Gnauck-Kühne considered this fairy tale to be an allegory of the experience of single women at the turn of the century.11 Like the nightingale, unattached women had unique contributions to offer society. But in attempting to share their talents, they invariably faced criticism and rebuke. Just as the frog derided the bird's song, single women also confronted charges of uselessness. Yet mockery and ridicule could become a source of empowerment for alleinstehende Frauen (women standing alone),12 just as suffering enhanced the splendor of the nightingale's call. The very particular nature of an unmarried woman's loneliness had the potential to infuse society with beauty and generosity. When Gnauck-Kühne's protagonist mates, readers are meant to lament the loss of the nightingale's singular song. Gnauck-Kühne hoped that the tale would also compel its audience to hear and respond to the gifts of those solitary nightingales whose Leid might never be quelled by a mate, yet who nonetheless ever attempted to transform the world through their Lied.
The History of European Single Women
Life without marriage: anxiety about such a fate plagued many middle-class German women at the turn of the century. The notion of a demographic crisis called the Frauenüberschuß fueled discussion of women's rights in Imperial Germany. Both contemporary observers and historians have described the German Frauenfrage (woman question) as a Ledigenfrage (singles' question) and the Frauenbewegung (women's movement) as a Jungfrauenbewegung (movement of virgins, connoting old maids).13 The distaff surfeit served as both discourse and demographic concern in considerations of the female role in society and culture. Helene Lange's description of the disrupted domestic hearth and Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne's fantasy of the solitary life are both representative of a central theme of the debate regarding German women's rights. Recounted in speeches, petitions, newspaper articles, prescriptive literature, demographic studies, fiction, journals of sexual science, attacks against the women's movement as well as apologia in favor of it, and even in fairy tales, the plight of the single woman informed and formed discussion of German women in the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany).
The importance of the female surplus in Germany is made clear in the 1902 Handbook of the Women's Movement14 Edited by Helene Lange and her companion, Gertrud Bäumer, the work asserted that one of the primary causes of the German woman question was “the numerical ratio of the sexes…A tremendous surplus of women developed in the cities of the Middle Ages. Not to such an extent, but nevertheless also perceptibly, the same unfortunate condition exists in the nineteenth century…It has further intensified in the course of the nineteenth century due to emigrations…but also from the greater mortality [of men].”15 While the description relies upon vague demographic assertions, it is firm in its contention that a perceptible increase in the majority of females plagued the late nineteenth century. A 1911 encyclopedic entry on the Frauenfrage further described the displaced female: “the number of unmarried women is increasing…They must create an existence. The oft-repeated saying: ‘the woman belongs in the house’ is a foolish and empty cliché as long as each woman cannot be given a husband and a home.”16 The notion of a surplus of unmarried women was a central pillar of debates surrounding the changing nature of society throughout the Kaiserreich.
This book investigates the ways in which anxiety about too many single women served as a leitmotif in the German culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By identifying single women as the focus of study, this work fits into a growing body of historical scholarship.17 The interest in marital status as a subject of historical investigation has increased alongside the development of the field of women's history. Marital status provides both a social category and a descriptive arena by which female experiences can be examined. As Judith Bennett and Amy Froide have noted in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, “the histories of European women, European families, and European societies look very different when single women are a part of the story.”18 The essays edited by Bennett and Froide identify class, age, sexuality, religion, and region as key factors that differentiate the experiences of single women of the pre-modern era.19 But even among widely disparate circumstances, Bennett and Froide note important similarities among single women, both positively in regard to single women's ability “to use their meager resources—cash, goods, credit, property—with fewer restrictions” than married women, as well as negatively in that unwed women were more vulnerable to persecution and ridicule because of their “unprotected” status.20 Still, the prospect of marriage itself served to connect both single and wedded women, as did stringent limitations on autonomy based upon sex rather than marital status.
Books by Martha Vicinus, Elaine Showalter, Rita Kranidis, and Mary Louise Roberts have examined the distinct experiences of unwed women in modern Europe. These works portray the modern unmarried woman as playing an important role in reconfiguring understandings of gender. By identifying single women as a cohort meriting scholarly consideration, these authors show how the female unwed posed distinct challenges to established gender norms, either directly through calls for political and social reform or indirectly as a result of cultural anxieties about the unattached female as a threat to social order.
Martha Vicinus' Independent Women identifies the advent of the nineteenth century as a turning point in the lives of single women in that “for the first time in history a small group of middle-class women could afford to live, however poorly, on their own earnings outside heterosexual domesticity or church governance.”21 Vicinus' study identifies a “unity of purpose” among independent women seeking to reconstitute constructions of femininity in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The present study of the German surplus woman is a scholarly descendant of Vicinus' work in its topical orientation, but it does not share her emphasis on residential institutions as a central theme.22 This book instead examines the cultural construction of the single woman as both object and creator of social reform—and thus, as a destabilizing force in turn-of-the-century gender norms.
In interpreting the discourse surrounding surplus women as a signifier of conflicting attitudes about changing gender roles, The Surplus Woman thematically echoes Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy, a work which examined “the myths, metaphors, and images of sexual crises and apocalypse that marked both the late nineteenth century and our own fin-de-Siècle, and its representations in English and American literature, art, and film.”23 My work shares Showalter's view that “odd women” served as a source of sexual anarchy in turn-of-the-century European culture.24 Showalter treats single women as one component of a broad range of symptoms indicative of apocalyptic anxiety.
In The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration, Rita Kranidis also offers an integrated reading of literature and history. Employing a perspective derived from postcolonial literary criticism, Kranidis traces the history of British female colonial emigration while arguing that “the colonial emigration of spinsters is analogous to the displacement and dispossession of the poor.”25 Kranidis is particularly interested in teasing out the “cultural value” of the bourgeois female unwed: “If the middle-class Victorian woman's value was seen to lie in her perfect domestication, and if the unmarried working-class woman's value in her sexuality, then the middle-class emigrant spinster emerges as a hybrid: Where might her value reside?”26 She answers that question by “conceptualizing the emigrant female as an already commodified cultural subject.”27 Identifying middle-class spinsters in exile as commodities provides Kranidis with a way of linking the histories of colonialism, class, capitalism, and the woman question. Yet it is precisely this theoretical description of the commodification of unwed women that precludes a more evidence-rich reading of the lives of real