Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Age of Enlightened Rule?
- Part II Leadership as Social Activism around 1900
- 7 Age and Purpose: Unmarried Women and Female Agency in the Works of E. Marlitt and Hedwig Dohm
- 8 “Heroism of the Mother”: Women's Rights Pioneer Jeannette Schwerin, Motherlove, and Women's Leadership in German-Speaking Central Europe, 1890–1914
- 9 Strategic Optimism: Bertha von Suttner's Activism for Peace
- 10 Humanizing Socialism: The Feminist Dimension of Rosa Luxemburg's Intellectual Leadership
- Part III Women and Political Power in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
7 - Age and Purpose: Unmarried Women and Female Agency in the Works of E. Marlitt and Hedwig Dohm
from Part II - Leadership as Social Activism around 1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Age of Enlightened Rule?
- Part II Leadership as Social Activism around 1900
- 7 Age and Purpose: Unmarried Women and Female Agency in the Works of E. Marlitt and Hedwig Dohm
- 8 “Heroism of the Mother”: Women's Rights Pioneer Jeannette Schwerin, Motherlove, and Women's Leadership in German-Speaking Central Europe, 1890–1914
- 9 Strategic Optimism: Bertha von Suttner's Activism for Peace
- 10 Humanizing Socialism: The Feminist Dimension of Rosa Luxemburg's Intellectual Leadership
- Part III Women and Political Power in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
IN THINKING ABOUT women and leadership, the question of age is paramount. After all, many of the most coveted positions of power are in the hands of older segments of the population. Specifically, old (white) men are the prime contenders for economic and political leadership positions while old women, and old unmarried women in particular, face a panoply of prejudicial notions that are designed to disempower them and keep them confined to dependent positions within the private sphere. Popular cultural stereotypes of “old maids,” whose minds and hearts deteriorate in the absence of husbands and children, are rooted in the nineteenth century. A subject of examination for physicians such as August Forel and Julius Weiss and sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the lifelong-single woman was represented as either sexually deviant, physically deficient, or both. In her study of unmarried women in Imperial Germany, The Surplus Woman, historian Catherine L. Dollard examines the single woman as “a destabilizing force in turnof-the-century gender norms.” According to Dollard, the contemporary fears regarding a growing number of unmarried women did not reflect a demographic surfeit of unwed women but rather arose “as a consequence of the tensions and uncertainties that characterized an era of great social transformation.” Nevertheless, the anxiety concerning the illusory female surplus impregnated the German cultural imagination. Yet it is precisely because these women are not subordinated to a husband or limited by the duties of childcare that they are potentially available for participation in the public sphere.
What emerged in response to this prevailing unease about the role of single older women was a discourse of unique female contributions to the German state, especially in terms of what Ann Taylor Allen calls “spiritual motherhood,” and, for more progressive writers, a critical reflection of a system that forced women into these dependent roles. In this chapter I examine the agency of older unwed and widowed women in the works of two authors from this period: E. Marlitt (1825–87) and Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Realities and Fantasies of German Female LeadershipFrom Maria Antonia of Saxony to Angela Merkel, pp. 147 - 164Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019