The Surplus Woman. Catherine L. Dollard
Roberts' books, Civilization without Sexes and Disruptive Acts, provide the most comprehensive look at the experience and representation of single women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. Civilization without Sexes identifies three female icons (the modern woman, the mother, and the single woman) that dominated the postwar discourse surrounding gender. Roberts argues that the unwed woman occupied unique rhetorical space in the decade following the Great War: “the single woman became a focus of debate because she symbolized shifts in the social organization of gender.”28 Unmarried women simultaneously stood as pathetic objects of scorn, subjects of political debate, and figures that presaged a new age.29 Disruptive Acts investigates the nature of female performances in the venues of Third Republic theatre and journalism. Roberts portrays women who “simply and often unwittingly [were] trying to think themselves out of the corners into which they had been painted.”30 In recognizing the confining nature of those corners, these women—in dangerous ways—reasserted the resonance of the labels (old maids, whores, shrews, viragos) that they had been trying to escape, even as they forced public reappraisal of both womanhood and singleness.31 My work has been influenced by Roberts' interpretation of the discourse surrounding unmarried woman as a signifier of cultural anxiety.
Yet Imperial Germany provides a significantly different context for the study of single women. After a series of victories in Prussian-led wars, German national unification in 1871 initiated an era in which the elusive goal of national cohesion was pursued and in which debates about the contours of German national identity were widespread.32 The Kaiserreich occupied an age of extraordinary economic and demographic growth. The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained examination of the ways in which Germans conceptualized anxiety about marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times. Unmarried women served as potent threats to social order during this time of change; thus, appropriations of the Frauenüberschuß were contested by women's rights advocates and their opponents.
The surplus woman debate was uniquely German. Certainly, debates about the role of bourgeois single women took place in other national settings. But the politics, laws, and culture of the Kaiserreich provided an exceptional context for interest in and engagement with the contours of female marital status. First, suffrage played a less consequential role in the German women's movement than it did elsewhere. Universal male suffrage existed only in the national elections of Imperial Germany; most German states (including Prussia, the largest and most dominant federation) featured voting systems based upon property and wealth. Moreover, until 1908, German women could neither join political parties nor attend political gatherings. Given these restrictions, female suffrage was viewed by many German activists as a proposition that was simply out of reach. The political crucible in which the German women's movement was formed dictated a reformist path emphasizing paths of reform beyond the vote, including education and vocation. Second, the laws of the individual states of the German empire by and large prohibited married women from working in professional fields such as education, law, medicine, journalism, and engineering. Because married women were excluded from white-collar professional life, discussion about bourgeois female work necessarily centered upon single women.
Finally, the culture of Imperial Germany featured spheres of intellectual engagement that enhanced interest in single women. The realms of sexology and social science, both fields of Wissenschaft (knowledge) that underwent significant development during the German Kaiserreich, provided fertile scholarly ground from which to examine female marital status.33 Psychologists, anthropologists, and physicians interested in sexuality discovered a pathology of aberrance in the unwed—and presumably unsexed—female. While central European sexologists lamented the atrophying old maid, demographers explored her social underpinnings. New developments in population analysis, accompanied by eugenically fueled anxiety about decreasing birth rates, informed the German understanding of the surplus woman problem.34 Though these statistical studies tended to overemphasize current conditions and did not examine thoroughly the change over time, they still lent an air of empirical credibility to discussions of the Frauenüberschuß. In this way, Kaiserreich fascination with the distaff unwed foreshadowed the twentieth-century postwar Germanies, in which demographic inequities fueled discussion of abundant women as a “problem.”35
The postwar demographic surfeits of unmarried women had no parallel in Imperial Germany. As chapter 3 elucidates, the German Kaiserreich experienced no significant change in marriage rates or in terms of the unmarried proportion of the female population. This book provides the history of an assumption—and it shows that the assumption was a mistaken one. Yet the nonexistence of an intensifying demographic surfeit of unwed women makes the discourse surrounding the Frauenüberschuß all the more important to understand. In the French context, Roberts has observed that “regardless of whether these anxieties were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…they did preoccupy, worry, and even traumatize French men and women. For this reason, they are cultural realities in themselves and warrant our closest attention.”36 This project similarly asserts that despite the lack of clear demographic evidence of a female surfeit—in fact, because of such a lack—it is essential to understand the ways in which the surplus woman became an important emblem of change in German culture. The facts of population did not create the interest in single women. Assessments of the plight of the unwed instead emerged as a consequence of the tensions and uncertainties that characterized an era of great social transformation.
Unlike her counterpart in France and Britain, the German single woman of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries has not been the independent focus of historical analysis. This void is especially curious since the female majority is often cited in both contemporary and secondary discussions of the era. Some historians of German women have considered the Frauenüberschuß as a peripheral concern or as background material; others have ignored it completely. Richard Evans' The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, the first major English-language work on the early German women's movement, did not address the female surplus at all.37 While Evans recognized the emphasis placed by women's rights advocates on opportunities for middle-class single women, he did not relate those reform activities to demography or to concerns about an excess of females.
Of those historical works that have addressed the German female surplus in the Kaiserreich, three sorts of assessments have emerged. The first model is found in the work of German historian Ute Frevert, who regards the female surplus as a simple consequence of change. She suggests that marital status played a role in the discussion of the ‘woman question’ due to a greater number of women exhibiting a “willingness to take fate into their own hands.”38 Frevert argues that there is little connection between the woman question and the Frauenüberschuß because the eighteenth century demonstrated similar demographic conditions without creating debate about women's roles in the greater society. But Frevert does not explore the peculiar emphasis on the female surplus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor does she detail the demographic analysis behind her assertions.
The second type of historical assessment of the female surplus concludes that the Frauenüberschuß is interesting but ultimately inconsequential. The works of Herrad-Ulrike Bussemer and Amy Hackett fall into this category. After looking at aggregate marriage rates, Bussemer maintains that no perceptible change occurs in the nineteenth century and that discussion of the surplus woman phenomenon resulted from exaggeration.39 Hackett provides a more thorough consideration of the Frauenüberschuß. She begins her analysis by observing how frequently discussion of the female surfeit emerged in contemporary commentary of the Frauenfrage. 40 Hackett demonstrates regional variation of marriage patterns and links anxiety regarding marital status to social class. But Hackett concludes her discussion of the female surplus by noting that, “Demography alone, however important its contributions, cannot explain the women's movement.”41
The works of Frevert, Bussemer, and Hackett recognize the omnipresence of the belief in a female surplus, but omit important questions: why were unmarried women considered to be a noteworthy cohort? Why were they constructed as a problem to be solved? These histories of German single women do not