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 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.”25 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.”26 While the author may have exaggerated the German obsession, the book nonetheless was a highly successful bestseller.27 Agathe's tragic tale undoubtedly resonated both with girls hoping to marry and mature women unlikely to wed. The 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.”28 But love and family offered her no return. Reuter dramatized an alte Jungfer's 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.”29 Deluded by the promises of youth, Agathe becomes a 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.30 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