The Surplus Woman. Catherine L. Dollard

      Old maids have a long history. Prior to the late nineteenth century, condemnations of single women were based upon a simple premise: unwed women threatened the prevailing economic and social order. Indeed, fear of the unattached woman as a destabilizing force had contributed to the condemnation of widows during the witch craze of early modern Europe. By the turn of the twentieth century, as educational and professional opportunities became more accessible for middle-class single women, one might have been able to hope for the eradication of discrimination against the unwed. Yet a 1911 essay asserted otherwise: “The old maid, that brutal social malformation, was about to disappear…but suddenly in the last few years, she has emerged again.”¹

      A review of sexual scholarship indicates that representations of the alte Jungfer (old maid) took on new characteristics just when one might have expected the hackneyed stereotype to fade away. The emerging field of Sexualwissenschaft (sexology) at the turn-of-the-century offered fresh insights into the category of old maidenhood by openly discussing female sexuality and affirming the existence and importance of the female sex drive. Sexual scientists offered an interpretation of single women supporting Michel Foucault's contention that “the society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society…set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex…as if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge.”² In pursuit of a uniform truth, scientia sexualis established controlling norms of sexual health and deviance. Yet, as historians Edward R. Dickinson and Richard Wetzell have observed regarding the historiography of German sexuality, “the field of sexual power/knowledge is constructed within a complex social environment…it is not the property of a few academically trained doctors or servants.”³ The sexologists addressed in this chapter responded and further contributed to a discourse on sexuality that reflected contemporary concerns about gender roles, women's rights, separate spheres, and the meaning of marriage. The surplus woman stood at the nexus of those anxieties. Sexological examination of the female unwed rendered readings that were embedded in an era of cultural and social apprehension, even as they attempted to create a modern, scientific understanding of womanhood.

      Richard Krafft-Ebing, the Viennese neurologist who pioneered Central European sexology,⁴ established in the late nineteenth century the paradigmatic view of sexologists on single marital status: “Mental illness is much more frequent among the single than among the married, a fact that…is explained in that the ages of the single are more strongly represented in the population which exhibits a greater predisposition to illness…[and] that the more hygienic conditions of married life and regular sexual intercourse have prophylactic effects.”⁵ The greater likelihood of mental illness befalling the unwed, combined with the belief that women in general exhibited “a greater disposition to mental illness than men,” meant a much higher likelihood of instability among single women: “If the female must bear alone the struggle for existence—as in the case of widows—then she succumbs more easily and rapidly than the man.” Beyond the psychic stress of solitary life, unmarried women suffered due to celibacy: “The female, by nature as much in need of sex as the man, at least in the ideal sense, knows no other respectable satisfaction of this need than marriage…Through countless generations, her character is developed in this direction.” Thus, Krafft-Ebing and the generation of sexologists that followed him viewed the female surplus as a serious threat to female mental health: “Modern life with its increasing demands offers ever fewer prospects of fulfillment in marriage. This is especially true for the higher classes, in which marriages take place later and more seldomly.”⁶

      Bourgeois surplus women emerged as objects of case studies among the early sexologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Krafft-Ebing described the female proclivity toward mental illness in contrast to men:

      As the stronger, through their greater intellectual and physical strength and their free social position, men can procure for themselves sexual satisfaction without trouble or can easily find an equivalent in a vocation which calls for their entire energy. But these paths are closed to the single females of the better classes. This initially leads to conscious or unconscious dissatisfactions with themselves and the world, to abnormal brooding. For some time, many sought a surrogate in religion, but in vain. Religious zeal, with or without masturbation, has brought forth a host of neuropathies, among which hysteria and mental illness are not infrequent. Only realize the fact that the greatest frequency of insanity among single females occurs in the time of the 25th to the 35th years of life, the time where the prime of life disappears and life's hopes along with it.⁷

      Naturally inferior to men, weakened by forsaken dreams, and sickened by sexual abstinence, single women occupied a precarious realm of mental health. Elite social status further imperiled them and the historical sanctuary of religious faith could well make them even more ill. The female surplus thus provided fertile cases of dysfunction for the emerging field of sexual science to examine. The Kaiserreich bore witness to the reinvention