own neediness. Victimizer rather than victim, she was to be condemned rather than pitied. Such a character stood in opposition to Reuters Agathe Heidling, who had constantly sought to be useful, but had been held back due to parental prohibitions.

Instead of noting the real hardships that faced middle-class women seeking independence, such commentators blamed single women themselves for the lack of professional and educational opportunities that they faced. The aphorism “whoever wants to work can always find work" characterized assessments of idle unwed women.^ The charge of selfishness sometimes extended into a medical diagnosis. Leipzig physician Carl Reclam asserted that in order to improve what he believed to be the generally weak health of old maids, "the best remedy is work; mental and physical activity in daily succession, serious exertion towards a goal, —in this manner one forgets one’s own T and its petty troubles.”4! But philosopher Eduard von Hartmann doubted that unmarried women of means had the capacity to work: “Ihey now know well the tediousness of unemployment, but not the tediousness and exhausting monotony of all professional work."

Such representations held that an unmarried woman could only overcome her egocentrism if she renounced the comforting prospect of family support. But these critics did not consider the impediments that family placed before single women seeking independence, nor the shame that bourgeois society attached to women truly standing alone. Condemnations of the alte Jungfer relied upon a double standard. The old maid was a cast-off, left barren by the vagaries of the marriage market and betrayed by her dreams of a happy future, yet she was simultaneously also the crafty engineer of a lifetime of ease and dependency. The unmarried women was thus both ridiculed and feared. Portrayed as deliberately desperate, the alte Jungfer was a cultural construction central to the debates about the position of women in Imperial Germany.

The Shrew, the Romantic, and die Tante

It was difficult for contemporaries to reconcile consistently the images of heartbroken girls such as Agathe Heidling with the portrayals of dilettantes who lived

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a leisurely life oblivious to the burden placed on those families who worked to support their whims. While views on the origins of single status differed, many observers of the day agreed that once a girl became a spinster, her character, her belief system, and even her body altered dramatically. The resulting old maid was a stock character in the cultural panorama, though the specific characteristics varied to accommodate both victims and lazy dilettantes. In 1906, the novelist Adelheid Weber offered a threefold characterization of traditional alte Jungfern: the bitter shrew; the simpering, foolish romantic; and the beloved aunt. While Weber viewed these caricatures as fading remnants of a judgmental era, a review of the literature suggests otherwise.

The most widespread parody of the alte Jungfer was that of vile harridan. Weber described her in the following manner: “[She is] large, gaunt, with a pointy nose and stabbing eyes. She has a small inheritance, lives alone with a herd of cats and a lapdog, despises children with a dry, grim, merciless hatred and horrifies the young girls whose reputations and happiness she pitilessly attacks. Lonely, hated, and hateful she lives and dies. And yet she had so much love to give that no one ever coveted. This she gave to her cats and dogs." ? Notorious for both her physique and her character, this figure is malicious. Yet she is also tragic in Weber's eyes, for her life has been determined and destroyed by lack of love. Other accounts were not so charitable, inspecting every physical characteristic in relendess detail: ^A young girl becomes old and ever older, the desired deliverance from virginity never comes. Youthful freshness is lost, rosy cheeks pale, skin wrinkles and folds; hair that framed a cute, sweet face used to be full and opulent, but now it becomes thin—the mop almost looks like a wig (and sometimes it really is one); the face develops an angular form with plunging eyebrows, a pointy nose, a yellowed complexion, dried lips, all of which sit atop a neck that is sometimes narrow and long, sometimes short and fat." ^ While the physical aspects depicted might be attributed, however harshly, to the benign process of aging, the description explicitly links her appearance to the unfulfilled calling of the unwed woman—never achieving true womanhood as a wife and mother, her body has betrayed her literal and figurative fruitlessness.

Yet physical decay is only one aspect of a much greater deterioration. The old maid of this first type is utterly consumed by bitterness. The aged incarnation of the selfish dilettante, the spinster nag sees nothing but her own pain, lashing out at everyone and everything around her. Disappointment is the central component of her unhappiness, but a lifetime of stigmatization and ostracization has made her malevolent as well. Gertrud Bülow von Dennewitz, an advocate of women’s rights who wrote under the pseudonym Gisela von Streitberg, saw the origins of such nasty creatures in the culture of bourgeois youth. A girl terrified of never marrying knew well “the heartless mockery of young girls toward unmarried old women of harmless nature who might here and there show some peculiar traits.” Such adolescents dreaded a similar fate: “[They] know only too well how soon they themselves will be written into the register of the aged ... and already carry in their hearts the embarrassingly pressing fear that they themselves will be

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left behind ... From such an individual then develops the embittered, jealous, malicious, in a word, unbearable alte Jungfer, of whom it is doubtful whether she makes her own or other's lives more miserable."^ Even this sympathetic portrayal concedes the misery that is spread by such a harpy. Another account describes the solitary woman as an increasingly angry figure: “Ihrough the habits of intellectual stagnation she becomes petty and bitter, she scatters her stubborn narrow-mindedness and inconsistency, making her environment contentious and stultifying [and] giving the designation ‘alte Jungfer its sinister timbre." 46

Embittered, the unmarried woman spreads bitterness; unloved, she is only capable of hate. The model of the shrew is the most prominent among the various lampoons of the spinster. The image fueled charges that the only true destiny for the female sex was marriage and motherhood. The following 1873 analysis of the Frauenfrage sums up the attributes of this most unfortunate female:

There is an army of deformities and abnormalities which develop into peculiarities and by which one can precisely designate the altjungfräulich ... Sharp, surly criticism of the passions of youth which one can no longer enjoy; condemnatory envy which cannot look joyfully on the happiness of others ... sorrowful satisfaction when someone married encounters misfortune; generally loveless behavior toward others; eavesdropping curiosity and a gossipy desire to report something ‘new’; pushy interference into the affairs of others; ... pedantic emphasis on dull, meaningless things and adherence to order."