Constructing the Surplus Woman
The story set forth here provides the history of the Frauenüberschuß, a concept that reflected cultural anxiety in the face of social and economic change, demonstrated the era's fascination with the findings of sexual and social science, and served as one of the most important tenets of the German women's movement. This book affirms through demographic analysis that the female surplus was not a real population event and argues that the notion was instead a cultural construction that was foundational to the moderate, radical, and religious German women's movements. At the same time, this study seeks to go beyond a narrative account of social movements in order to examine the ways in which this cultural construction emerged, shifted, and signified deep anxieties about modern life. The surplus woman was the lodestar of German women's movements, but simultaneously was also the source of renewed ridicule and anxiety about the unwed woman. Her paradoxical nature hints at the great ambivalence with which many Germans experienced the rapidly changing world around them.
Four goals guide this discussion of the female surplus. First and most basically, the project intends to demonstrate the centrality of the Frauenüberschuß concept to the ways in which Imperial Germans viewed the age of change in which they lived. The notion of an overabundance of women at once demonstrates the predominance of marriage and motherhood as the female ideal; it adds an important dimension to the link between class status and German feminism; and it clarifies the origins of the reform program pursued by the women's movement, one which emphasized educational and professional opportunities over political calls for suffrage and expanded legal rights. The female surplus both created an air of urgency that brought attention to calls for change and provided a potentially powerful group toward which to aim reform.
Second, The Surplus Woman affirms the importance of marital status as a category of historical analysis.61 Recent historical work has asserted the importance of marriage and marital status in our understanding of the past. Examining the history of US marriage, Nancy Cott has made a convincing case that “the whole system of attribution and meaning that we call gender relies on and to a great extent derives from the structuring provided by marriage.”62 Elizabeth Heineman's What Difference does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (1999) asserts “the proposition that marital status has, through much of Western history, been a basic category of difference for women, in some ways analogous to race, class, and gender.”63 My work shares in that proposition. The category of marital status provides a very useful lens from which to investigate a society's leading assumptions about gender politics. Studying the signification of married men in the Soviet Union offers important insights into the social profile of the increasingly fragile Communist state.64 Asking about the making of wives in colonial India contributes to our understanding of the turbulent interplay of custom, empire, and modernity.65 Research into the meanings attributed to marital status sheds historical light on the configuration of gender, the rule of law, the importance of tradition, and the interrelationship of religious and civil life.
Equally important is the historical fluidity of marriage as a signifying category. Does marital status matter less in a certain time and place—or does it matter, say, more for women and less for men? Do widows and widowers form their own social cohort, and do they have more power in some cultures than others? To what extent did people talk about marriage or marital cohort within a specific historical context? These questions matter deeply to our understanding of the past. In the context of post—World War II and divided Germany, Heineman has argued that, “women's marital status is a profound cultural marker; it has striking material ramifications; and it is laden with political significance. Marital status no longer defines women as sharply as it did early in the [twentieth] century, but it has undergone an incomplete revolution.”66 The Surplus Woman provides the history of the conceptualization of single women in Imperial Germany, an era in which marital status mattered greatly in defining womanhood.
The third intent of this book is to help dismantle the paradigmatic view of the German women's movement as a dichotomous entity. Beginning with Richard Evans' work in 1976, the split between moderate and left-wing camps has dominated the scholarship of organized female activism in Germany. Certainly, the ideological and programmatic tension between moderates and radicals is well documented.67 Archival material facilitates the predominance of the dichotomy, as protagonists from both sides left behind folders about the “linken Flügel (left-wing)” and the “Gemässigen (moderates).” But reliance on this bifurcated model does disservice to the two ‘camps' involved, as well as to the movement as a whole. The socialist women's movement, led by Clara Zetkin, Lily Braun, and Luise Zietz, tends to be considered separately from both the moderates and radicals.68 Women's organizations under a religious banner have also been viewed primarily as particularized entities.69 The historiography of German women's activism to date has disproportionately reflected a vision of fragmentation—yet so many ‘herstorical’ paths tend to reify the organizational structure of the German women's movement. They do not allow for the consideration of commonalities, nor do they reveal the ideological complexity that guided so many disparate branches toward sometimes very similar ends.
The Surplus Woman joins with other historical works of the last twenty years that have sought to break down the model of left versus right. Nancy Reagin has rightly pointed out that the division into camps became far easier after the 1908 reform of the Law of Association, which permitted women to join and participate in the work of political parties. The 1910 split in the major leadership organization of the women's movement also sharpened divisions.70 But Reagin's work makes clear that in the city of Hanover, even after 1910, a “politically ‘neutral,’ professional women's sphere” was the realm in which most female reformers sought to maneuver.71 Raffael Scheck's historical examination of female politics in Weimar Germany has urged scholars to recognize the broad range of perspectives even within political interest groups.72 The work of historians like Reagin and Scheck compel the field to move beyond the predominance of factions and to search anew for both commonality and difference.
This book argues that a variety of women, arguing from different perspectives, shared the view that the female surplus was changing women's lives. Mainstream moderates, vocal radicals, committed socialists, and religious leaders all articulated as a reason for their advocacy the belief that the industrial age had forever altered the conditions of female existence. All responded to the perceived crisis by suggesting that single women had something unique to offer the greater German society, be it via the professions; through maternal influence; as exemplars of the abuses of capitalism; or as living emblems of Marian purity in the modern world. These very distinct responses reflected different ideological bases, but commingled in a prevailing belief in the innate power of women. A shared vision of female potentiality—rather than a common feminism—united the branches of the German women's movement. Analysis of the female surplus demonstrates a strong intellectual and spiritual connection, albeit structurally weak, between camps traditionally viewed as divided. Only when historians shed the prevailing paradigm of the dichotomous women's movement can the examination of other possible common threads commence.
The fourth aim of this project is, as much as possible, to examine the German women's movement in the terms of the world in which it emerged and which it sought to change. In this regard, my work follows in the path of historian Ann Taylor Allen, who has argued against “the tendency to judge the history of feminism according to criteria derived from the present.”73 Her study of ‘spiritual motherhood’ as a pillar of German feminism asks it readers to consider the “context of a specifically German national culture and German conceptions of citizenship.”74 Sociologist Margit Göttert, in a historical study of Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, has described an “emotionale Uberschuß (emotional excess)” that can arise when modern feminists confront the historical legacy of the first German women's movement. Göttert believes that such emotion “is not only a sign of disappointment over a ‘politically incorrect’ biography…It also refers to the [historical]