Her Beruf (vocation, calling) had been envisioned quite simply: to become wife and mother. Failing that, anything else was at best a substitute. For Marie Calm, yet another author of guidebooks for young women, the alte Jungfer was defined precisely by the fact that she had failed in pursuit of her destined Beruf: “She did not find marriage, the natural occupation of the woman, and has not chosen another one. She takes her place in life without specific duties, without real work.”32 Calm advocated seeking other occupations, but single women would remain conspicuous because of their uselessness. The emphasis placed upon female utility is evident in the nomenclature. The English term “spinster” is etymologically derived from a traditional pre-industrial occupation of the single woman: spinning.33 While the German terms “Alte Jungfer” and “alleinstehende Frau” are not as occupationally precise, their late nineteenth-century usage implied a fate of displacement: the oxymoronic old virgin and the woman standing alone—the modifying adverb designating her isolation as noteworthy. The old maid either stood alone or became a burden on family specifically and society generally.
Most bourgeois single women did establish an income, either through inheritance or work. But the onerous nature of the Alte Jungfer was an essential element of the pariah paradigm. No conventional route to social interaction lay before the single woman. Marie Calm reflected that as long as she lived with her parents, she had some social security. But without a family, her conspicuousness condemned her to an uncertain fate:
O welche Lust allein zu sein! Allein zu stehn—O, welche Pein!
(Oh what joy to be alone! To stand alone, oh what pain!)34
Standing alone, she fruitlessly sought community. In order to find it, the single woman regularly had to inflict herself on those with richer companionate lives. Amalie Baisch observed that, “if [a female] did not get a husband and along with that the only sphere of activity for which she had been raised was closed off to her, she consequently must seem to be a superfluous member of human society, useless as the fifth wheel on a wagon.”35
In his 1854 Natural History of the German People, historian and journalist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl asked, “How should we deal with solitary women? How should we reduce the legions, increasing daily, of those who through no fault of their own are pushed outside of the family to stand desolately in the selfish . world, unoccupied, destitute, [and] mercilessly damned…to a failed, aimless life?” Offering no demographic evidence of the mounting legions, Riehl's tone was sympathetic as he noted that the aimless unwed had not purposely pursued such a pointless path. But his rhetorical solutions sounded a more unfeeling note: “Should they be barricaded in the cloister?…Should the surplus of family-less females be sent across the sea to Australia? Should they be struck dead?”36 One can only hope that his hyperbole was intended as a sad attempt at humor. The most practical solution to the plight of the unwed, Riehl suggested, was a familial culture that would provide loving sanctuary to their single sisters. Ironically, precisely those families who pushed her out into the cold world were to act as the saviors of the surplus woman.
Most observers of old maidenhood shared in the belief that other family members would likely be forced to carry the burden of the unattached woman. And some of them viewed their unwed relatives not only as intruders into the social realm, but, far worse, as parasites on limited family resources:
The evil exists, who can deny it? It is large and widespread and it seems to grow from year to year. In certain levels of society, there is hardly a family that will not be affected by it. I know no one who does not have among his nearest relations an aging aunt, cousin, or sister-in-law, who without support is more of a burden than a help to her family. Here live grown daughters as dilettantes, busying themselves with books and notes, an endless worry to advancing parents; there we find a sister as the hostess for her brother who for her sake denies himself fulfillment of the most passionate desires of his heart; in another place the sister of the wife is lodged in the house of her brother-in-law as a controlling biddy, a thorn in the flesh of the children.37
While this portrayal exudes hostility, its themes are not unusual. Male relatives had been forced to sacrifice and suffer because of the unexpected addition to the family sphere. The uselessness of the surplus woman was most offensive to those who had to work to support her. She was less a person than an object, “a piece of house furniture, an accessory that one reluctantly and with difficulty drags along, a necessary inconvenience to the family.”38 Such depictions transformed the image of the Alte Jungfer from a sheltered figure to a troublesome, dehumanized object that obstructed normal social and economic intercourse.
The objectification of the single woman implies both intractability and inertia. In some of the most damning accounts of old maidenhood, the forsaken women were charged with willfully creating their onerous status. These arguments maintained that middle-class surplus women did not desire to transform their dependency, but instead relished the life of leisure provided by aimlessness. Such women concerned themselves with “the dilettantish collection of music, French, literature, and often are also busy with extremely quiet hopes, but incidentally—they are perfectly useless.” A solution followed: “What means should be employed to remedy this evil? I think it is the means that the poor employ, that is—work.”39 Vilified as a lazy supplicant existing solely on the goodwill of others, the spinster in this vein was a freeloader who consciously created her own neediness. Victimizer rather than victim, she was to be condemned rather than pitied. Such a character stood in opposition to Reuter's Agathe Heidling, who had constantly sought to be useful, but had been held back due to parental prohibitions.
Instead of noting the real hardships that faced middle-class women seeking independence, such commentators blamed single women themselves for the lack of professional and educational opportunities that they faced. The aphorism “whoever wants to work can always find work” characterized assessments of idle unwed women.40 The charge of selfishness sometimes extended into a medical diagnosis. Leipzig physician Carl Reclam asserted that in order to improve what he believed to be the generally weak health of old maids, “the best remedy is work; mental and physical activity in daily succession, serious exertion towards a goal,—in this manner one forgets one's own ‘I’ and its petty troubles.”41 But philosopher Eduard von Hartmann doubted that unmarried women of means had the capacity to work: “They now know well the tediousness of unemployment, but not the tediousness and exhausting monotony of all professional work.”42
Such representations held that an unmarried woman could only overcome her egocentrism if she renounced the comforting prospect of family support. But these critics did not consider the impediments that family placed before single women seeking independence, nor the shame that bourgeois society attached to women truly standing alone. Condemnations of the alte Jungfer relied upon a double standard. The old maid was a cast-off, left barren by the vagaries of the marriage market and betrayed by her dreams of a happy future, yet she was simultaneously also the crafty engineer of a lifetime of ease and dependency. The unmarried women was thus both ridiculed and feared. Portrayed as deliberately desperate, the alte Jungfer was a cultural construction central to the debates about the position of women in Imperial Germany.
The Shrew, the Romantic, and die Tante
It was difficult for contemporaries to reconcile consistently the images of heartbroken girls such as Agathe Heidling with the portrayals of dilettantes who lived a leisurely life oblivious to the burden placed on those families who worked to support their whims. While views on the origins of single status differed, many observers of the day agreed that once a girl became a spinster, her character, her belief system, and even her body altered dramatically. The resulting old maid was a stock character in the cultural panorama, though the specific characteristics varied to accommodate both victims and lazy