The Surplus Woman

Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

Catherine L. Dollard

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

The first German women's movement embraced the belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, as a central leitmotif in the campaign for reform. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many bourgeois women without a husband. This book explores the ways in which the realms of literature, sexology, demography, socialism, and female activism addressed the perceived plight of unwed women. Case studies of reformers, including Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin, demonstrate the expansive influence of the discourse surrounding a female surfeit. By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about female marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times.

PART I

Der Frauenüberschuß

THE 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.

Chapter 1

THE ALTE JUNGFER

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.¹ 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!”² Davidis' guidance sought to secure for each reader a family of her own.³

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.⁴ 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 future, loving forethought on that which would embellish his strengths to achieve his life's destiny.”⁵ 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 woman's 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.”⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.”¹⁰ 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.

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.”¹¹ 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.¹²

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.”¹³ 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.”¹⁴ 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 “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.” The 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!”¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷

Descriptions of the onset of Altjungfertum 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ But Agathe would not marry; her parents had invested their fortune in their only son's education and gambling debts, leaving no dowry for Agathe. She is fated to remain a maid becoming old, never experiencing marriage and motherhood. The novel's 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 life's 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!”²⁰ Agathe is institutionalized and treated with “baths and sleep medication, electricity and massage, hypnosis and suggestion.”²¹ After two years she is released, but the life that follows is empty, almost a “living death.”²²

As the novel ends, family members try to secure a place for Agathe in a women's home, because “one can hardly take her into one's 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.”²³ Doomed by marital status, Agathe Heidling's story is in many ways the inversion of Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, another enormously successful novel of the Wilhelmine era.²⁴ 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.

Reuter's 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 somethin...