Schooling German Girls and Women [Course Book ed.] 9781400859795

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
ONE. The German Ideal of Womanhood and Education
TWO. The Rise of the Higher Girls' Schools
THREE. The Rise of Women Teachers to the 1870s
FOUR. The First Wave of Reform, 1865-1879
FIVE. The Petition Campaigns, 1887-1894
SIX. The Debate over Woman's Nature and Place
SEVEN. Propaganda of the Deed
EIGHT. The Decisive Reforms in Female Education
NINE. Aftermath, Comparisons, and Conclusions
Glossary
Bibliographical Note
Index

Citation preview

SCHOOLING GERMAN GIRLS AND WOMEN

SCHOOLING GERMAN GIRLS AND WOMEN Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century

James C. Albisetti

P R I N C E T O N UNIVERSITY PRESS P R I N C E T O N , NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1988 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey AU Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Albisetti, James C , 1949Schooling German girls and women. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Women—Education (Secondary)—Germany—History— 19th century. 2. Women—Education (Higher)—Germany— History—19th century. 3. Women teachers—Germany— History—19th century. 4. Feminism—Germany—History— 19th century. I. Title. LC2105.A431988 376'.63'0943 88-9991 ISBN 0-691-05535-1 (alk. paper) Publication of this book has been aided by the Whitney Darrow Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotron Palatino Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

For Nancy and Ann

Contents LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

IX

LIST OF TABLES

Xl

PREFACE

XUi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XXV

ABBREVIATIONS

XXVU

ONE

The German Ideal of Womanhood and Education

3

Two

The Rise of the Higher Girls' Schools

23

THREE

The Rise of Women Teachers to the 1870s

58

FOUR

The First Wave of Reform, 1865-1879

93

FIVE

The Petition Campaigns, 1887-1894

136

Six

The Debate over Woman's Nature and Place

168

SEVEN

Propaganda of the Deed

204

EIGHT

The Decisive Reforms in Female Education

238

NINE

Aftermath, Comparisons, and Conclusions

274

GLOSSARY

307

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

309

INDEX

313

List of Illustrations 1. View of the Prussian seminar at Droyssig in the 1890s. Source: Paul Meyer, Droyssig, 1852-1902: Ein Festschrift zum 50jiihrigen Bestehen den Droyssiger Anstalten (Berlin, 1902). 65 2. The dining hall at Droyssig. Source: ibid. 65 3. The Evangelical Tochterschule, Wesel, in the 1850s. Source: Otto Hollweg, ed., Festschrift zur Feier des 75jahrigen Bestehens des Stddtischen Oberlyzeums in Wesel (Wesel, 1928). 79 4. The Municipal Higher Girls' School, Wesel, built in 1899. Source: ibid. 79 5. "The Eternal Feminine in Medicine" (cartoon). Source: Kladderadatsch, 24, no. 32 (9 July 1871). 127 6. "The Darker Side—Women Students' Tavern in Zurich" (cartoon). Source: ibid., 25, no. 55 (1 December 1872). 132 7a and b. "Women Students of the Future" (cartoon). Source: Fliegende Blatter (8 March 1873). 133 8. Helene Lange. Source: Helene Lange, Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1930). 153

List of Tables 1. Foundation of Public Higher Girls'Schools

37

2. Social Origins of Girls in Saxon Secondary Schools, ca. 1900

56

3. Women Elementary Teachers in Prussia, 1861-1891

83

4. Women Participants in the Conference of 1906

265

5. Men Participants in the Conference of 1906

266

Preface THIS WORK examines

the development of and the attitudes toward the formal education for an elite social group, but a group without the economic and political power commonly associated with elites: middle- and upper-class women in the German states that combined in 1871 to form the Second Reich. The educational and employment opportunities discussed in the following chapters affected only a small percentage of German women, yet the evolution of these opportunities and the debates about them throughout the nineteenth century provide extremely valuable evidence about the perceptions and realities of sex roles in German society in this era. From the 1860s until the eve of World War I, educational reforms always occupied a prominent position among the demands of the German feminist movement, and women teachers held many positions of leadership within this movement. So central were issues of educational opportunity to German feminism that Ray Strachey's claim about England—that the gradual emergence of quality secondary and higher education for women supplied "the foundations upon which the whole breadth and force of the Women's Movement were to depend"1—could also apply to Germany. For most pupils, education in what were known in nineteenthcentury Germany as higher girls' schools constituted an important element in the shaping of their class and gender consciousness. Along with the influence of family, church, and community, such schools socialized middle-class girls to their expected roles and contributed both to the growth of "separate spheres" for men and women in the bourgeoisie and to the gradual isolation of this class from the lower orders.2 As will be discussed in Chapter Two, as 1 Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain (London, 1928; reprint 1978), p. 124. 2 The two best works on secondary education for girls in the nineteenth century are Ludwig Voss, Geschichte der hbheren Madchenschule: Allgemeine Schulentwicklung in Deutschland una Geschichte der hbheren Madchenschulen Kolns (Opladen, 1952); and Jiirgen Zinnecker, Sozialgeschichte der Mddchenbildung: Zur Kritik der Schulerziehung von Mddchen im biirgerlichen Patriarchalismus (Weinheim and Basel, 1973). Among studies of socialization of girls in nineteenth-century Germany, most of which devote minimal attention to formal schooling, see Dagmar-Renate Eicke, "Teenager" zu Kaisers Zeiten: Die "hohere" Tochter in Gesellschaft, Anstands- una Madchenbiicher zivischen 1860 und 1900 (Marburg, 1980); Dagmar Grenz, Madchenliteratur: Von den

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the century progressed these schools increasingly provided for a separation by class and sex, often from the very first days of schooling, which gave an institutional expression to attitudes absorbed elsewhere. Yet, as the autobiographies of many prominent German women reveal, the formal and informal curricula of these schools, when compared to those of the classical Gymnasien attended by boys from the same social groups, could stimulate in young girls an early awareness of, and a protest against, their "second-class citizenship" rather than a submissive conformity to the "German ideal of womanhood." As Fritz Ringer has noted in another context, "Even the most carefully restricted educational objectives had a tendency to raise troublesome expectations."3 The following chapters will demonstrate that even the higher girls' schools of nineteenth-century Germany could, and did, arouse such expectations in some of their pupils and in many of their women teachers. Books with titles such as The Unexpected Revolution and Reluctant Revolutionaries have been written about girls' education in England during the period covered by this book.4 No one has yet, however, attached such a positive connotation to the expanding educational opportunities for German girls and women in the nineteenth century; in fact, most scholars interested in the experiences of middleclass girls have stressed continuity almost to the exclusion of change. In a recent article, for example, Juliane Jacobi-Dittrich has argued that between 1811 and 1900 the changes that took place in the childhoods of middle-class girls were "limited in scope." Even moralisch-belehrenden Schriften im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Herausbildung der Backfischliteratur im 19. jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1981); Monika Justus, "Asthetische Praxis in der hauslichen Erziehung der Madchen im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert: Wiederspiegelung und Verfestigung der burgerlichen Frauenrolle durch die Konformkultur" (Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1979); Dagmar Ladj-Teichmann, Erziehung zur Weiblichkeit durch Textilarbeiten: Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte der Frauenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Weinheim and Basel, 1983); and, on German-speaking Switzerland, Ursi Blosser and Franziska Gerster, Tixhter der guten Gesellschaft: Frauenrolle und Mddchenerziehung in Schweizerischen Grossbiirgertum um 1900 (Zurich, 1985). 3 Fritz Ringer, "On Segmentation in Modern European Educational Systems," in The Rise of the Modern Educational System, ed. Detlef K. Miiller, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon (Cambridge, 1987), p. 63. This comment refers to the development of modern secondary schools for boys in France, which eventually came to challenge the classical lyc£es. 4 Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of the Education of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1979); Nonita Glenday and Mary Price, Reluctant Revolutionaries: A Century of Headmistresses, 1874-1974 (London, 1974). XlV

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Jurgen Zinnecker, whose valuable book on the social history of girls' education documents the growth in the number and enrollments of higher girls' schools and the expanding role of women teachers during the nineteenth century, emphasized continuity by concentrating on what he viewed as the function of girls' education under "bourgeois patriarchalism."5 Without offering a "Whiggish" account of continual improvements in girls' schooling or suggesting in any way that middle-class German girls came close to achieving equality of educational and employment opportunities with their brothers by 1914, this study will direct attention to the many changes that occurred during the nineteenth century. It will insist on the tremendous difference between the prospects of the girl of 1815, who was lucky to find a two- or three-class school offering anything remotely worthy of the name of secondary education, and those of her successor in 1914, who knew not only that she was allowed to pursue higher education and a professional career but also that thousands of German women were already doing so. The evolution of female education must be examined against the background of the industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization of Germany during the nineteenth century. This study will not, however, follow Zinnecker in attributing the major reforms of girls' schooling in the latter part of this period directly to "the rising demands of the state and of capitalist production for female workers." As Ringer has argued, it is extremely difficult to make such precise connections between educational change and the needs of the economy even with regard to boys' secondary schools, which were more closely tied to preparation for careers.6 Chapter Five will show that the most powerful push for new opportunities made by German feminists—the petition campaigns of the late 1880s and early 1890s—centered on demands for admission to medicine and secondary teaching, fields that were then considered to be overcrowded rather than in need of additional recruits. In her recent study of communities of professional and semiprofessional women in nineteenth-century England, Martha Vicinus pointed out how her work was made possible by the fact that 5

Juliane Jacobi-E>ittrich, "Growing Up Female in the Nineteenth Century," in German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Fout (New York, 1984), pp. 19798; Zinnecker, Sozialgeschichte der Madchenbildung, passim. 6 Zinnecker, Sozialgeschichte der Madchenbildung, p. 107; Fritz Ringer, "Introduction," in The Rise of the Modern Educational System, pp. 1-3. xv

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"earlier scholars have already described the process of institution building."7 For Germany, this is not the case. Despite the importance to social, educational, and women's history of the growth of the higher girls' schools, the rise of women teachers, the admission of women to German universities, and the emergence of female professionals, no comprehensive studies of any of these topics have yet been written.8 For this reason, the following chapters contain much more basic information about the development of institutions than is found in most recent scholarship on the history of modern European education or in many recent works on the history of British and American women. I hope that this background will provide a useful foundation for scholars interested in quantitative studies of the social history of girls' schooling or investigations of women's subcultures in Germany. One reason for the general neglect of the history of women's education in Germany has been the difficulty of obtaining source materials. School histories, autobiographies of women teachers and feminist leaders, relevant periodicals, and other printed sources are widely scattered at best, especially in the United States, although the recent availability on microfiche of the Gerritsen Collection of Women's History has partially alleviated this problem. That the individual German states administered educational affairs during the nineteenth century, and that most exercised very little control over the girls' schools until late in the century, means that what archival sources do exist are dispersed in a fashion that has encouraged local studies, such as the many detailed but self-contained studies of the admission of women to individual universities. In addition, the archives of the Ministry of Education of Prussia, Imperial Germany's largest state and educational pacesetter, have been relatively inaccessible at Merseburg in the German Democratic Republic.9 7 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago and London, 1985), p. 7. 8 For the most up-to-date bibliographies of recent work in German women's history, see Ute Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Biirgerlicher Verbesserung una Neuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt, 1986); John Fout, "Current Research on German Women's History in the Nineteenth Century," in Fout, ed., German Women in the Nineteenth Century; and Fout's recent essay, "Working-Class Women's Work in Imperial Germany," History of European Ideas 8 (1987): 625-32, which is broader in coverage than its title suggests. 9 In the summer of 1982, I was the first person to use the files on the girls' schools, although several scholars had previously used those on the admission of women to Prussian universities.

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Yet the problem of sources cannot account completely for the neglect of the history of women's education. Until very recently, male historians of education, and even some women trained by them, have been as guilty of silence about the experiences of half the population as have their colleagues in many other areas of history, despite their awareness of a female presence in the educational system that had no equivalent in political or military affairs. The extent of this silence is worth documenting briefly. Wilhelm Roessler, one of the pioneers in educational history in the Federal Republic, made only the briefest mention of girls' schooling in his study of the origins of the modern German educational system, a neglect made all the more obvious when Elisabeth Blochmann employed his general approach in her study of the emergence of girls' schools around 1800. In 1977, Detlef K. Muller's massive work, Social Structure and School System, gave no indication that girls participated in either society or the schools, even though inclusion of girls' schools might well have strengthened his thesis about the increasingly rigid social divisions within the educational system. An anthology of articles on Prussian educational history during the Second Reich, which appeared in 1980, contained no contribution related to female schooling. Most glaringly, perhaps, Norbert Andernach's book about the influence of German political parties on the universities before 1918 made not a single mention of the admission of women, even though between 1890 and 1910 discussion of this issue figured prominently in the parliamentary debates that served as his major sources.10 None of the many studies of the political indoctrination of pupils or the diffusion of the volkisch ideology in the schools of Imperial Germany devotes attention to girls, despite the fact that women were a majority of the voters in the Weimar Republic—the very people with whom most such studies are at least indirectly concerned.11 Women's role in the professions has not fared much better. An10 Wilhelm Roessler, Die Entstehung des modernen Erziehungswesens in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1961); Elisabeth Blochmann, Das "Frauenzimmer" una die "Gelehrsamkeit": Line Studietiberdie Anfdnge des Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1966); Detlef K. Muller, Sozialstruktur und Schulsystem: Aspekte zum Strukturwandel des Schulwesens im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1977); Peter Baumgart, ed., Bildungspolitik in Preussen zur Zeit des Kaiserreiches (Stuttgart, 1980); Norbert Andernach, Der Emfluss der Parteien aufdas Hochschulwesen in Preussen, 1848-1918 (Gottingen, 1972). 11 A complete listing is not possible here, but it can be noted that the most influential book in this area omits all discussion of women as bearers of the volkisch ideology: George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964).

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thony LaVopa's study of the professionalization of elementary schoolteachers before 1848 does not mention women, even though the Prussian government began operating "seminars," or normal schools, for women in 1832. Folkert Meyer's study of Prussian teachers in the second half of the century relegates women to one footnote, despite the fact that they comprised 18 percent of elementary teachers by 1901. Scholars who do take account of the emergence of women teachers have tended to rely on a single early work by Use Gahlings and Ella Moering without seeing any need for further research.12 Two female historians have chronicled the professionalization of German physicians and dentists in the nineteenth century; but not only do their works omit any recognition that the struggle over the admission of women to these careers had a profound impact on the process of professionalization, they also fail even to mention that women practiced these professions in the Second Reich.13 Even those scholars who have included the educational experience of women in broader studies have tended to give it only the most cursory attention. In Peter Lundgreen's two-volume survey of the social history of German education, the development of the higher girls' schools before 1908 receives only one page, and that in the volume ostensibly devoted to the period 1918-1980. A similarly delayed and abbreviated discussion of these schools can be found in Margret Kraul's summary of the history of German secondary education over the last two centuries. Coverage of female education is no more thorough in the survey text by Hans-Georg Herrlitz, WuIf Hopf, and Hartmut Titze. Women students are allocated only one paragraph in Charles McClelland's State, Society, and University in Germany and just a few pages in Konrad Jarausch's Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany.14 In Det12

Anthony LaVopa, Prussian Schoolteachers: Profession and Office, 1763-1848 (Chapel Hill, N . C , 1980); Folkert Meyer, Schule der Untertanen: Lehrer und Polihk in Preussen, 1848-1900, Historische Perspektiven, vol. 4 (Hamburg, 1976); Use Gahlings and Ella Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin: Sozialgeschichte und Gegenwartslage (Heidelberg, 1961), which is the only significant source on women teachers used by Rainer Boiling, Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Lehrer (Gottingen, 1983); and James Milton Olson, "The Prussian Volksschule, 1890-1914" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1971). 13 Claudia Huerkamp, Der Aufsheg der Arzte im 19. fahrhundert (Gottingen, 1985); Uta Althoff, Die Geschichte der Deutschen Gesellschaft fiir Zahn-, Mund- und Kieferheilkunde (Diisseldorf, 1971). 14 Peter Lundgreen, Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Schule im Uberbltck, 2 vols. (Gottingen, 1980-1981); Margret Kraul, Das deutsche Gymnasium, 1780-1980 (Frankfurt XVlIl

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lef MuUer's most recent work, he reduces decades of debate about the extent to which girls' education should be modeled on that for boys to the assertion that "the girls' schools had to be organised as a distinctive system patterned after that of the boys' schools," a not entirely accurate assessment of the major reforms in the early twentieth century.15 The recent explosion of interest in the history of German women has produced some attention to education, although American scholars active in this field have devoted a great deal of their work to investigations of workers, socialists, and Jewish Germans. Much work on female education, building on the earlier studies by Blochmann and Zinnecker, has concentrated on the evolution of ideas about girls' schooling, and has added little to our knowledge of the development of institutions.16 A number of West German feminists have published studies motivated more by a desire to attack contemporary discrimination against women in the educational system than by a serious interest in understanding the history of the nineteenth century.17 No work has as yet attempted, as am Main, 1984); Hans-Georg Herrlitz, WuIf Hopf, and Hartmut Titze, Deutsche Schulgeschichte von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart (Konigstein, 1981); Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700-1914 (Cambridge, 1980); Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1982). None of the first three of these works cites the studies by Voss and Zinnecker mentioned in note 2. 15 Detlef K. Muller, "The Process of Systematisation: The Case of German Secondary Education," in The Rise of the Modern Educational System, p. 44 (emphasis added). As will be discussed in Chapters Eight and Nine, even after the reforms of 1908 in Prussia, the girls' secondary schools differed in many ways from the boys' system, such as in the continued existence of many private institutions, the employment of mixed faculties, the delay of tracking until age thirteen, and the predominance of Realgymnasien as the main type of institution leading young women to the Abitur. 16 See Karin Meiners, Der besondere Weg, ein Weib zu werden: Uber den Einfluss von Leitbildern auf die Entwicklung der hoheren Madchenbildung seit dem 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main and Bern, 1982); Peter Petschauer, "Eighteenth-Century German Opinions about Education for Women," Central European History 19 (1986): 262-92; Monika Simmel, Erziehung zum Weibe: Madchenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1980); Gerda Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauenbildung (Weinheim and Basel, 1977); and George Bernstein and Lottelore Bernstein, "Attitudes toward Women's Education in Germany, 1870-1914," International Journal of Women's Studies 2 (1979): 473-88. 17 Among overly present-minded works, based on limited research, I would include Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, "Kampf urns Frauenstudium—Studentinnen und Dozentinnen an deutschen Hochschulen," in Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beitrdge zur Berliner Sommeruniversitat fur Frauen, JuIi 1976 (Berlin, 1977), pp. 33-72; Kristine von Soden, "Zur Geschichte des Frauenstudiums," in 70Jahre Frauenstudium, ed. Soden XlX

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this book does, to bridge the gap between women's and educational history by examining female education in nineteenth-century Germany from the perspectives of both fields. Chapters Four through Nine also aim at a reappraisal of the feminist movement in Imperial Germany. Margrit Twellmann's pioneering investigation of this movement gave some attention to educational issues but relied on a limited selection of sources and stopped its coverage at 1889, which resulted in a somewhat distorted picture of German feminists' activities for educational reform. More recently, Herrad-Ulrike Bussemer has published a more thorough examination of the first decade of organized feminism, but the very depth of her concentration on the years from 1865 to 1875 led her to neglect longer-term developments in the schools, universities, and teaching profession. In their studies of German feminism after 1894, both Richard Evans and Barbara Greven-Aschoff gave only limited, and not always accurate, coverage to the struggle for educational reforms.18 An especially troublesome aspect of some recent scholarship on German feminism is a tendency to denigrate the views and importance of individuals with whose views about women's role in society an author does not agree. This has been the case particularly with regard to what historians generally call the "moderate" feminists, those who believed in an "equality in difference" and desired an expanded arena for the exercise of specifically female talents and virtues. Evans, for example, seriously underestimated the achievements of the moderate leader Helene Lange when he accused her of having "fully accepted the role prescribed for women by the official social ideology of Imperial Germany." In a similar fashion, Monika Simmel has written, "By limiting itself to 'genuinely feminine' activities the majority of the bourgeois womand Gaby Zipfel (Cologne, 1979), pp. 9-42; and Karin Ehrich and Friederike Vauth, "Kampf um eine bessere Lehrerinnenbildung," in Lehrerinnen: Zur Geschichte ernes Frauenberufs, ed. Use Brehmer (Munich, 1980), pp. 82-107. Based on much more thorough research but weakened by their authors' prejudices against moderate feminists are Simmel, Erziehung zum Wetbe; and Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauenbildung. 18 Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung im Spiegel reprasentativer Frauenzeitschriften: Ihre Anfange una erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972); Herrad-Ulrike Bussemer, Frauenemanzipation und Bildungsbiirgertum: Sozialgeschichte der Frauenbewegung in der ReichsgrUndungszeit (Weinheim and Basel, 1985); Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976); Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bttrgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894-1933 (Gottingen, 1981). xx

PREFACE

en's movement fulfilled its objective function of ensuring bourgeois rule."19 The moderates did not advocate the overthrow of the social and economic structure of Imperial Germany, but they did raise important, and at times highly effective, challenges to the position of women in that society. Without overlooking the limits to the demands of moderates such as Lange, this book aims to provide a more positive assessment of the moderates' goals and successes. In this endeavor, the most original contribution that this study can make lies in its detailed examination of the interaction between the women's movement and government officials, especially those in the Prussian Ministry of Education. In historians' discussions of the struggle for reform of female education, such officials have often appeared more or less as villains, particularly Robert Bosse, who headed this ministry from 1892 to 1899, and his successor, Konrad von Studt, who served until 1907.20 In responding to various petitions, these men had more opportunities to address the "woman question" than did most other government officials, and they occasionally made blunt, if not outrageous, comments in defense of the status quo. Yet, as Chapters Seven and Eight will demonstrate, Bosse, Studt, and their subordinates treated women's demands more seriously and made significantly greater efforts to satisfy some of them than did any other government leaders. Another important contribution to the reappraisal of German feminism lies in the adoption of a comparative perspective, measuring the educational and employment opportunities gained by women in Imperial Germany against those obtained in other European countries. Recent major anthologies devoted to comparative educational history, among them three volumes produced by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, have failed to include any meaningful examinations of female education.21 Even scholars in women's history, despite their frequent in19

Evans, Feminist Movement, p. 24; Simmel, Erziehung zum Weibe, p. 138. See, for example, Greven-Aschoff, Frauenbewegung, pp. 56-57; and Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Die Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1928), pp. 179-80. 21 There are no articles relating to female education in Lawrence Stone, ed., The University m Society, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1974); idem, ed., Schooling and Society (Baltimore, 1976); Walter Laqueur and George Mosse, eds., Education and Social Structure in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1967); Jerome Karabe] and A. H. Halsey, eds., Power and Ideology in Education (New York, 1977); Konrad Jarausch, ed., The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860-1930 (Chicago, 1983); Werner Conze and Jiirgen Kocka, eds., Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, pt. 1: Bildungssystem und Pro20

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sistence on the need to rethink traditional historical categories, have seldom managed to break through national boundaries in their works. With regard to educational history, neither Phyllis Stock's sweeping Better Than Rubies, nor Richard Evans's brief survey of The Feminists, nor Priscilla Robertson's An Experience of Women has produced a satisfactory comparative analysis of developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 West German scholars in women's history have made virtually no effort to compare the experiences of nineteenth-century German women with those of their sisters in other countries. Yet almost all such scholars appear to operate with an assumption of German backwardness in women's rights similar to that made by Margrit Twellmann, who asserted without the benefit of comparative study that, in relation to the struggles for improving women's education in other European countries, "the parallel developments in Germany can only be characterized as ineffectual, slow, and tentative, perhaps even as timid and old-fashioned."23 Through the use of the many available secondary works on the education of girls and women in other countries, this study will, particularly in Chapters Three, Four, and Nine, make more explicit and precise comparisons and, in the process, will challenge some aspects of Germany's alleged backwardness. The following chapters thus also aim, at least indirectly, to contribute to the ongoing debate about Germany's Sonderweg, or special path of modernization, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The political and social historians who have been the major participants in this debate have devoted as little attention to the position of women in German society as West German women's historians have to the kind of comparisons the Sonderweg controversy has encouraged.24 Yet the study of women's education and fessionalisierung in internationalen Vergleich (Stuttgart, 1985); or Miiller, Ringer, and Simon, eds., The Rise of the Modern Educational System. The last three works do, however, contain limited recognition of the changing position of girls and women in the educational systems of different nations. 22 Phyllis Stock, Better Than Rubies: A History of Women's Education (New York, 1978); Richard J. Evans, The Feminists (London and New York, 1977); Priscilla Robertson, An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 1982). 23 Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, \: 68. 24 For the major statement insisting that Germany did not differ as substantially from other countries as has often been asserted, see Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History (New York, 1984); for an accessible introduction to the dominant viewpoints in recent West German scholarship on the Secxxil

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employment opportunities can benefit greatly from the suggestions of David Blackbourn, one of the leading participants in the debate, that "there are more fruitful ways of approaching modern German history . . . than to address it with questions to which the answer is always 'No' " and that "it is striking how often what did not happen has been regarded as more important than what did."25 It is certainly legitimate to ask why Germany had no Girton College or Marie Curie, or why women could not matriculate at German universities until so late. Equally legitimate, though, are questions about the support that city and state governments in Germany gave to higher girls' schools and the training of women teachers during the nineteenth century, or the wide diffusion of institutions preparing girls for the universities and the admission of women to all institutions of higher education in the early years of this century. This study will address questions of both types. The breadth of coverage attempted in this book has made certain omissions or condensations necessary. Not treated is the entire topic of the portrayal of sex roles in textbooks used in the higher girls' schools, and in general less is said than could be about socialization in the home and school. Regional variations in the provision of schooling are not ignored, but they are at times downplayed in order to emphasize general trends. Differences among Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and interdenominational schools also merit more attention than they receive here. The dayto-day experiences of female professionals and of the first generation of women students are other areas where it can be hoped that this study will serve to stimulate further research. ond Reich, see James Retallack, "Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to H.-U. Wehler's Das Deutsche Kaiserreich," and Roger Fletcher, "Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and Its Critics," German Studies Review 7 (1984), pp. 423-50 and 451-80, respectively. 25 Eley and Blackbourn, Peculiarities, pp. 160, 159.

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Acknowledgments of researching and writing this work, I have been fortunate to receive the valuable and willing assistance of many individuals and institutions. Dr. Meta Kohnke and the staff of the Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II, at Merseburg in the German Democratic Republic, assisted me in locating materials from the files of the Prussian Ministry of Education. Dr. Detlef Miiller of the Institut fur Padagogik at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum was a genial host on two occasions and made available to me the impressive library he and his colleagues have assembled. Dr. Hartmut Titze welcomed me to the Padagogisches Seminar at the University of Gottingen and assisted in my search for materials. At both institutions, I had the opportunity to share preliminary versions of my findings with interested scholars. In West Berlin, Dr. Regina Mahlke of the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz provided critical assistance on several occasions, including help with obtaining photographs. Ute Zander granted permission to use the library of the Deutscher Staatsburgerinnen-Verband and offered very kind hospitality during my visit there. My friends Mary Lee Townsend and Ed Harper succeeded many times in making my visits to Berlin more pleasant. In the United States, I received assistance from the staffs of the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Institute of Education, the New York Public Library, the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Indiana University library. Special thanks are due to Robert Gaines of the microforms division of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; during my visit there and through interlibrary loan he made the Gerritsen Collection of Women's History easily available to me. Jean Soderlund at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection provided me with access to Helene Stocker's papers. Two individuals saved me a trip to New England: Susan Boone of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College supplied a photocopy of Maria Munk's memoirs, and Laurie Gepford of Boston University copied some materials from the Boston Public Library. Catherine Prelinger provided crucial last-minute assistance with obtaining illustrations. As always, the people without whom this work truly could not have been completed are the members of the interlibrary loan staff at the M. I. King Library of IN THE COURSE

xxv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the University of Kentucky. Among them, I owe particular debts to Barbara Wight and Jennifer Geran. I have presented aspects of my research at several conventions over the last six years. Among critics who have aided the evolution of my thinking on various issues are Evan Bukey, Konrad Jarausch, Phyllis Stock, Linda Clark, Karen Offen, Joan Burstyn, Catherine Prelinger, Joanne Schneider, Katherine Kennedy, and Erika Kiipper. Konrad Jarausch and an anonymous reader for Princeton University Press provided useful criticisms of the entire manuscript. Even if I have not always followed their suggestions, I am sure that the final product is better for their critiques. Research for this book was aided by a study grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1982, a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the University of Kentucky in 1983, and the Grawemeyer Faculty Award for research in Germany in 1984. I owe special thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Grawemeyer for endowing this award and to David Hershberg, chair of the selection committee at the University of Louisville, who welcomed me warmly and assembled a stimulating audience for my Grawemeyer Lecture in November 1984. The University of Kentucky granted me a sabbatical leave in 1985-1986, which enabled me to complete this manuscript. For permission to republish portions of articles that have appeared previously, I would like to thank B. Edward McClellan, editor of History of Education Quarterly; Douglas A. Unfug, editor of Central European History; Gerald R. Kleinfeld, editor of German Studies Review; and Indiana University Press, for material from German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes. I would also like to thank Dr. Regina Mahlke for permission to publish photographs supplied by the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz. This study is dedicated to two individuals who would have convinced the most misogynist professor in Imperial Germany of the value of opening the universities and the professoriate to women. One is my friend and colleague Nancy Schrom Dye, without whose encouragement at an early stage this work would not have been undertaken. The other is Ann Taylor Allen, who over the past five years has shared with me her extensive knowledge of the history of German women, supplied friendly but penetrating criticism of my manuscript, and proven in so many ways that the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have much to gain by closer cooperation. XXVl

Abbreviations IN THE notes, full information for each work is provided the first time it is cited in each chapter. Subtitles are omitted if they are not necessary for identifying the topic of the work. References to materials from the Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II, Merseburg, are given in the format required by that archive. The following abbreviations are used in the notes: Centralblatt . . . IXXX: Centralblatt fur die gesatnte Unterrichtsverwaltung in Preussen, Jahrgang IXXX KM: Kultusministerium, the short name given to the Prussian Ministerium fur geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinalangelegenheiten ZfwB: Zeitschrift fur weibliche Bildung ZStA-II: Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Historische Abteilung II

XXVIl

SCHOOLING GERMAN GIRLS AND WOMEN

ONE

The German Ideal of Womanhood and Education O N 2 JANUARY 1824, Goethe commented in one of the conversations faithfully recorded by his friend Johann Eckermann, "We love in a young woman things entirely different from her intelligence." Although he went on to say that men could respect intelligence in a woman and that it even could be valuable as a means "to bind us when we already love," Goethe made clear then as well as in his fictional works that other qualities formed the essence of feminine charm.1 His most famous German female characters, Lotte in The Sufferings of Young Werther and Gretchen in Faust, certainly did not attract men through displays of clever reasoning or deep learning. The "eternal feminine" as conceived of by Goethe had little to do with a woman's mental powers, especially not with those cultivated through formal education in school. Goethe's writings, along with those of many contemporaries, helped to propagate what many people in the later nineteenth century would refer to as the German ideal of womanhood. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, numerous German intellectuals, from major philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte to many nearly forgotten pastors and educators, attempted to define woman's "nature" and her proper place in society. The many such works from this era put forward three related but distinct points of view, all of which drew in part on the extremely influential works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.2 The Philanthropist educators tended to emphasize woman's 1

Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe, 9th ed. (Leipzig, 1909), p. 428. On Rousseau's influence on writings about women in Germany, see Elisabeth Blochmann, Das "Frauenzimmer" und die "Gelehrsamkeit": Eine Studie iiber die Anfange des Mddchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1966), pp. 26-28; Dagmar Grenz, Mddchenliteratur: Von den moralisch-belehrenden Schriften im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Herausbildung der Backfischhteratur im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 22-24; and Karin Meiners, Der besondere Weg, ein Weib zu Werden: Uber den Einfluss von Leitbildern aufdie Entwicklung der hoheren Mddchenbildung seit dem 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and Bern, 1982), pp. 34-41. 2

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duties in the household; the idealist philosophers, woman's "nature" as a complement to that of man; and romantic poets and writers, woman's role as mother. This chapter will examine the elaboration of this German ideal of womanhood and analyze a continuing controversy among historians about the extent to which it represented a new ideology that served to lower the position of middle-class women in the various German states. Then the discussion will focus on the views expressed in this same era about why and how girls' education should be extended and reformed. POLARIZATION OF SEXUAL STEREOTYPES ABOUT

1800?

Recent research into the history of the family and of women has challenged radically Goethe's belief in an eternal, immutable idea of femininity. Efforts to treat gender as a historical category comparable to class or ethnicity, and to examine changes over time in the sexual division of labor and in perceptions of the "nature" of men and women, have resulted in a new understanding of the alterations in sex roles over the centuries.3 For Germany, in fact, many scholars have concluded that both the realities of and the ideological justifications for modern notions of separate spheres for men and women emerged in the educated middle class only during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a recent survey of the history of German women, Ute Frevert discusses this era in a section entitled simply, "New Bourgeoisie and New Femininity."4 It is not difficult to find writers of this period who emphasized the differing natures and fates of the two sexes. Many leading representatives of German idealism and romanticism argued that the sexes, despite sharing a common humanity, possessed by nature differing characteristics and talents that made them complementary rather than identical. Kant, for example, stressed the way women's "temperament has characteristic traits that clearly differentiate it from ours." In particular, he thought women were more concerned with and defined by the beautiful, men by the noble or 3

For general discussions of this theme, see Annette Kuhn, "Das Geschlecht— eine historische Kategorie?" in Frauen in der Geschichte, vol. 4, ed. Use Brehmer, Juliane Jacobi-Dittrich, Elke Kleinau, and Annette Kuhn (Diisseldorf, 1983), pp. 2950; and Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75. 4 Ute Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Biirgerlicher Verbesserung una Neuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 33-39. 4

THE GERMAN IDEAL

sublime. Kant insisted that women's "worldly wisdom is not specious reasoning, but feeling."5 Wilhelm von Humboldt, in an essay written in 1794, also put a strong emphasis on the complementarity of the sexes, which felt "a painful deprivation" that caused them to turn to each other for fulfillment. Humboldt extended traditional notions of male activity and female passivity in sexual intercourse to the creation of intellectual or artistic works, although he admitted that all such works had both masculine and feminine elements. The implications of his views for women's activities in the public sphere were decidedly negative: "Induced by their nature itself more to turn inward than to wander in the wide world, all receptive beings are chained to a steadier, less changeable course."6 In 1797, in a discussion of "natural law" as it applied to marriage, Johann Gottlieb Fichte stressed that, not human law or social convention, but nature had decreed women's subordinate position. Although he did not claim that women's mental capacities were less than those of men, Fichte insisted that "the intellect of both has by nature a totally different character." Women possessed "a natural feeling for distinguishing the true, the proper, and the good." Femininity made women "particularly practical, but in no way speculative," and thus destined them for the home.7 Two decades later, Ernst Moritz Arndt would echo Fichte's insistence that nature, not social convention, was responsible for separate spheres for the sexes.8 Members of the romantic movement tended to devote more attention to, and put a higher valuation on, woman's role as mother 5 See the relevant sections of "Beobachtungen iiber das Gefiihl des Schonen und Erhabenen" (1764) and of "Anthropologic in pragmatischer Sicht" (1798) in Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Koniglich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1912), pp. 228-43, and vol. 7 (Berlin, 1917), pp. 303-11 (quotations are from 2: 228, 230). For further discussion of Kant's views, see Barbara Duden, "Das scheme Eigentum: Zur Herausbildung des burgerlichen Frauenbildes an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert," Kursbuch 47 (1977): 125-40; and Ursula Nolte, "Die Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung von der Aufklarung bis zur deutschen Romantik" (Ph.D. diss., University of Mainz, 1952), pp. 22-31. 6 Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Uber den Geschlechtsunterschied und dessen Einfluss auf die organische Natur," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Berlin, 1903), pp. 311-34, quotations on pp. 320, 331. 7 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre, in Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, vol. 4, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitsky (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1970), pp. 95-136, quotations on p. 135. 8 On Arndt, see especially Nolte, "Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung," pp. 122-37.

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than the idealist philosophers did. The most enthusiastic celebration of motherhood came from Jean Paul Richter, who spoke of "the first and most important education, that given by the mother, which no after tutors, schools, or paternal praise and blame can ever replace." In his view, "Nature has directly formed woman to be a mother, only indirectly to be a wife." Yet romantics like Jean Paul and Friedrich Schlegel shared the idealist notion of the complementarity of the sexes, and they added to it an assertion that women are more childlike than men. As Schlegel wrote in his novel Lucinde, "Having remained the creatures of nature in the midst of human society, women alone possessed that childlike consciousness with which one has to accept the favors and gifts of the gods." For Jean Paul, all of women's "powers are rather receptive than formative."9 Many writers more directly concerned with female education adopted this concept of separate spheres for men and women. According to the Philanthropist J. H. Campe, whose Fatherly Advice for My Daughter (1789) would become the most widely read book on girls' education during the next decades, it was "the common will of nature and of human society that the man should be the protector and master of the woman, the woman in contrast . . . the loyal, thankful, and obedient companion and helpmate of his life."10 The pastor Johann Philipp Trefurt, in advertising a girls' school he had opened in Gottingen, commented in 1806, "The sphere in which the female sex is destined to work is certainly narrower than that which is assigned to the man, and only seldom can that sphere be enlarged beyond its natural limits without the loss of precious femininity." Putting forward guidelines for girls' education in 1836, the theologian F.H.C. Schwarz asserted, "The woman must not involve herself in the domain of the man; not the least interest in his occupation can be approved of."11 In an essay that has become by far the most influential exploration of German ideas about women in the late eighteenth and early 9 Jean Paul Richter, Levana, or the Doctrine of Education, trans. Anne Holt (London, 1913), pp. 223, 232, 224, 228; Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans, and with an intro. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 99. 10 Joachim Heinrich Campe, Vaterlicher Rat fur meine Tochter (Braunschweig, 1789), p. 21, as cited in Ulrich Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht fiir Madchen im 18. Jahrhundert," Wolfenbiitteler Studien zur Aufkldrung 3 (1976): 106. On Campe's influence, see especially Grenz, Mddchenliteratur, p. 47. 11 Johann Philipp Trefurt, Historische Nachrichten iiber die Errichtung der Universitdts-Tochterschule in Gottingen (Hannover, 1806), p. 1; F.H.C. Schwarz, Grundsatze der Tochtererziehung fiir die Gebildeten (Jena, 1836), p. 77.

6

THE GERMAN IDEAL

nineteenth centuries, Karin Hausen argued that the polarization of sex roles in this era was definitely a new phenomenon. "From the end of the eighteenth century," she wrote, "character definitions took the place of status definitions." This was true especially for the educated middle class, where the separation of home and male work was most advanced at this time: "In contrast to previous generations, it was only the woman, and no longer the man, who was defined by the family; and also in contrast to earlier times it was the laws of nature, history, and morality that set the boundaries." For Hausen, there is no doubt that the ideology about the "natural" spheres and characters of the sexes served "to reinforce patriarchal authority" and to impose new restrictions on women.12 Many other scholars have supported Hausen's interpretation. Peter Petschauer, for example, traced the shift in this era from the use of the term Haustnutter, which referred to a woman who managed an extended household that produced goods, to that of the term Hausfrau, which had a connotation similar to "housewife" in modern American usage. Susan Cocalis and Kay Goodman pointed out that "at the end of the eighteenth century, the literature of German Classicism began to codify the images of women . . . into 'universally valid' models for female behavior that have remained normative until this day." Gerda Tornieporth echoed Hausen by saying that "the differentiation of 'masculine' and 'feminine' spheres of work according to productive and reproductive sectors did not exist before industrialization." Barbara Duden argued, "Only the achievement of bourgeois society brought with it an oppression of women that reached even into the psyche." The new ideal of woman as spouse, mother, and housewife, she emphasized, resulted in a "degradation" of women by making them more complaisant in the face of oppression. As Dagmar Grenz said of the effects of this process, "The ideal turned into shackles for the real woman."13 12

Karin Hausen, "Die Polarisierung der 'Geschlechtcharaktere'—Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben," in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 367-93; trans, by Cathleen Catt as "Family and Role-Division: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century—An Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life," in The German Family, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee (London and New York, 1981), pp. 51-83. Citations are to the English version, pp. 57, 61. 13 Peter Petschauer, "From Hausmiitter to Hausfrau: Ideals and Realities in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany," Eighteenth-Century Life 8 (1982): 72-82; Susan Cocalis and Kay Goodman, "The Eternal Feminine Is Leading Us On," in their Beyond the Eternal Feminine (Stuttgart, 1982), p. 10; Gerda Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauen7

ONE

Responding to these and similar statements about the fate of women in nineteenth-century Europe, the French historian Olwen Hufton has lamented how "feminist writing on the nineteenth century has tended to force upon historians of the early modern period one unenviable task, that of locating a bon vieux temps when women enjoyed a harmonious, if hard working, domestic role and social responsibility before they were downgraded into social parasites or factory fodder."14 Students of the history of German women are not unaware of the implications of this observation. Duden, for example, found it necessary to say that her critique of the oppression of women in bourgeois society "in no way glorifies preindustrial conditions." In a similar fashion, Tornieporth admitted that, although generations preceding the polarization of sexual characteristics may have valued women's work in the household more highly, they also witnessed more frequent expressions of contempt for women. The historian of education Ulrich Herrmann has even pointed out that in the writings of the later eighteenth century woman's role as mother underwent a "decisive upward valuation."15 Annette Kuhn has gone the farthest in arguing not only that there was no golden age for women in the period before 1770 but also that Hausen and others have exaggerated the degree of change that occurred in the late eighteenth century. Willing to admit that the ideological foundations for woman's role may have changed, Kuhn found continuity to be more important than discontinuity in this era with regard to both the economic realities of the division of labor and the assumptions about woman's place in the home. In her view, "The sexual stereotypes of the late eighteenth century were only the latest formulation of the previously prescribed roles for women."16 Influenced by this critique of Hausen's views, Ute Frevert has chosen to refrain from attempting to measure the half-known against the unknown in her most recent bildung (Weinheim and Basel, 1977), p. 7; Duden, "Das scheme Eigentum," p. 125; Dagmar Grenz, " 'Das eine sein und das andere auch sein': Uber die Widerspruchlichkeit des Frauenbildes am Beispiel der Madchenliteratur," in Frauen in der Geschkhte, 4: 284. 14 Olwen Hufton, "Women in History: Early Modern Europe," Past and Present 101 (1984): 126. 15 Duden, "Das schone Eigentum," p. 19; Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauenbildung, p. 35; Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht," p. 108. 16 Kuhn, "Das Geschlecht," pp. 41-46, quotation on p. 42. See also Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht," p. 101; and Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die burgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894-1933 (Gottingen, 1981), p. 28. 8

THE GERMAN IDEAL

work, commenting, "As long as we know so much less about relations of the sexes in the 16th, 17th, or 18th centuries than about male-female relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries, the attempt to depict earlier social structures as friendlier to women lacks any scholarly basis."17 There is no disagreement, however, about the rapid growth during the last third of the eighteenth century in the number of treatises devoted to the education of girls and the role of women in German society. To a certain extent, the sharp increase in works on these topics may merely reflect the expansion of the reading public.18 Yet the many reprintings of works such as Campe's Fatherly Advice also suggest a strong demand for guidance on proper behavior from some segments of the German population. Whether such works tended more to describe an existing state of affairs or to prescribe alterations in typical behavior is difficult to determine. Admitting that most such treatises "at the very least do not contradict the accepted model for the sexual division of labor," Hausen remarked that "the polarization of the sexes only coincided with real social phenomena in the educated bourgeoisie."19 Seldom acknowledged by scholars interested in this polarization of sex roles is the almost total absence of tracts by Catholic writers among the works being studied. Whereas the frequent appeals in this literature to nature or history for justification of woman's place in society suggest that for educated Protestants older religious prescriptions were losing their effectiveness, Catholic Germans in this era do not appear to have felt the need to redefine or reinforce their views of women. As will be discussed in Chapter Two, the formal education of Catholic girls in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries underwent fewer significant changes than did that of Protestant girls.20 For the educated Protestant middle class these years did see a rapid growth in the number of "higher girls' schools." The development of schools specifically for girls certainly is an example of the existence of "separate spheres" for the sexes, but for this social group—primarily the families of pastors and civil servants—such separation was not new: earlier generations of middle-class Protestant girls had not attended schools and universities with their brothers. According to Hausen, the new "educational policies had 17

Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte, p. 10. Petschauer, "Hausmutter," p. 73. 19 Hausen, "Family and Role-Division," pp. 51, 68. 20 See pp. 25-26, 35-36. 18

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the effect of widening the gap between the sexes," because "when it was decided that girls too should have a planned education, the judgment on the 'nature' of women had already been fixed." In her view, the schools served to inculcate young girls more thoroughly than had been possible before with beliefs and behavior patterns corresponding to the ideology of separate spheres for men and women. 21 Yet scholars more directly interested in the girls' schools than Hausen have also stressed the positive potential in having a planned education where there had been none before. Only after the need for some form of secondary schooling for girls had been recognized could demands arise that it should become equal to that given their brothers. 22

T H E FEAR OF M I S E D U C A T I O N

Two major themes dominate much of the prescriptive literature about female education published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: a deep fear about the possibility of the miseducation (Verbildung) of girls and a conviction that women required formal preparation for their "natural" calling to be wives, mothers, and housekeepers. The frequency with which these themes recur reveals that male writers in this era did not have complete confidence in the ability of "nature" or "natural law" to steer women toward their proper place in society. Assistance from human institutions was often seen as necessary to ensure the desired result. Much of the confusion surrounding this issue stemmed from the wonderfully ambiguous German word usually used to describe woman's role, her Bestimmung. Given that this word means, among other things, definition, destiny, and vocation, to say that the Bestimmung of woman was to be a spouse, mother, and housewife could imply that this was what she was, what her inevitable fate was, or what she chose to be. Even writers who did not employ the term Bestimmung could become enmeshed in similar ambiguities about determinism and free will. The pedagogue J. L. Ewald, for example, equated a woman's occupation (Beruf) with her essence (Wesen).23 Around the turn of the century, few writers about girls' educa21

Hausen, "Family and Role-Division," p. 71. Joanne Frances Schneider, "An Historical Examination of Women's Education in Bavaria: Madchenschulen and Contemporary Attitudes about Them, 1799-1848" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1977), p. 3; Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", passim. 23 Grenz, Miidchenliteratur, p. 94. 22

10

THE GERMAN IDEAL

tion accepted the sensationalist psychology that would later lead John Stuart Mill to argue that there were no innate mental differences between men and women. J. H. Campe came closest to attributing all such differences to nurture, suggesting to girls that "if you practice masculine physical and mental exercises, . . . you will never reach your Bestimmung."2i Much more common was the belief that improper education would deflect girls from their Bestimmung by cultivating undesirable innate characteristics or by failing to develop necessary ones. The conservatively minded Ernst Brandes, for example, asserted that girls could be "led away" from their destiny. Johann Daniel Hensel, more interested in improving the education available to girls, nonetheless emphasized that "great care is required from childhood on, if a woman is to become what she can become." Writing in 1826, the influential Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher suggested that the problem was to avoid wasteful, rather than harmful, education. "How is female education to be arranged," he asked, "so that on the one hand nothing happens that will be rendered useless by woman's natural Bestimmung, and on the other the female sex will be aided to the degree necessary for the improvement of its position and for its influence on the future generation?"25 In this era two types of miseducated women appeared frequently in the literature on girls' education: the scholar or "bluestocking" (gelehrtes Frauenzimmer) and the cultivated woman of the salon (Salondame). Both types were considered to be undesirable as wives because they were likely to neglect their children and home for other interests. In reality, however, neither type appears to have been common enough to have aroused such general hostility. In the middle of the eighteenth century, some intellectual circles in Germany had developed a limited cult of women scholars and poets, but only a handful of either obtained renown. When Kant attacked educated women in 1764, he mentioned two French examples, the classicist Anne Dacier and the popularizer of Newtonian ideas, the Marquise du Chatelet, rather than any of his Ger24 Ferdinand Strassburger, Die Mddchenerziehung in der Geschichte der Padagogik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich una Deutschland (Strassburg, 1911), p. 140; Nolte, "Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung," p. 38. See also Johann Daniel Hensel, System der weiblichen Erziehung (Halle, 1787), p. viii, for another suggestion of mutability through education. 25 Ernst Brandes, Betrachtungen itber das weibliche Geschlecht und dessen Ausbildung, 3 vols. (Hannover, 1802), 1: xxxii; Hensel, System, p. 153; Schleiermacher cited in Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", pp. 81-82.

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man contemporaries.26 At the end of the century, women who ran or participated in salons became more prominent in Berlin and some other cities,27 but neither their number nor their potential to be models for others appears to have constituted a serious threat to the Bestimmung of most German women. Yet these were the warning examples held up by men afraid that women might abandon their "natural" place. Kant suggested that scholarly women might as well have beards, which would be true reflections of the serious countenances they wanted. Fichte admitted that women could learn a great deal, but he also insisted that because their nature led them to treat learning as an end in itself rather than as a means to serve society, most ended up being pedants. According to the educator Friedrich Wilhelm Niethammer, some girls had been taught to "analyze, theorize, reason, criticize, demonstrate, lecture—all of which suits them extremely badly, is done poorly by them, and miseducates them." J. H. Campe as well attacked "book learning" in women.28 Campe also criticized sharply what he saw as an "epidemic" of women writers, a more prominent phenomenon in his age than scholarly women. His Philanthropist colleague Johann Bernhard Basedow shared this negative view of female writers, as did Fichte, who judged that women should restrict themselves to producing works about the education and morality of their own sex.29 Linked to this assault on women writers were frequent complaints about the "mania for reading" women had recently adopted. Campe thought this led to "enthusiasm," neglect of children, and bad nerves from too much sitting. For Arndt, "nothing demoralized young women more than too much reading."30 26

Grenz, Madchenliteratur, p. 7; Nolte, "Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung," pp. 15-20; Kant, Schriften, 2: 229-30. Still interesting on the Gelehrtes Frauenzimmer is vol. 1 of Adalbert von Hanstein, Die Frauen in der Geschichte des deutschen Geistesleben des 18. und 19. jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1899-1900). 27 On the women in Berlin salons, see Deborah Hertz, "Salonieres and Literary Women in Late Eighteenth-Century Berlin," New German Critique 14 (1978): 97-108; idem, "Intermarriage in Berlin Salons," Central European History 16 (1983): 303-46. 28 Kant, Schriften, 2: 230; Fichte, Grundlage, p. 134; Niethammer as cited in Johann W. H. Ziegenbein, Schulschriften uber Gegenstande aus dem Gebiete der weiblichen Erziehung und Bildung (Blankenburg, 1809), p. 40; Grenz, Madchenliteratur, pp. 52-53. 29 Nolte, "Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung," pp. 45, 35; Fichte, Grundlagen, p. 134. 30 On the general concern with too much reading, Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht," p. HO; Campe cited in Grenz, Madchenliteratur, p. 54; Arndt discussed in Schneider, "Women's Education in Bavaria," pp. 100-101. 12

THE GERMAN IDEAL

The extent of this concern about the possible creation of more scholarly women can be seen in many public statements issued by men who founded or operated girls' schools in this era. Johann Heinrich Meier, who ran such an institution in Lubeck for over twenty years, testified in 1826 that he wanted it to be "guilty as little of the miseducation of its pupils as of their overeducation." J.CA. Heyse, in an advertisement for the school he opened in Nordhausen in 1808, argued that women could be educated "without meriting the repugnant name of a scholar," but he assured parents that his institution would not encourage "a dangerous passion for reading." In the town of Minden, a pastor named Baden who tried to found a girls' school in 1805 indicated that he opposed "that broad smattering of knowledge so insufferable in the second sex, which destroys delicate femininity." In proposing to establish a municipal higher girls' school in 1819, the Munich school commission stated, "It is not supposed to be a female academy for educating scholarly women." August Spilleke, who in 1823 took over leadership of what would become the Royal Elisabeth School in Berlin, insisted that "scholarship is the business and calling of men" and would play no role in his girls' school.31 The critique of the Salondame often took the form of attacks on education that emphasized the artistic "accomplishments" expected of women in society rather than the practical concerns of the wife and mother. Jean Paul, for example, warned against praising girls for their musical talents and other skills that might attract a husband and suggested, "Only an understanding of the general regulation of a house . . . should be spoken of as valuable for the future groundwork of the marriage tie." Johann Daniel Hensel lamented how the interest in teaching girls French, music, and dancing had spread from the aristocracy to the middle classes even in smaller towns. Pastor Baden of Minden opposed "the culture of taste" as much as excessive book learning and promised that this also would not be an aim of his proposed school. Johann Trefurt in Gottingen informed parents of prospective pupils that his insti31

Johann Heinrich Meier, Uber weibliche Bildung durch offentliche Anstalten (Lubeck, 1826), p. 3; J.C.A. Heyse, Gesammelte Schriften und Reden uber Unterricht und Bildung besonders der weiblichen Jugend, 2 vols. (Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 18261829), 1: 150; Katharina Krickau, Die Geschichte des Mindener Oberlyzeums, 1826-1926 (Minden, 1926), p. 5; Gottfried Dostler, 1822-1922: Hundert Jahre Hohere Madchenschule (Munich, 1922), p. 9; Friedrich Bachmann, Geschichte der Koniglkhen Elisabethschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1897), p. 35. 13

ONE

tution would pursue cultivation of "the understanding and the heart" rather than of "taste."32 The main culprits in propagating the ideal of the Salondame, according to such critics of existing educational practice, were boarding schools, or Pensionaten, to which girls went for a few years in their teens. The number of these institutions around 1800 is impossible to determine, but they must have been numerous enough to have attracted so much disapproval. In the 1780s and 1790s, many writers complained how Pensionaten devoted too much attention to instruction in French and would often turn a "good German maiden" into "the most vacuous French fool." Jean Paul questioned the educational value of boarding institutions, noting that "girls connected with other girls of a similar age, as in schools, provoke one another to an exchange of foibles rather than of excellences, to love of dress, admiration, and gossip."33 After the mid-1790s, some works concerned with the possible miseducation of girls also included explicit rejections of the demands for women's rights made by Olympe de Gouges during the French Revolution or in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel. Without mentioning any names, Fichte dismissed the demands of the "protectors of women" for new opportunities in secondary and higher education. Brandes insisted he had learned nothing from Hippel and Wollstonecraft, and argued that the triumph of their principles would mean the deflection of women from their Bestimmung. For the theologian Schwarz, "any emancipation that is contrary to nature" was likely to lead only to "a worse oppression."34 EDUCATING GIRLS FOR THEIR

Bestimmung

Individuals who shared a common conception of woman's natural Bestimmung could, nevertheless, disagree about the best means of preparing girls for it. Rousseau's influence here was ambiguous: on the one hand, he stressed the need for close direction of the 32 Richter, Levana, p. 240; Hensel, System, pp. 19-20; Krickau, Geschichte des Mindener Oberlyzeums, p. 5; Trefurt, Historische Nachnchten, p. 28. 33 Konrad Friedrich Uden, cited in Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht," pp. 110-11; Richter, Levana, p. 243. See also Grenz, Madchenhteratur, pp. 145-52, for discussion of an anti-Pensionat novel, Friderike Helene Unger's Julchen Grunthal (1784), which spurred a number of imitators. 34 Fichte, Grundlagen, pp. 133-34; Brandes, Betrachtungen, 1: xxxii; Schwarz, Grundsatze, p. xvii.

14

THE GERMAN IDEAL

practical education of girls; on the other hand, his general hostility to schools led him to claim that girls were better off than boys because they usually were educated at home.35 Kant followed Rousseau in both areas, insisting on the need for practical training for girls but also stating, "Until we shall have studied feminine nature better, it is best to leave the education of daughters to their mothers, and to let them off from books." "Dare to know!" may have been Kant's definition of the Enlightenment, but he did not apply it to girls' education.36 Jean Paul viewed day schools as "somewhat better than girls' boarding schools" but preferred that daughters be raised at home by their mothers. In the Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Fichte advocated coeducational elementary education, but neither there nor in his examination of natural law did he mention any further formal schooling for girls. Schleiermacher could accept girls' attendance at schools only if this did "no harm to the cultivation of the sentiments in the family." Of greatest importance for the future, Wilhelm von Humboldt made no reference to any formal education for girls beyond the elementary level in the elaborate plans for Prussian school reform that he drew up in the early 1800s, and he did nothing to create girls' secondary schools during his brief but crucial tenure as the head of the educational administration of that state in 1809-1810.37 Humboldt thus appears to have applied his ideal of Bildung only to boys: they should be educated to "humanity," girls only to "femininity." In this regard, Humboldt shared the attitude of most of his contemporaries. For those who did advocate formal schooling for middle-class girls, there was little question that such education should take place in single-sex institutions. The one exception, in this as in so many areas having to do with women, was Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel. In his treatise On Improving the Status of Women, Hippel argued that until at least age sixteen boys and girls could attend the same schools and take the same courses, "except with regard 35 See the relevant excerpts from Emile in Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif., 1983), 1: 42-49. 36 Immanuel Kant, The Educational Theory oflmmanuel Kant, trans, and ed. Edward Franklin Buchner (Philadelphia and London, 1908), p. 226. 37 Richter, Levana, pp. 244, 227; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. George Armstrong Kelly (New York, 1968), p. 154; Schleiermacher cited in Monika Simmel, Erziehung zum Weibe: Madchenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York, 1980), p. 61; Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", p. 88.

15

ONE

to those duties to which each is called by its very nature. During this period such duties would necessarily be taught by persons of the same sex, whereas all else, as far as the circumstances allowed or required, could be taught by persons of either sex without regard for this difference."38 It is interesting to note that even the most radical advocate of changing women's position in German society at this time still accepted notions of the sexes having innate natures and resulting duties. Most writers concerned with female education viewed singlesex institutions as necessary not only because girls and boys should be taught different subjects but also because girls required a different atmosphere for their education. Girls' schools, they thought, should recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the home, something not aimed at by the boys' schools. One illustration of this distinction is the frequent use of the term Tochterschule (daughters' school) instead of Madchenschule (girls' school), thus implying a link to the family that was not made for boys. The classical secondary schools were known as Knabenschulen (boys' schools), never as Sohneschulen (sons' schools).39 Among advocates of educating girls specifically for their Bestimtnung, the most influential were the Philanthropists, led by Campe and Basedow. In comparison with Rousseau, they placed less emphasis on raising women to be pleasing to their husbands, more on preparing them to be housewives and mothers. As will be discussed in the next chapter, schools founded by their followers paid little attention to foreign languages and accomplishments, emphasizing instead domestic skills, German, and practical arithmetic. Among the Philanthropists, Basedow appears to have been alone in arguing that all girls should be educated well enough that they could become governesses or teachers if they did not marry.40 Karoline Rudolphi and Betty Gleim, the women who wrote the most influential works on girls' schooling in this era, shared in the belief that girls should have educational institutions designed specifically for their needs, but they disagreed sharply on the form such schools should take. Rudolphi, born in 1754 in Potsdam, worked for a number of years as a governess before being encour38 Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Improving the Status of Women, trans, and ed. Timothy F. Sellner (Detroit, 1979), p. 131. 39 Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", p. 103. 40 Ibid., p. 28; Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauenbildung, p. 58; Strassburger, MSdchenerziehung, pp. 137, 131-32. Trefurt spoke of educating girls for their "probable future" Besttmmung: Historische Nachrichten, p. 114.

16

THE GERMAN IDEAL

aged to open a girls' school near Hamburg in 1787. Sixteen years later, she moved her school to Heidelberg, in part because she wanted to keep it small enough to have a true family atmosphere.41 While located in Heidelberg, Rudolphi published her twovolume Pictures of Feminine Education, a work so full of gushing sentimentality as to be almost unreadable today.42 This work emphasized education of girls by their mothers at home, despite Rudolphi's own career as proprietor of two girls' schools. She viewed self-will and boredom as the two greatest dangers for little girls and recommended fighting the latter by having them start knitting and sewing at age five. She stated that obedience "must very early become second nature for girls, whose entire life should be one of obedience not only to the laws of the just and the true, but also to those of the beautiful and the proper." In addition, Rudolphi argued that "the domineering male temperament must not come out in a girl, even if she has a predisposition to it. Her character should form itself to a prudent submissiveness." Rudolphi even believed that men did a better job of teaching academic subjects to girls.43 Betty Gleim's views differed in many respects from those of Rudolphi. Born in 1781 in Bremen, Gleim opened a girls' school in her hometown in 1806. She met Rudolphi and read her work a few years later, but was not impressed. For Gleim, the older woman's educational ideas and practice suffered from a lack of system and from "sentimental extravagance," both of which posed dangers to the healthy development of girls. Her negative reaction to Rudolphi's work inspired Gleim to write her own treatise, Education and Cultivation of the Female Sex (1810).44 More than any other writer of her age, Gleim insisted that the ideal of Bildung should apply to girls as well as boys. "Bildung," she wrote, "is the stimulation, development, and cultivation of all human powers into a harmonious accord." AU girls should be educated "as human beings, as 41 See the autobiographical sketch in Karoline Rudolphi, Schriftlicher Nachlass (Heidelberg, 1835), esp. pp. 47-51. 42 Karoline Rudolphi, Gemalde weiblicher Erziehung, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1857). The first edition appeared in 1807. Blochmann agrees that it is virtually unreadable: "Frauenzimmer", p. 70. 43 Rudolphi, Gemalde, 1: 24-25, 71, 49, and 2: 46-47. 44 August Kippenberg, Betty Gleim (Bremen, 1882), pp. 23-26; Josefine Zimmermann, Betty Gleim una ihre Bedeutungfiir die Geschkhte der Mddchenbildung (Cologne, 1926), p. 26. I never obtained a copy of Gleim's Erziehung und Bildung des weiblichen Geschlechts (Leipzig, 1810) and have relied on the biographies by Kippenberg and Zimmermann for discussion of it and of Gleim's other writings.

17

ONE

women, and as citizens of the world," and, at least for those who could afford it, such education should continue until age eighteen. Gleim also appealed for the creation of institutions for training women to become teachers, both because she believed that "for many reasons, women are instructed and educated best by women" and because she considered teaching a field that could provide greater employment opportunities for women.45 Although ahead of her time in a number of ways, Gleim also shared many of the beliefs of educators with less radical views of female education. For example, she criticized boarding schools for taking girls out of the home and once commented that "all reading in excess is harmful." The gelehrtes Frauenzimmer was not her ideal: "Truly pernicious, and in its effects extremely destructive," she advised, "is that intellectual education which does not go hand in hand with the aesthetic, moral, and religious." Girls' schools should develop the "special qualities of women's nature," among which she included sensitivity of feelings, modesty, and charm. Although interested in expanding job opportunities in teaching, nursing, and the arts, Gleim rejected careers for women as physicians, lawyers, or preachers because such public functions were inappropriate for them.46 Gleim differed from many of her contemporaries in advocating that girls should be introduced to aspects of the culture of classical antiquity. Yet she recommended against teaching Greek mythology because it contained too many references to procreation to be acceptable subject matter for girls. She also considered learning Latin and Greek to be neither feasible nor suitable for women.47 This latter view was shared by most other educators in the early nineteenth century. So obvious did it seem that girls should not study the ancient languages that few people even found it necessary to justify this opinion. The general sentiment appears to have been not that girls were unable to learn Latin and Greek but that these languages would be useless to them in their activities as wives, mothers, and housekeepers. This stress on utility for everyday life conflicted with the usual justifications for having boys learn the ancient languages: the introduction to Western culture they offered and the mental discipline their grammar could de45

Kippenberg, Betty Gleim, pp. 33, 45, 63-64, 51. Ibid., pp. 92-95, 71, 40, 49; Zimmermann, Betty Gleim, pp. 82-83, 46, 51. 47 Renate Mohrmann, "The Reading Habits of Women in the Vormarz," in German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Fout (New York, 1984), p. 109; Zimmermann, Betty Gleim, p. 78. 46

18

THE GERMAN IDEAL

velop. The theologian F.H.C. Schwarz was one of the very few who attempted to say why girls should or could not reap these benefits. In his view, the logical powers cultivated by learning Latin were "not exactly feminine ones"; girls' minds "could be better exercised by German grammar."48 Gleim also emphasized more strongly than many of her contemporaries the important role that German language and literature should play in the education of girls.49 More common was the view that learning French could supply for girls some of the logical discipline boys were supposed to derive from Latin. Many educators, however, merely accepted that women in the upper classes needed to know conversational French to function in society, especially during the period of Napoleon's domination of the German states. There were exceptions: Jean Paul regretted that French had triumphed so completely over other languages in girls' education, and Campe suggested that girls should not waste time on any foreign language.50 That religion should be, as August Spilleke put it, "the supreme source of all female education" was assumed by almost all writers on this subject, but few of the prominent ones devoted a great deal of attention to the specifics of how religious instruction for girls should differ from that for boys.51 Explicit distinctions between the sexes appeared more often in discussions of the appropriate history curriculum for girls. Kant, for example, insisted that military history had no place in girls' education. Rudolphi believed that girls should learn only the "sunny side" of history, and Jean Paul suggested that the curriculum should be "rich in great men and great events." Johann Ziegenbein recommended in his list of what "appealed most to girls" biographies of "truly noble men, women, and mothers."52 Underlying these suggestions of a special history curriculum appears to have been a belief that girls could develop their moral sensitivity only though exposure to positive models, not by negative examples or rational deduction. Jean Paul insisted 48 Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte, p. 38; Hensel, System, p. 188; Schwarz, Grundsatze, p. 152. 49 Kippenberg, Betty Gleim, p. 58. 50 Meier, Uber weibliche Bildung, p. 36; Heyse, Schriften, 1: 140; Schwarz, Grundsatze, p. 151; Richter, Levana, p. 258; Nolte, "Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung," p. 51. 51 Bachmann, Geschichte der Koniglwhen Elisabethschule, p. 35. See also Brandes, Betrachtungen, 2: 395. 52 Schwarz, Grundsiitze, pp. 150-51; Kant, Schriften, 2: 230; Rudolphi, Gemalde, 1: 221; Richter, Levana, p. 257; Ziegenbein, Schulschriften, p. 81.

19

ONE

that girls should "never hear, much less see, what is rude, immoral, or violent." Gottlieb Anton Gruner, a teacher at the wellknown Model School (Musterschule) in Frankfurt, justified the need for separate classes for girls by saying, "For boys, consciousness of duty should be inculcated forcefully through the understanding more as a categorical imperative, for girls it will be dripped into the soul with soft words through the path of the feelings."53 Clear differences also existed between the curricula in mathematics and natural sciences offered to boys and the aspects of these subjects that educators considered appropriate for girls. Mathematics, in fact, is not the proper term for the practical arithmetic, including mental calculations that would be useful in running a household, that writers such as Heyse and Meier argued was all that girls needed to learn. In contrast to Kant, who asserted that girls should not learn geometry, both Jean Paul and F.H.C. Schwarz argued that at least some familiarity with this branch of knowledge was desirable. The latter cautioned, however, that anything more advanced than geometry would not "be useful for feminine thinking."54 In Bavaria, an official decree of 1804 "stipulated that women should not study any sciences." Few pedagogical writers went quite this far, but neither did many advocate anything more for girls than the most superficial instruction in the sciences. Kant was certain that women should not attempt to study Newtonian physics, even in a popularized version. Ziegenbein stated that his school would restrict instruction in science to that which would aid "the proper understanding and judgment of everyday natural events and the suppression of superstition." Sharing Rousseau's belief that women had much stronger powers of observation than of reason, Jean Paul recommended science instruction that would develop this capacity: "Consequently, botany—this inexhaustible, tranquil, ever-interesting science attaching the mind to nature with bonds of flowers. Then astronomy, not the properly mathematical, but the Lichtenbergian and religious."55 53

Richter, Levana, p. 242; Gruner cited in Petra Meyer, "Madchenbildung in Frankfurt am Main zwischen 1816 und 1848" (inaugural diss., University of Frankfurt, 1979), p. 54. 54 Meier, Uber weibliche Bildung, p. 24; Heyse, Schriften, 1: 141-42; Kant, Schriften, 2: 230; Richter, Levana, p. 256; Schwarz, Grundsatze, p. 150. 55 Schneider, "Women's Education in Bavaria," p. 33; Kant, Schriften, 2: 230; Ziegenbein, Schulschriften, p. 83; Richter, Levana, p. 255. Jean Paul was referring here 20

THE GERMAN IDEAL

In comparison to the views expressed by opponents of new educational opportunities for women at the end of the nineteenth century, the works written around 1800 much less frequently contain assertions that women by nature were incapable of learning what men did. More often the argument was that their Bestimmung meant that they should not, rather than could not, master certain subjects. Even the traditionalist Ernst Brandes could say that women would "very seldom" find "much from the realm of scholarship to be truly interesting or useful"; he did not claim that they would seldom find scholarship to be comprehensible.56 Brandes also reflected a common attitude in his insistence that "the entire education of women must be inclined toward the practical, always with an eye to the fulfillment of their important duties as spouse, mother, and housewife." The Philanthropists were the most vigorous advocates of treating instruction in domestic skills as of greater importance than any academic subject for girls from the middle classes. Ziegenbein, for example, recommended that "daughters should work more than reason, use the hand more than the head." Even in the statutes of an institution for training governesses, which opened in Berlin in 1811, one can find the statement: "All instruction must be assessed only by its usefulness for a woman's occupation."57 A distinction must be made between the instruction in spinning and weaving aimed at training children from the lower classes for possible employment and that in finer handiwork designed to prepare middle- or upper-class girls for their household tasks. As !Caroline Rudolphi noted, such instruction in knitting and sewing could serve as an important form of discipline, which would habituate girls to avoiding idleness, paying attention to detail, and sitting still. Even after the middle of the century, Rosalie Schallenfeld, the person most responsible for introducing more systematic instruction in sewing to the girls' schools, could ask how a woman could develop "a taste for the quiet, domestic life" with its attention to small details if this was not "awakened and nourished early" in her life through instruction in needlework.58 to the writings of the German philosophe and professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799). 56 Brandes, Betrachtungen, 2: 417. 57 Ibid., 2: 399; Ziegenbein, Schulschriften, p. 90; statutes of the Luisenstiftung as cited in Blochmann, "Frauenztmmer", p. 116. See Chapter Three for a discussion of this institution. 58 Dagmar Ladj-Teichmann, Erziehung zur Weiblkhkeit durch Textilarbeiten: Ein Bei21

ONE

what aspects of this ideal of womanhood and its consequences for girls' education were unique to Germany in the early nineteenth century is extremely difficult. The notions of women's Bestimmung advanced by German Protestant thinkers certainly did not differ substantially from those expressed by British writers in the same era.59 In France, conservatives of the romantic era such as Joseph de Maistre, who disagreed totally with Rousseau on the role of religion and the Catholic church in female education, could nonetheless find common ground with the author of Emile in rejecting public schools for girls who were destined for "a life of retreat and shall be solely concerned with familial needs."60 Greater differences existed between the ideology of woman's place in Germany and that in Russia, where the virtual absence of an urban middle class in the early nineteenth century meant that the ideal of womanhood continued to be that of the nobility and gentry.61 Where some German peculiarities do become more discernible is in the schools created to educate girls to their Bestimmung and in the teachers who worked in these institutions. It is to the emergence of these higher schools in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century that we now turn. DETERMINING

trag zur Sozialgeschichte der Frauenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Weinheim and Basel, 1983), pp. 85-116, 204-205, and passim. To my knowledge, this interesting work has not been reviewed in any American journal. 59 See especially Joan Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London, 1980), pp. 30-47. 60 Maistre cited in Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984), p. 6. See also the discussion of French notions of education for "religious motherhood" in Fra^oise Mayeur, L^ducation des filles en France au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1979), pp. 46-49. 61 For discussion of the education of the daughters of the Russian gentry, see especially Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1983).

22

TWO

The Rise of the Higher Girls' Schools THE YEARS between 1800 and 1870 witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the opportunities for German girls to obtain some form of education beyond the elementary level. Not only did the number of schools providing such education grow exponentially, but almost all of these schools gradually increased the number of separate classes they offered and introduced more academic subjects while reducing the time devoted to sewing and "accomplishments." The teaching staffs, in general, improved in quality, at least as measured by the formal training the teachers had received. In the process, the financial support for girls' schools from governmental coffers, primarily those of cities but in some cases those of states as well, grew substantially. These schools did little or nothing to train their pupils for jobs, so their proliferation cannot be explained by the demands of the German economy. What this expansion did reflect was a changing view of the proper education and upbringing for the daughters of Germany's expanding middle classes. By the end of this period, British observers could comment that "German girls . . . have advantages at school such as we in England should accept in an ecstasy of gratitude" and that "the schools for girls are so excellent, and the instruction is so thorough, that a servant-maid in Germany is better grounded than most young ladies in England." 1 Yet, as of 1870, the situation of the so-called higher girls' schools still revealed in many ways the low valuation attached to female education in German society. In every state, what little supervision these schools did receive came from state officials who oversaw elementary education, not those in charge of boys' secondary schools. No state had issued a mandatory—or even a recommended—curriculum for its girls' schools. Nor did these institutions even come close to preparing their pu1

"Female Education in Germany," Cornhill Magazine 15 (1867): 365; Sabine Baring-Gould, Germany, Past and Present (London, 1879), p. 172. 23

TWO

pils for university education: not only did they stop at age fifteen or sixteen, compared to eighteen or nineteen for the boys' Gymnasium, but they did not offer the Latin, Greek, mathematics, and sciences taught to boys. Graduates had only one means to continue their formal education: attendance at a teachers' seminar, or normal school, for two or three years, after which they could teach in elementary or higher girls' schools, though usually only in the lower grades of the latter. 2 This chapter will explore the proliferation of and improvements in the higher girls' schools, as well as the continuing limits on the education and further opportunities they provided. T H E E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y BACKGROUND

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the German states possessed a few girls' schools that aimed at providing an education beyond the elementary level, especially for daughters of the urban upper classes. Yet none of these institutions could make a claim to being a secondary school according to later standards, and none offered a curriculum equivalent to that of the contemporary Latin schools for boys. In most cases, in fact, it is difficult to distinguish between a Madchenschule and a hohere Madchenschule in this period. The oldest girls' schools with continuous or nearly continuous histories were those founded by various orders of Catholic nuns in the 1600s. Most prominent among these orders were the socalled English Sisters, founded by the expatriot English woman Maria Ward, and the Ursulines. The former group concentrated its activities in Bavaria and devoted its energies to both elementary education for the poor and boarding schools for wealthier girls. Before 1750, the English Sisters established "daughters' institutes" in towns such as Munich, Burghausen, Bamberg, Altotting, Mindelheim, and Frankfurt. The Ursulines were active primarily in the Rhineland and Bavaria, although as early as 1689 they also founded a girls' school in Breslau. This school, and similar ones in Cologne and Duren, survived all the political changes of the next two centuries, only to be closed in the 1870s when Bismarck, as part of his Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, expelled all teaching orders from Prussia. 3 2

See Chapter Three for a discussion of the emergence of seminars for women teachers during the nineteenth century. 3 Marie Theodolinde Winkler, "Maria Ward und das Institut der englischen Frau24

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

What distinguished "higher" or secondary education from elementary in the Catholic girls' schools of this period appears to have been little more than the teaching of French. In Duren, for example, the Ursuline school developed separate German and French sections during the eighteenth century, which appear to have catered to different clientele. In institutes run by the English Sisters, French conversation became the most important subject, and French was often the language of instruction.4 The honor of being the first Protestant higher girls' school is usually accorded to the "Gynaeceum" founded in 1698 by the Pietist August Hermann Francke as a part of his large educational establishment in Halle. Influenced by F^nelon, whose work on the education of girls he translated into German, Francke focused on providing a moral and practical upbringing to future wives and mothers. Girls in the Gynaeceum had a curriculum different from that in Francke's orphanage school, including French and other accomplishments more appropriate for upper-class women. The first incarnation of this school lasted only until 1704; a revised version opened in 1707 but closed for good by the early 1730s.5 Pietists created another girls' school in the first years of the eighteenth century, the Magdalenenstift in Altenburg, which survived into the late nineteenth century as a boarding school for noble girls.6 Of greater influence, though, was a school founded by Francke's disciple Johann Julius Hecker in Berlin in 1747. This institution, which eventually developed into the Royal Elisabeth School, originally was an adjunct to the Royal Realschule—later the Kaiser Wilhelm Realgymnasium—headed by Hecker, and it lein in Bayern, 1626-1810" (inaugural diss., University of Munich, 1926), pp. 2251; Joseph Kuckhoff, "Das Madchenschulwesen in den Landern am Rhein im 17. und 18. Jahrhunderte," Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Erziehung und des Unterrichts 22 (1932): 1-35; Barbara Weber, "Die Geschichte der Kolner Ursulinenschule von 16391875" (inaugural diss., University of Cologne, 1930); Erwin Gatz and Peter Dauven, "Bildungseinrichtungen fur das weibliche Jugend in Duren, 1681-1944," Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins 82 (1972): 13-17; Rudolf Dieck, Die Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen (Breslau, 1892), pp. 2-4. See Chapter Four for a discussion of the effects of the Kulturkampf on girls' education. 4 Gatz and Dauven, "Bildungseinrichtungen in Duren," p. 17; Winkler, "Maria Ward," pp. 53, 82-83. 5 Ferdinand Strassburger, Die Mddchenerziehung in der Geschichte der Padagogik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich und Deutschland (Strassburg, 1911), pp. 104-14; Ulrich Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht fur Madchen im 18. Jahrhundert," Wolfenbiitteler Studien zur Aufklarung 3 (1976): 103-104. 6 Strassburger, Madchenerziehung, p. 114; Ludwig Wiese, Lebenserinnerungen und Amtserfahrungen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1886), 1: 251-53. 25

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appears to have led a rather precarious existence until the 1820s. Prominent among the early pupils were daughters of workers at the royal porcelain works and those of members of the choir at Berlin's Trinity Church. Its historian indicates that, although the school offered French from at least the 1780s, only in a curriculum introduced in 1812 was there "a certain effort to go beyond the purely elementary."7 Twenty years after its creation, Hecker's school served as a model for the Maidens' School (Jungfernschule) established in Breslau in 1767. During its first fifty-two years, the Maidens' School divided its pupils into just two classes, and boys were admitted to the lower class until 1816. As at the future Elisabeth School in Berlin, this institution developed into a more recognizable secondary school only after 1820.8 A third stimulus to the creation of girls' schools, in addition to those supplied by Catholic teaching orders and Pietists, came from the Philanthropists. Although their stress on practical training of girls for women's Bestimtnung limited the scope of the education they envisioned, their belief that girls did need formal schooling for this future occupation led the Philanthropists to support creation of girls' schools. In 1786, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann opened a school for girls as an adjunct to his Philanthropin for boys at Schnepfenthal. The girls' section moved to Gotha in 1790 but closed a few years later. Other Philanthropinnen for girls opened in Colmar, Muhlhausen, Darmstadt, Frankenthal, Dessau, and Frankfurt, with the last named being created by the Jewish community. Perhaps the most famous girls' school based on Philanthropist ideas was the Industrie-Tochterschule founded in 1795 at Blankenburg im Harz by Johann Ziegenbein. An unusual feature of this institution was the effort made there to mix girls from different social classes.9 7

Friedrich Bachmann, Geschichte der Koniglichen Elisabethschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1897), pp. 3-4, 15, 22, 26, 30. This school was located at the corner of Kochstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, a spot that today is just on the American side of Checkpoint Charlie. 8 Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, pp. 4-22. 9 Strassburger, Madchenerziehung, pp. 137-39; Elisabeth Blochmann, Das "Frauenzimmer" una die "Gelehrsamkeit": Eine Studie uber die Anfange des Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1966), pp. 89-91; H. Baerwald. Geschichte der Realschule der israelitischen Gemetnde (Philanthropin) zu Frankfurt am Main, 1804-1904 (Frankfurt am Main, 1904), pp. 31-33; Julie Sander, "Zur Geschichte der Industrie-Tochterschule zu Blankenburg im Harz (1795-1839)," Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch 55 (1974): 175-205. See also Johann W. H. Ziegenbein, Schulschriften Uber Gegenstande aus dem Gebiete der weiblichen Erziehung und Bildung (Blankenburg, 1809).

26

HIGHER GIRLS'

SCHOOLS

The Philanthropinnen were products of the last years of the eighteenth century or, in the case of Frankfurt, of the beginning of the nineteenth and thus mark the end of this brief prehistory of girls' secondary education in Germany. The schools in Frankenthal, Dessau, and Blankenburg also represented an important new departure: support of female education by ruling princes. MONARCHICAL MADCHENSCHULEN

One of the most striking features in the flowering of girls' education in Germany around 1800 is the role played by some of the ruling families of the various states. The schools they sponsored or supported were not typical of those founded in this period, because they served for the most part the daughters of nobles and court officials. The rulers often spent only modest amounts of money on these schools, merely giving them royal or ducal protection and small subsidies. Yet even this level of support helped to raise the general prestige of secondary education for girls, and the curricula of these schools also provided models for others to imitate. The first monarchical foundation proved to be the shortest lived. In 1771 Karl Eugen of Wurttemberg, one of the most extravagant of eighteenth-century German rulers, opened an Ecole des demoiselles in his capital of Ludwigsburg. It closed after only one year, but reopened in 1774 and moved to Wurttemberg's other capital of Stuttgart the next year. The Ecole des demoiselles did not even last until the end of Karl Eugen's reign, however: its doors shut for good in 1787.10 The Philanthropin for girls founded at Frankenthal in 1782 by Karl Theodor of the Palatinate did not survive much longer. This school, headed by a Swiss woman, brought together daughters of the nobility and the urban elite, but it was dissolved in 1799 by the new ruler, Max Joseph, and his reforming minister, Montgelas. In 1818, however, after Montgelas had left office and control of education in Bavaria was turned over to the cities, the Philanthropin reopened as the Queen Caroline School, officially a private institution but with some subsidies from both the city and the state.11 The Antoinette School in Dessau enjoyed a longer history. Established in 1786 by Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt in 10 Emil Heintzeler, Das Konigin-Katharina-Stift in Stuttgart: Seine Geschichte von 1818 bis 1918 (Stuttgart, 1918), p. 2. 11 Anna Maus, Von Philnnthropin zur Madchenoberschule, 1782-1957: Die Geschichte der Karolinenschule zu Frankenthal/Pfalz (Trautheim, 1958).

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response to proposals made by the Philanthropist Johann Bernhard Basedow, the Antoinette School began with 163 girls between ages five and fourteen distributed among five separate classes. The stress on practical training can be seen in the fact that in 1793 only four girls were taking an optional course in French. Not until 1852 did a foreign language become mandatory; in 1869 the school would divide into a "higher" and a "middle" girls' school.12 In Hannover, the impetus for founding a girls' school came from preachers at the court of the absent monarch, George III of England. This Hoftochterschule, intended for daughters of royal officials, opened in 1790. It had four classes of two years each and aimed to keep pupils in school only to age fourteen. The early directors were all court preachers. The Hoftochterschule grew to about 150 pupils in the 1840s, but a decline in enrollment led to its takeover and transformation into a municipal higher girls' school in 1853.13 After closing the convent schools in Bavaria, Max Joseph and Montgelas created two different royal girls' schools. In accord with their general policy, they designed these schools for girls of all religions, not just Catholics, although both would imitate the convent schools in having women as directors. The Max Joseph Institute, which opened in Munich in 1813, was intended specifically for girls of the aristocracy, although there were some scholarships for daughters of deceased soldiers or impoverished nobles. Enrollment was limited at first to sixty girls, later ninety, who did not enter until after several years of elementary schooling. Until the 1860s all classes except for German language and literature were conducted in French, an indication of the type of education considered appropriate for this clientele.14 The second Bavarian girls' school with royal patronage, at Nymphenburg outside of Munich, replaced a convent school closed down in 1816. Opening the next year, this school aimed to attract 12

Johannes Wutschke, Zur Geschichte der Antoinettenschule bzw. des Antoinettenlyzeums zu Dessau (Dessau, 1936), pp. 5-7. 13 Leon Wespy, Festschrift der Hoheren Tochterschule I zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens unter stadtischen Patronate (Hannover, 1903), pp. 4-54. 14 Winkler, "Maria Ward," pp. 146-69; Joanne Frances Schneider, "An Historical Examination of Women's Education in Bavaria: Madchenschulen and Contemporary Attitudes about Them, 1799-1848" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1977), pp. 39-43; Josef Heigenmooser, Ueberblick der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Bayern bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1905), p. 42. Schneider points out that having seven daughters may well have stimulated Max Joseph's concern with female education. 28

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

girls from the urban middle classes and stressed German rather than French. King Ludwig I, who did not share his father's anticlericalism, allowed teaching orders to return to Bavaria after 1825, and he turned over the Nymphenburg school to the English Sisters in 1836.15 In neighboring Wurttemberg, a replacement for the defunct Ecole des Demoiselles did not appear until 1818, when Queen Katharine provided the stimulus for the creation of a school similar to the Smolno Institute in her native Russia, which had been established in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great. By combining two existing private schools, the Katharinenstift opened with 203 pupils in seven separate classes. An eighth class for girls over age fourteen was added in 1831, and by 1854 there were 366 pupils in nine classes, with 30 girls receiving full scholarships. Until 1848, the state provided a small annual subsidy; when the legislature raised objections, the king began to contribute to the school from his own resources. In contrast to the Bavarian schools, the Katharinenstift had male directors. Women did, however, supervise the boarding facilities used by some of the pupils.16 Prussian monarchs did not move as vigorously as others to support secondary schools for girls. The first significant action in this field was the creation in 1811 of a training facility for governesses, the Luisenstiftung, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In 1827, Crown Princess Elisabeth, the wife of the future Friedrich Wilhelm IV, granted her protection to the school originally founded by Hecker, which moved into its own building at this time. She also endowed ten free places in the school. By 1846, the Royal Elisabeth School enrolled 510 pupils in an eight-year program divided into eleven classes. It had male directors throughout the nineteenth century and an overwhelmingly male faculty during its first fifty years.17 In 1832, a new higher girls' school opened on the Schiitzenstrasse in Berlin, only a few blocks from the Elisabeth School. The individual most responsible was a provincial school inspector named Otto Schulz, who saw a need for an institution for "chil15 Schneider, "Women's Education in Bavaria," pp. 48-50; Theodolinde Winkler, ed., Hundert Jahre im Dienste der hoheren Madchenbildung, 2 vols. (Munich, 1935). The latter is a history of the Nymphenburg school, and its second volume lists all teachers and pupils during the first hundred years. 16 Heintzeler, Katharina-Stift, pp. 2-34 passim. 17 Bachmann, Geschichte der Komglichen Elisabethschule, pp. 43-66.

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dren from better and educated classes" whose parents could not afford the high tuition at private schools. Although the Prussian Ministry of Education made vague promises about granting subsidies for construction costs and operating expenses, the New Daughters' School operated in rented quarters for over fifty years. From its second year it ran a surplus from tuition income. The director, Karl Bormann, began referring to his institution as the Royal New Daughters' School in the 1840s, a practice adopted within a few years by the education authorities in Berlin. The school received the name of Royal Augusta School in 1863 but was not placed under direct state control until 1877. Already in 1849 it had more than 400 pupils in eight classes. 18 As the century progressed, rulers in a few of the smaller German states also lent support to secondary schools for girls. In Lippe, Prince Leopold II helped found and granted an annual subsidy to a school created in 1830. It had attracted just fifty-three pupils as of 1845, and only in 1871 did it expand to four classes extending over nine years. In Saxony-Coburg, a school known as the Alexandrinum enjoyed ducal protection from its foundation in 1852, although it did not receive a substantial endowment from Duchess Alexandrina until 1900 and became a state school only in 1905. In Saxony-Weimar, the Sophienstift had the sponsorship of the duchess from its establishment in 1854.19

P R I V A T E S C H O O L S FOR G I R L S

Many times more numerous than the institutions with monarchical patronage were private secondary schools for girls, the large majority of which were run by women. For example, Berlin in 1838 possessed, in addition to the Elisabeth School and the New Daughters' School, sixteen private higher girls' schools, eleven of which were maintained by women. In addition, women operated four Pensionaten. Ot twenty-three private girls' schools that existed 18

Karl Supprian, Zur Geschichte der Koniglichen Augusta-Schule und des Koniglichen Lehrerinnen-Seminars zu Berlin (Berlin, 1882), pp. 2-9, 30-38; 100 Jahre Staathche Augusta-Schule (Berlin, 1932), pp. 11-14. For the foundation of an elite boarding school, the Augustastiftung, in 1872, see Wiese, Lebenserinnerungen, 1: 252-57. 19 See Gerhard Bonwetsch, Hundert Jahre hohere Madchenbildung in Detmold, 18301930 (Detmold, 1930); Alexandrinum zu Coburg, 1852-1927 (Coburg, 1927); and, on the Sophienstift, Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, 1872-1897: Festschrift zur Feier des 25jdhrigen Bestehens des Deutschen Vereins fur das hohere Madchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1897), p. 17. 30

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

in Frankfurt for at least part of the period from 1816 to 1848, twenty had women as proprietors.20 Such schools varied widely in terms of faculty, enrollments, curricula, the number of classes, and the length of the course. Pensionaten, almost exclusively the preserve of women, tended to be quite small and have only one or two classes. A few private institutions grew in size to rival the largest state or city schools, but many more never approached a full complement of separate classes for each grade. Few male teachers worked full-time in private schools run by women, but almost all of these hired men on a part-time basis to teach at least some classes. In Saxony, women were required to hire a certified male teacher as the primary instructor in the school.21 Among the most famous private schools from the early nineteenth century were those founded by the two women whose views were discussed in Chapter One, Karoline Rudolphi and Betty Gleim. The former, with her interest in retaining a family atmosphere in her schools, tried to restrict the number of pupils to twenty or fewer. Gleim's institution in Bremen, which operated from 1806 to 1815 and again from 1819 to 1827, as of 1812 enrolled eighty pupils in four classes extending up to about age sixteen.22 Rather different from Rudolphi's and Gleim's schools, and almost unique among nineteenth-century educational establishments for girls, was the Anna Barbara von Stetten Institute in Augsburg. Founded by a bequest from Stetten in 1805, the year before Augsburg was annexed to Bavaria, the school followed the Philanthropists' ideal of educating girls from middle and lower classes to be spouses, mothers, and housewives. It included boarding facilities designed primarily for girls who "because of their social background could not properly be placed in an orphanage or poor house," and it even had a fund from which dowries could be given to such girls. Like most other south German schools, the Stetten Institute admitted its pupils only after several 20 Eduard Muret, Geschichte der ersten stadtischen hoheren Tochterschule, der Luisenschule in Berlin (Berlin, 1888), p. 7; Petra Meyer, "Madchenbildung in Frankfurt am Main zwischen 1816 und 1848" (inaugural diss., University of Frankfurt, 1979), p. 73. 21 Bernhard Rost, Entwicklung und Stand des hoheren Madchenschulwesens im Konigreich Sachsen (Tubingen, 1907), p. 42. 22 Karoline Rudolphi, Schriftlicher Nachlass (Heidelberg, 1835), esp. pp. 46-51; Josefine Zimmermann, Betty Gleim und ihre Bedeutung fur die Geschichte der Madchenbildung (Cologne, 1926), pp. 24-26, 71.

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years of elementary school and, until 1889, had a woman as director. French, music, and drawing were optional, because such accomplishments were seen as unnecessary for the poorer girls, who would probably become domestic servants. As of 1854, the Stetten Institute enrolled 104 pupils, including twelve boarders.23 At the opposite end of the social spectrum were private "circles" established for small groups of girls whose parents did not want them to mix with other, possibly less refined, girls in any school. Patricians in the Hanseatic city-states of northern Germany tended to educate their daughters in this fashion, as did the wealthier bourgeoisie of the west end of Berlin after the middle of the century. On occasion, such private circles could grow into full-scale institutions, as occurred with one founded by a Frau Schuback in Dusseldorf in 1859. She began with eight girls around ten years old, but within two years she was hiring other teachers and by 1864 had fifty-eight girls in four classes. This school celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1934.24 A woman who progressed from being a governess to teaching a private circle to running her own Pensionat was Marie Hillebrand, sister of the revolutionary and later expatriate essayist Karl Hillebrand. Starting in Offenbach near Frankfurt, Hillebrand moved her school further from the big city to Rodelheim in 1854, to Soden near Aschaffenburg in 1866, and again to the neighboring village of Neuenhaim in 1871, where she would remain for another twenty years. Her biographer states that the years in Rodelheim marked the high point in the reputation of Hillebrand's Pensionat, when a significant proportion of its pupils were foreigners. Although the school accepted girls of all ages, the majority were between thirteen and seventeen and remained for only two or two and a half years.25 Hillebrand moved her school from Rodelheim because a typhoid 23 Schneider, "Women's Education in Bavaria/' pp. 44—48; Eberhard Schott, Jubilaumsschrf des A. B. von Stetten'schen Tochterinstituts, 1805-1905 (Augsburg, 1905), pp. 12-15, 70, 42. The original statutes for this school have recently been published by Karen Meiners, " 'Plan und Einrichtung einer Biirgerlichen Tochterschule und Erziehungsanstalf: Aus dem Testament der Anna Barbara von Stetten," Zeitschnft des Historischen Vereins fur Schwaben 74 (1980): 131-68. 24 Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 21; ZfwB 23 (1895): 64; Schuback-Schmidt Lyzeum: Festschrift zur filnfundsiebzigjahrigen Bestehen der Anstalt (Dusseldorf, 1934), p. 5. An interesting account of a private circle in Hamburg can be found in Mary A. Sloman, Erinnerungen (Hamburg, 1957), pp. 56-57. 25 Jean Roland, Marie Hillebrand (1821-1894): Ihr Leben und erziehliches Wirken (Giessen, 1895), pp. 19, 29-34, 37, 44.

32

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

epidemic, which involved deaths at the Pensionat, caused parents to regard the town as an unsafe place to send their daughters. This example illustrates the fragility of such private schools. A similar institution run by Thekla Trinks in Meiningen suffered outbreaks of scarlet fever and diphtheria in the early 1870s and then was destroyed in a major fire in the city. Trinks decided she had to move from Meiningen if she wanted to attract any pupils, and she succeeded in establishing a new Pensionat in Stuttgart. Others were not so fortunate. Max Weber's wife Marianne recalled that the "fashionable institute" she attended in Hannover as a teenager closed down after a foreign girl died there.26 Women could also experience difficulties in passing their schools on to new directors. When Agatha Bertling, who had run a private school in Danzig for seventeen years, wanted to retire in 1881, she found a woman interested in taking over the institution but able only to rent, not buy, the school building. When teachers and parents quickly lost confidence in the new director, Bertling had to sell her building under inauspicious conditions.27 One can find counter-examples, however. After twenty-eight years in Dusseldorf, Frau Schuback managed to pass her school to a woman named Anna Schmidt, who also found an adequate successor, so that the Schuback-Schmidt Lyzeum survived into the Nazi era. In Breslau, a private school dating from the 1840s passed in 1857 from its second director to the future feminist leader Auguste Schmidt, who four years later turned it over to one of the teachers, Bertha Lindner. Lindner added a seminar for women teachers and enlarged the enrollment to almost three hundred pupils before she transferred the institution to another woman in 1885. Auguste Schmidt herself moved to Leipzig, where she taught for several years at the Steyber Institute, which was established in 1847, before taking it over from its founder and then continuing to operate it for twenty-two years.28 Many schools run by women were ultimately merged into municipal higher girls' schools when city governments decided to get 26 Ibid., p. 34; Thekla Trinks, Lebensfiihrung einer deutschen Lehrenn (Eisenach, 1892), pp. 221-24, 230-31; Marianne Weber, Lebenserinnerungen (Bremen, 1948), p. 46. 27 Klementine Wangemann, Agathe Bertling: Ein Lebensbild (Gotha, 1885), pp. 11217. 28 Schuback-Schmidt Lyzeum, pp. 6-9; Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, pp. 37-39; Anna Plothow, "Auguste Schmidt," in Bahnbrechende Frauen, ed. Deutscher Lyceum-Club (Berlin, 1912), p. 61.

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involved in female education. Those women who agreed to become teachers in such municipal schools suffered a loss of status as well as independence, because almost all such schools in Protestant areas of Germany had male directors. A Fraulein von Erkelenz, who agreed in 1837 to merge her small school in Dusseldorf into what eventually became a municipal institution, chose three years later to open another private school of her own.29 Her experience may well have been more common than can be demonstrated conclusively from the available school histories. Men also owned and operated private schools for girls in nineteenth-century Germany, especially in the earlier decades before many cities had created public higher girls' schools. In Berlin, for example, the pastor August Hartung ran a girls' school alongside his more famous elementary institution, the Cathedral School, from the 1780s until 1834. In Lubeck, a school founded by Johann Heinrich Meier in 1806 remained under his control for over twenty years. Fanny Lewald has provided a lively portrait of the modestsized private institution operated in Konigsberg by a man named Ulrich in the 1810s and 1820s.30 Even later in the century, some private schools could be passed down from generation to generation, such as the Lyceum Janson in Bremen, which had both male and female directors from the same family from 1860 until 1922, when runaway inflation forced its takeover by the city. The very exclusive boarding school founded by Henriette Breymann in 1854, which moved from the village of Watzum to outside Wolfenbuttel a decade later, passed to her brother upon her marriage in 1872 and remained in the family until the 1930s.31 In towns where the local government refused to pay for special educational institutions for upper-class girls, groups of parents often established corporations to create such schools and to provide a guaranteed salary to teachers. In the Westphalian town of Schwelm, for example, nine fathers founded a school in 1804 and 29

Viktor Uellner, Zur Geschichte der stMtischen Luisenschule und der nut ihr verbundenen Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalt zu Dusseldorf (1837-1887) (Dusseldorf, 1887), pp. 1517, 26. 30 Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 13; Johann Heinrich Meier, Liber weibhche BiIdung durch offentliche Anstalten (Lubeck, 1826); Fanny Lewald-Stahr, Meine Lebensgeschichte, ed. Gisela Brinkler-Gabler (Frankfurt, 1980), pp. 44-65. 31 Gustaf Janson, Zur funfundsiebzigjahrigen Jubelfeier des Stadhschen Lyzeums Janson (Bremen, 1934); Mary J. Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann: lhr Leben aus Bnefen und Tagebuchern zusammengestellt und erldulert, 2 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1922), 1: 164, 240; Arnold Breymann, Festschrift zum 50jahrigen Bestehen des Breymannschen lnstituts (Braunschweig, 1906). 34

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

promised to enroll their children there for at least five years in order, they said, "to avoid the costly practice of sending their daughters to out-of-town institutes and Pensionen—which, as is wellknown, are not without defects and remove one's daughters from one's own supervision." Although the school never attracted as many as one hundred girls during the nineteenth century, it survived as a parental venture until being taken over by the city in 1881.32 In Dusseldorf, a similar venture began in 1837. Protestant fathers, including several army officers and merchants, a physician, and two civil servants, decided to establish a school for girls who had completed several years of elementary school. They hoped to convince the local Protestant community (Getneinde) to take responsibility for covering any deficit the school might run but did not succeed in doing so until 1854. The Protestant community ended up accumulating over 19,000 Thaler, or 57,000 Marks, out of the surpluses run at the school before the city took it over in 1876. In Wesel, on the Rhine north of Dusseldorf, twenty fathers, most of whom listed their occupation as "merchant," founded a private Protestant girls' school in 1853. Only after it opened did the mayor and county administrator lend their names to the effort.33 In some cases, religious communities were the original founders of secondary schools for girls. As was already mentioned, the Jewish community in Frankfurt supported the Philanthropin for girls from 1803 onward. By 1871, this school had grown from its original three to a full complement of nine separate classes. A school established by the small Protestant community of Cologne in 1827 also enjoyed a long history, despite several squabbles over the rights and responsibilities of the directors and the sponsors. By the 1870s, it had a ten-year program divided into seven classes.34 Most numerous among the corporately run private girls' schools were, of course, the Catholic convent schools. These were most 32 August Schaffer, Die stadtische hohere Miidchenschule zu Schwelm, 1804^-1904 (Schwelm, 1904), pp. 4, 33, and passim. For a similar case, where the parental corporation ran the school until 1900, see Festschrift zur Hundertjahrfeier der AugusteViktoria-Schule Saarbrucken, 1832-1932 (Saarbrucken, 1932), esp. pp. 10-13. 33 Uellner, Luisenschule zu Dusseldorf, pp. 14, 17-20, 28, 56; Otto Hollweg, ed., Festschrift zur Feier des 75]dhrigen Bestehens des Stadttschen Oberlyzeums in Wesel (Wesel, 1928), pp. 4-5. 34 Baerwald, Realschule der tsraelitischen Gemeinde, p. 142; Elisabeth Toelpe, Geschichte des Lyzeums der evangehschen Kirchengemeinde KbIn, 1827-1927 (Cologne, 1927), pp. 28, 32, 61, 87, and passim.

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prominent in western Prussia, Baden, and Bavaria. Bavaria alone had seventy convent schools as of 1905, about half of them dating from before 1850, twenty-nine from the period 1850-1875, and only five from the last quarter of the century. Most were quite small: one source indicates that the more than one hundred secular and religious private schools in Bavaria in the late nineteenth century had a total enrollment of fewer than 4,200 pupils. 35

MUNICIPAL HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

Although the number and scope of private schools for girls grew substantially between 1800 and 1870, the most noteworthy expansion occurred in municipal higher girls' schools. In 1887, the Saxon school director Wilhelm Noldeke gathered statistics about the dates of foundation of such schools within the territories included in Bismarck's Second Reich (see Table 1). In addition, Noldeke located fifty schools for which he could not determine the date of foundation, although he suspected that most opened after 1850.36 Persuading city officials to accept the need for public expenditure on secondary education for girls was not always easy. In many cases, the city councilmen (Stadtverordneten) refused to support what they considered to be a luxury, insisting that parents 35

Heigenmooser, Ueberbhck, p. 13; Johanna Gaab, "Eine verwaltungsrechtliche Untersuchung uber das hohere Madchenschulwesen in Bayern" (Ph.D. diss., Technische Hochschule Munich, 1930), p. 41; Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 23. 36 Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin: Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des hbheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1888), p. 4. This total of over 300 public higher girls' schools as of 1887 is significantly higher than the figure of 196 for all of Germany in 1897 cited by E. Wunder in Jakob Wychgram, ed., Handbuch des hbheren Madchenschulwesens (Leipzig, 1897), p. 55, and repeated by Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung im Spiegel reprasentativer Frauenzeitschriften: Ihre Anfange und erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), 2: 295. Wunder says there were only 128 public schools in Prussia, yet both Ludwig Voss and Jiirgen Zinnecker accept a number of 185 public schools in Prussia as of 1886: see Voss, Geschichte der hbheren Madchenschule: Allgemeine Schulentwicklung in Deutschland und Geschichte der hbheren Madchenschulen Kblns (Opladen, 1952), p. 268; and Zinnecker, Sozialgeschichte der Madchenbildung: Zur Kritik der Schulerziehung von Mixdchen im btirgerhchen Patriarchalismus (Weinheim and Basel, 1973), p. 36. The Prussian Statistical Bureau counted 206 such schools in 1891 and 213 in 1901: Festschrift des Konighch Preussichen statistischen Bureaus (Berlin, 1905), p. 119. These official figures, as well as Noldeke's, may have included schools that did not have as many classes or as significant a municipal role as Wunder required for inclusion in his list; but as Noldeke was a leader in the drive to recognize only truly secondary institutions as higher girls' schools, I am inclined to accept his data. 36

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS TABLE 1

Foundation of Public Higher Girls' Schools Time Period

Number of Schools

Pre-1820 1821-1840 1841-1860 1861-1872 1873-1880 1881-1887

22 34 47 62 71 22

TOTAL

258

Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin: Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des hoheren Mddchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1888), p. 4.

SOURCE:

who wanted such an education for their daughters should pay for it themselves. In the Pomeranian town of Stargard, local officials resisted pressure from the provincial government to found a higher girls' school from 1828 until 1836, and then in the 1840s they refused to create any free places in the school. Attitudes were similar in Westphalia, where the city fathers of Minden also rejected suggestions from provincial authorities that they establish a secondary school for girls until fifty parents guaranteed the enrollment of their daughters. Merchants in Elberfeld had to promise to cover any possible deficits before the city would agree to convert a private into a public school in 1844. In Leipzig, the council opposed not only the expense but the whole notion of a girls' secondary school, arguing in 1840 that "the surest and most appropriate" education for teenaged girls took place at home "under the watchful eyes of their mothers." As was mentioned above, in 1848 even the legislature in Wurttemberg refused to continue the subsidy that the Katharinenstift had received for thirty years because its members believed that parents should bear the cost of such an education for their daughters. 37 37 Dora Prechel, Geschichte der Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Stargard in Pommern, 18371937 (Stargard, 1937), pp. 7, 15; Katharina Krickau, Die Geschichte des Mindener

37

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Few cities and towns took the initiative to found a municipal school; more often they took over private or corporate schools already possessing a clientele and a faculty. One case of a municipal school without any forerunners was in Munich, where the school commission in the early 1820s lobbied the provincial government to allow it to establish a school to serve girls whose parents were then sending them to the "expensive private institutes which accomplished little," as well as those who could not afford such a costly education. 38 Among municipal schools that incorporated existing private institutions was Berlin's Luise School, established in 1838. It absorbed pupils from two such schools on the Oranienburger Strasse, where the Luise School also stood. The city purchased its original building in 1840, after which the school paid rent to the city out of its tuition income. It required some subsidies from the municipal treasury in the first years, but thereafter it ran a surplus until construction in the early 1870s of a large new building on the Artilleriestrasse, which cost over 900,000 Marks. 39 Thus, except for supplying the school buildings, the city did not have to appropriate much money for a higher girls' school. The size of the city or town had little influence on how soon a municipal higher girls' school was founded. That Frankfurt possessed such a school—as a section of the so-called Model School (Musterschule)—in the first decade of the nineteenth century is not surprising. Yet the small towns of Nordhausen in Prussian Saxony and Buckeburg in Oldenburg also had municipal girls' schools this early. 40 Munich established its first public girls' school in 1822, its second not until 1877, and this latter closed just five years later. Berlin did not open its second, the Victoria School, until 1867, twenty-nine years after the Luise School.41 Oberlyzeums, 1826-1926 (Minden, 1926), pp. 9-11; Volkmar Wittmutz, Schule der Burger: Die hohere Schule in Wuppertal, 1800-1850 (Wuppertal, 1981), pp. 268-72; Rost, Entwicklung, p. 63; Heintzeler, Katharina-Stift, p. 29. 38 Gottfried Dostler, 1822-1922: Hundert Jahre Hohere Madchenschule (Munich, 1922), pp. 9-13. 39 Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, pp. 19-21, 30-31, 40, 69. 40 Maria Rudolph, Die Frauenbddung in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Otto Schlander (Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979), pp. 177-79; Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", p. 102; Kurt Briining, ed., Der Landkreis Schaumburg-Lippe (Bremen-Horn, 1955), p. 266. 41 Dostler, Hundert Jahre Hohere Madchenschule, p. 37; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, pp. 42-54, which contains a detailed description of the deliberations preceding construction of the Victoria School. 38

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

Many areas had few or no public higher girls' schools as of 1870. Catholic regions relied primarily on private schools: in Westphalia, Minden was the only town with a municipal school before 1850; along the Rhine, cities such as Cologne, Essen, and Dusseldorf did not support girls' secondary education at all before 1870. Yet the heavily Protestant northern coast also possessed very few public institutions. The Hanseatic city-states of Hamburg, Liibeck, and Bremen had only private schools until after 1900, while a public school founded in Kiel in 1861 was the only one in Schleswig-Holstein when it was annexed by Prussia in 1866. Rural Mecklenburg saw its first municipal school established in 1869. Even in Saxony, Dresden did not convert its Ratstdchterschule into a true city school until 1868, and Leipzig's first such institution opened its doors only three years later.42 The increasing involvement of municipalities in the provision of secondary schools for girls in this period was a unique feature of female education in Germany. No such municipal schools existed in the period before 1870 in England, France, or Austria; and in Russia similar public institutions began to be founded only in the late 1850s. In most cases, this involvement of city governments with secondary education for girls was an outgrowth of earlier participation in the provision of elementary schools or of secondary schools for boys. In countries where local authorities had traditionally played a less important role in the administration of education or where the Catholic church exercised more complete control over girls' schooling, such municipal institutions did not emerge until much later than in Germany. Perhaps the most important concomitant of the involvement of German cities in secondary education for girls was the dominance of male directors in municipal schools. When cities took over private schools headed by women, men were almost always appointed as directors of the new institutions. By the early 1890s, over 91 percent of public higher girls' schools had male directors.43 42 Krickau, Geschichte des Mindener Oberlyzeums, p. 14; Festschrift zur 75-jahrfeier des Oberlyzeums I mit Reform-Realgymnasialer Studienanstalt zu Kiel (Kiel, 1936), p. 15; Auguste Sprengel, Erinnerungen aus meinem Schulleben (Berlin, 1932), p. 15; Rost, Entwicklung, pp. 73-82. On the history of the Ratstdchterschule in Dresden, see Gustav Hausmann, "Die Entwicklung der Stadtischen hoheren Tochterschule zu Dresden," Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fur deutsche Erziehungs- una Schulgeschwhte 7 (1897): 265-80. 43 Helene Lange, Entwicklung und Stand des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1893), p. 13.

39

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Most city governments, not used to dealing with women in any positions of responsibility, appear to have been totally unwilling to appoint women even to the directorships of institutions for their own sex. Male teachers were also more prominent in public than in private schools, attracted by the guarantees of salaries and pensions that the authorities provided. In Prussia and most other states, throughout the nineteenth century there was no requirement that directors of public (or private) higher girls' schools be university graduates. Men or women who had only the seminar training given to elementary teachers could, after passing the examination for "rectors" of elementary schools, assume the directorship of a higher girls' school. Yet before 1870 men who had studied theology, or were even ordained Protestant pastors, held the directorships of most public girls' schools in major cities. In Prussia, pastors who wanted to supplement their incomes by being school inspectors had to teach for at least one year, and working at a higher girls' school was an attractive way to fulfill this requirement while waiting for a parish. Many such men stayed only briefly, but others decided to make their careers in the girls' schools, especially during the 1830s and 1840s, when there was an oversupply of candidates for the ministry. Among leading directors who had studied theology, many of whom became leaders in the movement to upgrade girls' education (to be discussed in Chapter Four), were: Friedrich Flashaar, head of the Royal Elisabeth School from 1851 to 1868; August Merget and Karl Supprian of the Royal Augusta School; Heinrich Matzner, who led the Luise School in Berlin for its first fifty years; Theodor Haarbriicker, the first director of the Victoria School in Berlin; Richard Schornstein of Elberfeld; Hermann Dieckmann of Hannover; Karl Wobcken of Oldenburg; Wilhelm Noldeke of Leipzig; and all the men who headed the Katharinenstift.44 This prominence of Protestant pastors not only indicates the importance attached to religion in girls' education but also suggests that later efforts to make these schools more like those for boys would encounter entrenched opponents who believed that women's posi44 For the prominence of pastors in girls' education before 1800, see Wolfgang Neugebaur, Absolutistischer Stoat una Schulwirklichkeit in Brandenburg-Preussen (Berlin and New York, 1985), pp. 619-24; for the 1830s and 1840s, Catherine Prelinger, Charity, Challenge, and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women's Movement in Germany (Westport, Conn., 1987), p. 12; for short biographies of individual directors, Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, pp. 43-53.

40

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

tion in German society was not only "natural" but ordained by God. That many parents felt some uneasiness about entrusting their daughters to male teachers is evident from advertisements issued by schools trying to attract pupils. In Halle in 1828, a private school run by a pastor informed parents of prospective pupils that instruction in the lower two classes would be given "only by married men with years of experience in public positions," in the upper grades only by "certified candidates in theology," certainly not "young men who are still studying." In Stargard, the city school commission announced in 1836 that only married men would teach at its new municipal institution.45 At some schools, especially those sponsored by the various princes, female chaperones attended most or all classes taught by men, as much to discipline the girls in cases where men could or should not as to keep an eye on the male teachers. In Hannover, these Anstandsdamen disappeared only when the city took over the Hoftochterschule in the 1850s. They survived at the Katharinenstift until 1888, at the Sophienstift in Weimar until after 1900.46 Even at schools that did not have chaperones, the senior woman teacher—if there was one— might be assigned the task of aiding the director in matters of discipline and morality among the girls.47 COMMON CHARACTERISTICS AND PROBLEMS

Despite the wide variety among the public and private girls' schools in Germany before 1870, they shared a number of characteristics and problems. In comparison to boys' secondary schools, they were much more dependent upon parental whim, especially in the early decades of the century, when the practice of sending girls to higher schools was not yet firmly established.48 Without 45

Eugen Rambeau, Chronik des Stddtischen Lyzeums I nebst Studienanstalt zur Feier des SQjahngen Bestehens der Anstalt (Halle, 1933), p. 7; Prechel, Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Stargard, p. 8. 46 Wespy, Festschrift der Hoheren Tochterschule I, pp. 22-25; Heintzeler, KathannaStift, pp. 15-16; Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", p. 123n. See also Schneider, "Women's Education in Bavaria," p. 139. 47 Bachmann, Geschichte der Komglichen Ehsabethschule, p. 65; Hildesheim, Stadtische Hohere Tochterschule, Festschrift zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens der Stadtischen Hoheren Tochterschule zu Hildesheim (Hildesheim, 1908), p. 12. 48 For useful comparative material, see Joyce Senders Pedersen, "The Reform of Women's Secondary and Higher Education: Institutional Change and Social Values in Mid- and Late Victorian England," History of Education Quarterly 19 (1981): 61-91. 41

TWO

the sanction of curricula imposed by the state or of civil service examinations or privileges based on required years of schooling, the girls' schools had no viable way to make parents comply with their regulations. This situation had several consequences. Girls might attend school less regularly than their brothers or receive exemptions from any courses that their parents found useless or harmful. Early in the century, educators like J.C.A. Heyse and Betty Gleim tried to impress on parents the need for regular attendance by their daughters. At a private Pensionat such as that run by Marie Hillebrand, parents enrolled or removed their daughters at various times during the year, making continuity in classes very difficult to maintain. As late as 1880, parents of girls in the Lyzeum of Cologne's Protestant community felt free to take their girls out of school during the year for long family trips.49 The competition between public and private schools, or among the numerous private schools in larger cities, also militated in favor of conforming to parents' wishes. In the Hannoverian town of Celle, the public school started to lose enrollment in the 1840s as soon as a private school began to offer English, so the former hired an English teacher. In Posen, competition from a new seminar run by the Ursulines caused the director of the public institution to hire women from France and England to teach their native languages. When a new private school began to draw pupils from Stargard's municipal school, the school commission lamented, "Overly tender parents, especially mothers, do not like to see their daughters criticized because of their behavior or laziness. They immediately remove the girls and put them in private schools, which have to show consideration for business reasons." When the Cloister School in Hamburg tried in 1880 to divide its pupils into a "higher" and a "middle" school on the basis of ability, parents of many girls assigned to the less prestigious track withdrew them and enrolled them in other private schools.50 49

J.C.A. Heyse, Gesammelten Schnften und Reden iiber Unterricht una Bildung besonders der weiblichen Jugend, 2 vols. (Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1826-1829), 1: 236; August Kippenberg, Betty Gleim (Bremen, 1882), pp. 98-99; Bonwetsch, Madchenbildung in Detmold, p. 11; Roland, Marie Hillebrand, p. 61; Toelpe, Lyzeum der evangelischen Kirchengemetnde, p. 86. 50 Theophil Besch, Aus dem Leben der Kaiserin Auguste-Viktoria-Schule in Celle, 18051930 (Celle, 1930), p. 38; Otto Konopka, Geschichte der Koniglichen Luisenstiftung zu Posen (Posen, 1910), p. 52; Prechel, Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Stargard, p. 24; Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, "Die Klosterschule von 1872 bis zum ersten Weltkrieg: Beitrag 42

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

One way in which almost all schools tried to appeal to parents was to stress their social exclusivity. Rhetoric about equality of opportunity and social mobility through education played no role in public statements about female education at this time.51 As early as 1787, the pedagogical writer Johann Daniel Hensel insisted on the need for schools where middle-class girls would not have to mix with "the dirty child from the streets." In Frankfurt, the educational authorities in 1812 recognized the need for private girls' institutes because no single school system could meet the needs of "the differing classes in civil society." The administrators of the Jewish Philanthropin in that city agreed, commenting in 1813 that mixing with "unkempt and vulgar" children was more harmful to girls than to boys. When a third class was added to the Maidens' School in Breslau in 1819, the director made clear that he expected only girls from "the so-called educated classes" to enroll in it. Betty Gleim's school in Bremen also aimed to attract daughters of the "higher classes," and similar phrases can be found in statements from many other early school directors.52 Such views persisted into the second half of the century. When the Berlin School Commission was discussing creation of a second municipal school in the 1860s, it accepted the continued existence of private schools with women teachers "for a certain segment of the public" but also thought a new public school was needed that would be adapted to the "personal situations of the greater part of our educated public." In the same decade, the director of the girls' school in Celle established a Selekta, or final grade, for those past the age of confirmation, to serve the needs of "the highest classes residing in" that city. In 1880, director Noodt of the Cloister School in Hamburg refused to grant a tuition reduction to the daughter of an elementary schoolteacher because he believed such a girl did not belong in his school.53 zur Geschichte der hoheren Madchenbildung in Hamburg," Zettschnft des Vereins fur Hamburgische Geschichte 58 (1972): 50. 51 Such rhetoric was not that common with regard to boys' education, but at least the ideology of Bildung as enunciated by Humboldt had the implicit democratic message that everyone should be able to develop his talents to the greatest possible extent. 52 Johann Daniel Hensel, System der weiblichen Erziehung (Halle, 1787), p. 23; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 51; P. Meyer, "Madchenbildung in Frankfurt am Main," p. 61; Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, p. 22; Zimmermann, Betty Gleim, pp. 26, 85. 53 Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 44; Besch, Auguste-Vtktoria-Schule in Celle, p. 55; Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," p. 11. 43

TWO

Tuition costs served to preserve the exclusivity of the higher girls' schools. In 1806, Johann Trefurt justified the relatively high tuition at the new University Tochterschule in Gottingen by pointing to the need "to set a certain limit to the vanity which parents from the lower classes express through the education they try to give their daughters." In 1821, tuition increases were used at both the Model School and the English Sisters' institute in Frankfurt to drive Iower-middle-class girls into other schools. In the 1830s, the Industrie-Tochterschule in Blankenburg abandoned its effort to mix social classes and split into a free elementary school and a higher girls' school charging tuition. When officials in Leipzig were discussing establishment of a municipal girls' school in 1840, the director of a boys' school insisted on the need to set tuition high enough to prevent "too much pressure from the classes which do not belong there."54 Most public girls' schools charged tuition fees of the same order of magnitude. At the Philanthropin in Frankfurt, girls in the top class paid 70 Gulden (105 Marks) as early as 1810, a relatively high fee. The Royal Elisabeth and Augusta schools in Berlin had tuitions of 24 Thaler (72 Marks) in 1832, an amount that rose to 30 Thaler (90 Marks) by 1872. Costs at the municipal Luise School were similar, climbing to 100 Marks by 1885. At the Katharinenstift in the 1850s, day pupils paid 60 Gulden (90 Marks), but boarders paid 450 Gulden (675 Marks). In Saxony at the end of the century, the public girls' schools in Dresden charged up to 144 Marks; the school in Leipzig, 120 Marks for all classes; that in Chemnitz, just 60 to 100 Marks. When the Cloister School opened in 1872, its fees of from 120 to 144 Marks were high for that time but still below those at most of Hamburg's private schools.55 In comparison, the exclusive boarding school run by Henriette Breymann charged a comprehensive fee of 300 Thaler (900 Marks) in the 1860s. It is not surprising that this institution attracted such girls as Eugenie Schumann, daughter of the composers Robert and Clara, and 54 Johann Philipp Trefurt, Historische Nachrichten liber die Errichtung der Unwersitats-Tochterschule in Gottingen (Hannover, 1806), p. 35; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 193; Sander, "Geschichte der Industrie-Tochterschule," pp. 195-99; Rost, Entwwklung, p. 66. 55 Baerwald, Realschule der israelitischen Gemeinde, p. 32; Supprian, Geschichte der Kdniglichen Augusta-Schule, p. 48; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, pp. 26, 55-56; Heintzeler, Katharina-Stift, p. 34; Rost, Entwicklung, p. 212; Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," pp. 10-11.

44

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

Hedwig Criisemann, whose father was a founder of the North German Lloyd.56 Even municipal schools had few free places for poorer girls from the middle class. At Minden's municipal school, eight out of seventy-six girls had free places in 1832. The city council in Berlin provided in the 1860s for 8 percent of the pupils at the Luise School to receive a free education, but at all of Berlin's municipal institutions in the 1890s less than 5 percent of the girls were not paying tuition. As noted above, the director of the Cloister School opposed free places; he feared that "an excessive rush of scholarship girls would keep the better classes away from the school."57 One way in which girls' schools attempted to demonstrate their worth to parents was through annual public examinations. Throughout the century, this practice drew sharp criticism from many educators because the public performances and encouragement of competitiveness involved in such exercises contradicted the general spirit of girls' education. Johann Heinrich Meier from Lubeck wrote in 1826 that public examinations undermined the "charming unpretentiousness" of girls and were "the strongest stimulus to ambition, and thus the greatest danger to humility and modesty." August Spilleke, who oversaw the upgrading of the future Royal Elisabeth School in the 1820s, voiced similar fears in condemning any "rewarding of effort" in girls' schools. In the 1860s, the director of this school insisted that public examinations were "repugnant to the essence of femininity." For Tinette Homberg, for many years the head of a private Pensionat, those who gave such examinations did not know "that most precious pearl in the genuine jewelry of feminine nature, unassuming modesty." In the 1880s, Viktor Uellner, head of the Luise School in Dusseldorf, asserted that, in response to these annual events, "talented girls manifest a disagreeable tendency to push themselves forward, less talented to retreat into the shadows." Late in the century, critics stressed that public examinations caused a level of excitement and 56

Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, 1: 279. See Eugenie Schumann, Memoirs, trans. Marie Busch (London, 1927), pp. 34-45; and Hedwig Heyl, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1925), pp. 4-5. At the Pensionat run by a woman named Moder in Eisenach in the 1860s, tuition, room, and board cost 600 Marks for German girls, 800 for foreigners: see Henry Mayhew, German Life and Manners, 2 vols. (London, 1864), 1: 275. 57 Krickau, Geschichte des Mindener Oberlyzeums, p. 13; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 56; ZfwB 23 (1895): 66; Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," p. 11. 45

TWO

tension that often damaged girls' "nerves," an objection also raised at that time against similar exercises in boys' schools.58 Institutions under the protection of the Prussian royal house occupied a unique position with regard to public examinations. The statutes of the Luisenstiftung teachers' seminar from 1811 indicated that, to maintain the family atmosphere desirable for female education, it would adopt from boys' schools neither class rankings nor public examinations. Similarly, with the support of Princess Elisabeth, Spilleke eliminated such practices at his school in 1828. Girls at the New Daughters' School founded four years later did not even give speeches or recitations, because these might "nourish female vanity." At a school in Posen that enjoyed royal protection, public examinations were eliminated in 1837.59 Elsewhere the practice persisted longer. In Minden in 1830, parents demanded introduction of public examinations at a school that had been founded without them. The city of Hannover stopped the practice when it took over the Hoftochterschule in 1853. Despite the example of the royal schools, Berlin's municipal Luise School did not drop public examinations until 1886. In Dusseldorf, Uellner struggled for eight years before he succeeded in abolishing this tradition in 1892. Schools in Tilsit, Hamburg, and Giessen also retained this "unfeminine" procedure until the 1890s.60 Another way in which schools catered to parental desires was by offering as wide a variety of courses as possible. This practice led to a very cluttered curriculum, which, when one counts the hour or two per week devoted to singing, drawing, and calligra58

Meier, Uber weibliche Bildung, p. 193; Bachmann, Geschichte der Konighchen Ehsabethschule, p. 38; Friedrich Flashaar, "Hohere Madchenschule," in Encyklopddie des gesamten Erziehungs- und Unternchtswesens, vol. 4, ed. Karl A. Schmid (Gotha, 1865), p. 942; Tinette Homberg, Gedanken uber Erziehung und Unterricht (Berlin, 1845), p. 183; Aegidius Huppertz, Hundert Jahre Dusseldorfer Luisenschule (Dusseldorf, 1937), p. 42; Christian Ufer, Nervositat und Madchenerziehung in Haus und Schule (Wiesbaden, 1890), p. 100. 59 Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", p. 116; Bachmann, Geschichte der Konighchen Elisabethschule, p. 45; Supprian, Geschichte der Koniglichen Augusta-Schule, p. 15; Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, p. 42. 60 Krickau, Geschichte des Mindener Oberlyzeums, p. 18; Wespy, Festschrift der Hoheren Tochterschule I, p. 69; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 109; Huppertz, Dusseldorfer Luisenschule, p. 42; Franz Koch, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Tilsiter Madchenschulwesens (Tilsit, 1911), pp. 71-72; J. Loewenberg, Anerkannte Hohere Madchenschule Lyzeum von Or. J. Loewenberg: Festschrift zum 50jahrigen Bestehen der Schule (Hamburg, 1913), p. 7; Heinrich Berger, Zur Geschichte der Hoheren und Erweiterten Madchenschule zu Giessen (Giessen, 1920), p. 26.

46

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

phy, might include more than ten separate subjects.61 Such a plethora of courses, none of which could be handled in depth, became the target of some of the sharpest criticism directed at the higher girls' schools in the 1860s and after. The gradual addition of new courses—other languages, history of art and literature, mythology—led to a gradual reduction in the number of hours devoted to needlework. In the Philanthropinnen of the first decades of the century, needlework took up to half of the classroom hours. The girls' school run by the Jewish community in Frankfurt had fourteen hours per week, other early foundations ten or twelve. In the town of Luneburg, time given to sewing fell from twelve to eight hours per week in a new curriculum issued in the 1830s, while the New Daughters' School in Berlin allotted eight hours in its first class and six hours in the other three in its original curriculum in 1832. By the time the Cloister School opened in Hamburg in 1872, needlework occupied an average of about three hours per week.62 At many schools, girls would practice French or English conversation while working on their sewing projects. Except in the Hanseatic cities, where English took precedence, French was the main foreign language learned by German girls. The addition of English as a second foreign language gradually spread from north to south during the nineteenth century, although not in an unbroken pattern. The Royal Elisabeth School and the Luise School in Berlin began offering English in the 1840s, the Royal Augusta School not until 1858, at the time of the engagement of Prince Friedrich to the daughter of Queen Victoria. Most schools in Frankfurt did not teach English until the city was annexed by Prussia in 1866. Many other schools added this second language to the curriculum in the 1850s or 1860s, and by the 1870s English had penetrated to Breslau and Munich.63 In Bavaria, how61

For an examination of programs at a variety of girls' schools, see George Bernstein and Lottelore Bernstein, "The Curriculum for German Girls' Schools, 18701914," Paedagogica Historica 18 (1978): 275-95. This article contains several mistakes and misinterpretations, however. 62 Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", p. 101; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 150; Arthur Zechlin, Geschichte der Luneburger Hoheren Bildungsansalten filr die weibliche fugend (Luneburg, 1925), pp. 20-21; Supprian, Geschichte der Koniglichen Augusta-Schule, p. 12; Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," p. 24. 63 Bachmann, Geschichte der Koniglichen Ehsabethschule, p. 60; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 33; Supprian, Geschichte der Koniglichen Augusta-Schule, p. 42; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 70; Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, p. 67; Dostler, Hundert Jahre Hohere Madchenschule, p. 36. 47

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ever, English would not be required even in a curriculum issued in 1911. In the Prussian province of Posen, several schools taught Polish, although Bismarck's anti-Polish crusade in the late 1880s would cause it to be dropped at the Luisenstiftung in the city of Posen, which by then was run by the state.64 By the 1870s Italian had appeared at some girls' schools, especially in Bavaria, but also as an option at the Luise School in Berlin.65 In no case, however, did a higher girls' school offer its pupils either Latin or Greek, the languages required for university studies in nineteenth-century Germany. Instruction in arithmetic and the sciences developed along the lines discussed in Chapter One. Science instruction might include both "natural history," covering elementary material from botany and zoology, and "description of nature," including introductions to geology, chemistry, and physics, but much of it was related to nutrition or other housewifely concerns. Few parents or educators wanted girls to learn more science, which was perceived as "unfeminine" not only for its rational methods but also for its potential challenge to religious convictions. Even human physiology, which mothers would need to know to fulfill their Bestimmung, was dangerous. Writing in the 1860s, the school director Richard Schornstein argued that it was "better to exclude it entirely if the teacher does not possess, in addition to factual knowledge, the ability to conduct himself tactfully and carefully maintain the necessary limits." When the municipal girls' school in Tilsit tried to hire a man with university training in science in the early 1870s, the county government at first refused to authorize the appointment because it saw no possible use for such a teacher in a girls' school.66 One area in which parents and girls came into conflict with educators and government officials was the introduction of physical education or gymnastics to the girls' schools. As early as 1845, the provincial government of Posen urged the girls' school in the city of that name to introduce physical exercise for its pupils. Attempts by educators to introduce Turnen, or gymnastic exercises, for girls 64 Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 12; Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, pp. 17, 61. 65 Dostler, Hundert Jahre Hohere Madchenschule, p. 36; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 75. 66 Richard Schornstein, Das hohere Miidchenschulwesen (Elberfeld, 1866), p. 39; Koch, Geschichte des Tilsiter Madchenschulwesens, pp. 27-28.

48

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

failed in Hannover in the 1850s and in Detmold in the 1860s. Even in the 1880s, optional lumen at the higher girls' school in Hannoversch-Munden attracted less than 25 percent of the pupils.67 In general, however, two or three hours per week of lumen became obligatory at most schools during the 1870s and 1880s. Many new school buildings constructed in this period contained adequate gymnasiums for the first time. Yet girls still took their exercise in their normal street clothes. Efforts to introduce special uniforms did not come until around the turn of the century, and they encountered strong resistance from parents who objected to their daughters' legs being exposed. A convention of gymnastics teachers had to admit in 1907 that only "limited success" had been achieved in girls' gymnastics.68 An almost universal problem for higher girls' schools was the retention of teachers. There were exceptions, particularly among the public institutions in major cities, such as the Luise School in Berlin or the Katharinenstift. The municipal school in Kiel in its first half century enjoyed what appears to have been the unique experience of having twenty-three teachers who stayed for twenty-five years or more.69 Much more typical was an extremely rapid turnover among all types of teachers except men with seminar training, for whom a position in a higher girls' school represented one of the best jobs available. Candidates for pastorships often taught only to gain the experience necessary to be appointed as school inspectors or until they obtained a church. Foreign women who came to Germany to improve their job prospects at home through a better knowledge of German tended to stay for only a few years.70 German women could leave to take other jobs, found their own private schools, or marry. Of twenty-one who left Berlin's Luise School in its first half century, six did so to wed. In Posen, seven of twenty took other positions and ten married. Among women teachers who resigned from Breslau's municipal 67

Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, p. 29; Wespy, Festschrift der Hoheren Tochterschule I, p. 70; Bonwetsch, Madchenbildung in Detmold, p. 25; Gertrud Hobrecker, Festschrift zur 50jahrfeier des Stddtischen Lyzeums zu Hannoversch-Miinden, 1879-1929 (Hannoversch-Miinden, 1929), p. 5. 68 Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," pp. 32-34; 100 Jahre staatliche Augustaschule, p. 33. 69 Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, unpaged foreword and p. 84; Heintzeler, Katharina-Stift, p. 18; Festschrift des Oberlyzeums I zu Kiel, pp. 48-51. 70 Uellner, Luisenschule zu Dusseldorf, p. 26; Berger, Mddchenschule zu Giessen, p. 16. 49

TWO

school in the late nineteenth century, at least four founded new private schools.71 Most difficult to retain were men with university training, for whom the pay, benefits, and level of teaching in the higher girls' schools proved much less attractive than positions in secondary schools for boys. The lack of pension plans at even solid private schools like the Stetten Institute in Augsburg or the Lyzeum of Cologne's Protestant community proved to be a serious obstacle to efforts to hold on to such men.72 A teacher shortage in the rapidly expanding boys' schools during the 1860s and 1870s aggravated this problem for girls' schools, especially those in smaller towns that had only one position for an academically trained teacher. Luneburg filled such a position four times in eleven years in this period; Schwelm, four times in thirteen years; Celle, five times in twenty years.73 This difficulty in attracting and holding university graduates hampered later efforts to raise the higher girls' schools to the status of true secondary schools. Another reason such male teachers disliked the girls' schools was that large numbers of pupils dropped out at the time of confirmation, about age fourteen, just when teaching them became more satisfying to university graduates. Betty Gleim had urged parents not to take their girls out of school too soon, and throughout the century educators from all parts of Germany continued to complain in vain about this practice. In Tilsit and Celle in the 1870s, directors refrained from adding a tenth year to their schools because they doubted pupils would enroll in it. The director of Cologne's Protestant school shared these fears but did introduce a tenth class; the Philanthropin in Frankfurt terminated its experiment with such an extended program after just four years. Karl Supprian of the Royal Augusta School later commented that, as of the mid-1880s, the idea of keeping girls in school until age sixteen had not taken root among parents in Berlin. In Halle at this period, only eight girls in Gertrud Baumer's class stayed for the final year. In Dresden, the Ratstochterschule in some years could not retain enough pupils to run even a ninth grade. Of the 5,272 girls who left Berlin's Luise School between 1838 and 1888, only 670 did so from the final class (although many may have transferred to other 71 Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 82; Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, p. 62; Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, p. 58. 72 Schott, Jubilaumsschrift, p. 65; Toelpe, Lyzeum der evangehschen Kirchengemeinde, p. 85. 73 Zechlin, Geschichte der Liineburger Hbheren Bildungsanstalten, p. 15; Schaffer, Miidchenschule zu Schwelm, p. 37; Besch, Auguste-Victoria-Schule in Celle, p. 79.

50

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

schools or to Pensionaten).74 That so few girls remained in school past the age of compulsory education is the clearest indication that for most of the nineteenth century what was "higher" about these institutions was much more the social origins of their pupils than the education they offered. GIRLS' EXPERIENCES IN SCHOOL

Several of these common characteristics of the higher girls' schools suggest aspects of the educational experiences that their pupils underwent. Most noteworthy is the brevity of girls' stay in school, which was several years shorter than that of many boys in secondary schools, who, even if they did not remain until graduation, usually did not drop out until age sixteen, at which time they gained the valuable privilege of serving just one year in the Prussian, or after 1871 the German, army. Without any state examinations to aim for, girls could more easily gain exemption from individual courses and suffered much less agony than their brothers about achieving good grades or even passing—the memoirs consulted for this study revealed no cases of girls having been forced to repeat a grade. Similarly, the day-to-day discipline in the girls' schools appears to have been much less harsh than that imposed in the Gymnasium. Although some German women, such as Fanny Lewald and Gertrud Baumer, wrote extensively about their schooling in their memoirs, many women who attended higher girls' schools in the nineteenth century said relatively little about their experiences, at least in comparison to the central role the Gymnasium occupies in the memoirs of so many men.75 Some women went so far as to claim that their formal education had little lasting impact on them. 74 Kippenberg, Betty Gleim, p. 99; Rost, Entwicklung, p. 162; Julius Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in WUrttemberg (Berlin, 1916), p. 8; Koch, Geschichte des Tilsiter Madchenschulwesens, p. 37; Besch, Auguste-Victoria-Schule in Celle, p. 74; Toelpe, Lyzeum der evangelischen Kirchengemeinde, p. 87; Baerwald, Realschule der israelitischen Gemeinde, p. 142; Karl Supprian, Frauengestalten in der Geschichte der Pddagogik (Leipzig, 1897), p. 273; Hausmann, "Tochterschule zu Dresden," p. 275; Gertrud Baumer, tebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende (Tubingen, 1933), p. 91; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 77. 75 Lewald-Stahr, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 44-65; Baumer, Lebensweg, esp. pp. 74-99. Using such examples, Juliane Jacobi-Dittrich argues that women did write a great deal about their schooling: see "Growing Up Female in the Nineteenth Century," in German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Fout (New York, 1984), pp. 197-217. For discussion of men's recollections of their Gymnasium years, see James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1983), pp. 4355.

51

TWO

More common were laments about what Kate Frankenthal later called "the rather primitive general education" provided by the higher girls' schools, which Julie Braun-Vogelstein insisted "did not deserve their name."76 Some girls became aware very soon that their brothers learned more challenging subjects in school. As Hedwig Kettler put it in an interview in 1892, "When quite a girl, long before I knew anything of a Woman's Question, I was puzzled to think why girls should be barred from studying subjects which any boy, be he ever so stupid, is allowed to take up." 77 If one finds in women's memoirs few glowing reports of days in school, one also encounters very little of the bitter hatred that colored the recollections many men had of their Gymnasium years. For middle- and upper-class German women, the time after leaving school often produced much more unpleasant memories, which may have made the years in school look good by comparison. Women who went on to have successful careers described the life of a nineteenth-century "hohere Tochter" who had completed school as "hollow," "boring," and "unbearable." Marie-Elisabeth Luders considered this period of her life to have been "without content or goal"; for Adelheid Mommsen, it was a time of "dusting and pulling currants off their stems."78 Male teachers in the girls' schools receive only limited criticism in women's memoirs. Helene Lange recalled that at the private school she attended in Oldenburg even a teacher whom she liked could not avoid "serious blunders" in the moral education of his pupils, an experience that later helped to shape her crusade to have girls taught primarily by women.79 Yet more frequent than such complaints are positive statements about male directors and teachers, who appear not to have had the adversary relationships 76 Marie von Bunsen, Der Welt in der ich lebte (Leipzig, 1929), p. 40; Adele Gerhard, "Das BiId meines Lebens," in Melitta Gerhard, Das Werk Adele Gerhards als Ausdruck einer Wendezeit (Bern and Munich, 1963), p. 197; Kate Frankenthal, Der dreifache Fluch: Judin, Intellektuelle, Sozialistin, ed. Kathleen M. Pearle and Stephan Leibfried (Frankfurt and New York, 1981), p. 1; Julie Braun-Vogelstein, Was mentals stirbt (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 206. 77 Hugo Willich, "Hedwig Kettler," Niedersachsische Lebensbilder, vol. 4, ed. O. H. May (Hildesheim, 1960), p. 156, citing an interview in the Women's Herald of London. See also Lewald-Stahr, Lebensgeschichte, p. 60; Margarete Henschke, Ulrike Henschke (Berlin, 1931), p. 41; and Marie-Elisabeth Luders, Fiirchte Dich ntcht (Cologne, 1963), p. 34. 78 Trinks, Lebensfuhrung, p. 5; M. Weber, Lebensennnerungen, p. 48; "Alice Salomon," in Elga Kern, ed., Fuhrende Frauen Europas (Munich, 1928), p. 6; Luders, Fiirchte Dich nicht, p. 40; Adelheid Mommsen, Theodor Mommsen im Kreise der Seinen, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1937), p. 79. 79 Helene Lange, Lebensennnerungen (Berlin, 1930), p. 47.

52

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

with their pupils that their colleagues in the boys' schools often did. Female teachers could, on occasion, serve as role models for the girls. Lange had one who "understood what almost no one in the small town yet wanted to understand: that a woman too could demand to lead a full and useful life, her own life." Auguste Sprengel, later an influential teacher, and Alice Salomon, a pioneer in social work, liked their first teachers so well that they decided to become teachers themselves. For Carla Wenckebach, who finished a varied career as a professor of German at Wellesley College, the inspiration for teaching came only when her family abandoned the governesses it had hired and enrolled her in a private girls' school.80 Teachers did not represent an ideal for all girls, however. Julie Braun-Vogelstein believed that the women who taught her had possessed no sense of humor or lightheartedness. The novelist Gabriele Reuter, who attended Henriette Breymann's boarding establishment at a time when her family's finances were collapsing, recalled that in addition to the many elegant girls at the school there were "others who already looked like rather old, hardworking governesses, even though they were still quite young. They would become nothing other than this, it was their fate, which they bore with courage or resignation. But I had always viewed my governess as something of an underling. If I too would now have to become a governess and let a lady say to me, 'Miss, I would like . . .' What a strange idea!"81 Women teachers who did not marry and had to work for a living could easily appear to upper-class German girls as failures rather than as models. THE SITUATION ABOUT 1870

According to Noldeke's statistics, the German Empire of 1872 possessed at least 165 municipal or state-supported higher girls' schools. These varied tremendously, from an institution such as Berlin's Victoria School, which within five years of its foundation in 1867 enrolled 947 girls in eighteen separate classes (two sections for each of nine grades), to the tiny school in the mining town of Clausthal, which, although dating back to 1828, grew to four classes only in 1873 and did not top 100 pupils until the 1880s. In 80 Ibid., p. 49; Sprengel, Erinnerungen, p. 6; "Alice Salomon," p. 4; Margarethe Muller, Carlo Wenckebach, Pioneer (Boston, 1908), p. 59. 81 Braun-Vogelstein, Was niemals stirbt, p. 191; Gabriele Reuter, Vom Kinde zum Menschen (Berlin, 1921), p. 189.

53

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thirty-three schools surveyed by Noldeke, German language and literature occupied an average of 20 percent of the class hours, followed by French with 13 percent, sewing and arithmetic with 11 percent each, and religion with 9 percent. English, history, geography, science, drawing, writing, singing, and gymnastics each occupied between 4 and 6 percent of the pupils' time.82 At the time of unification, private schools outnumbered public institutions by a wide margin. The two royal and two municipal schools in Berlin enrolled 2,496 girls, compared to 13,070 attending fifty-seven private schools in the city. In Kiel, one public school competed with nine private ones; in Giessen, the ratio was one to four. As late as 1892, Breslau's two city schools faced eighteen private institutions.83 The opening in 1872 of Hamburg's Cloister School, which was private despite close supervision by state authorities, drew girls from more than fifty other schools, some from elementary schools that had charged tuition but according to a new law now were open to all. In Hamburg's suburb of Altona, in Prussia, a new municipal school in 1876 competed for pupils with twenty-three other institutions.84 Despite the ability of public schools to attract pupils, the general perception around 1870 was that the better private schools were more socially exclusive in their clientele. As was mentioned above, the Berlin School Commission in the 1860s did not challenge the idea that private schools should exist to serve the upper classes. Helene Lange, who rose to prominence while a teacher at an exclusive Berlin school operated by a woman named Lucie Crain, argued that members of the elite preferred to have their daughters raised by women. Maria Munk, daughter of a judge in Berlin's superior court and herself to become one of the first female judges in Germany, was sent to Crain's school because, as she put it, "AU the children came from good homes; a child would not pick up bad habits and was more likely to find congenial companions and friends." Even in a smaller town like Stargard, officers, civil ser82

Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, pp. 4, 6-9; Bruno Engelhardt, Festschrift zur Feier des WOjdhrigen Bestehens des Lyzeums Clausthal (Clausthal, 1928), pp. 32, 44. As of 1886, 80 of 185 public higher girls' schools in Prussia still had six or fewer classes: Zinnecker, Sozialgeschichte der Madchenbildung, p. 36. 83 Friedrich Hofmann, Ueber die Errichtung offentlicher hoheren Mddchen-Schulen in Berlin: Bericht an der Magistrat (Berlin, 1875), p. 58; Festschrift des Oberlyzeums I zu Kiel, p. 10; Berger, Madchenschule zu Giessen, p. 27; Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, p. 93. 84 Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," p. 13; Festschrift zur Feier des 50jahngen Bestehens der ersten stadtischen hoheren Madchenschule in Altona/Elbe (Altona, 1926), p. 15.

54

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

vants, and other university-trained men supported the creation in 1874 of a private school that had a lower enrollment and higher fees than the existing city school.85 The relative prestige of public and private education for girls can be illustrated in a variety of ways. Among daughters of prominent officials and professors in Berlin, not only Maria Munk but also Marie von Bunsen, Anna von Gierke, Marie-Elisabeth Luders, Adelheid Mommsen, and Alice Salomon attended private schools rather than any of the thriving public institutions in the capital.86 Just after 1900, Bernhard Rost surveyed the professions of fathers of 3,666 girls enrolled in Saxon secondary schools, divided equally between public and private institutions and thus not including all those from private schools (see Table 2). There are many problems with the survey: its incompleteness, the vagueness of such terms as factory owner (Fabrikbesitzer or Fabrikant) and merchant (Kaufmann), the listing of other businessmen according to specific fields of endeavor, the inclusion of some individuals according to honorific titles, the plethora of different categories of civil servants. Yet, especially in the data for the different levels of teachers and medical personnel, it is clear that those with more education and greater prestige chose more often to send their daughters to private schools.87 In the economic middle class as well, the apparently more prosperous factory owners favored private education more than the merchants and shopkeepers did. A similar picture emerges for Berlin. Residents of the northeastern section of the city who petitioned in the early 1870s for construction of a public girls' school included many artisans and small shopkeepers but very few men with academic titles. After this Sophie School opened in 1876, another characteristic of its clientele 85 Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 44; Lange, Entwicklung una Stand, p. 13; Maria Munk, "Rise and Fall of German Feminism, the Life History of a Woman Judge," ms. autobiography in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, pt. 1, p. 8; Prechel, Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Stargard, p. 23. 86 Bunsen, Welt, p. 40; Marie Baum, Anna von Gierke: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1954), p. 32; Luders, Furchte Dich nicht, pp. 29-34; Mommsen, Theodor Mommsen, p. 64; "Alice Salomon," p. 4. 87 Rost, Entwicklung, pp. 170-74. Rost had information on 1,833 girls from public schools, then accumulated data on the same number from private schools, 1,174 from Leipzig authorities and almost 700 from private school directors. He broke down fathers' occupations into an unwieldy 388 different categories, with many having only a few representatives. I have combined his figures for military officers of different ranks and for estate owners (Gutsbesitzer and Rittergutsbesitzer), but have not added businessmen listed by specific trades to those he listed simply as factory owners or merchants.

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TABLE 2

Social Origins of Girls in Saxon Secondary Schools, ca. 1900 Private Schools Father's Occupation University professor Technical institute professor Gymnasium teacher Other secondary teacher Girls' school director Girls' schoolteacher Elementary schoolteacher Physician Dentist Pharmacist Pastor Attorney Military officer Mayor City councilman Banker Estate owner Factory owner Engineer Merchant/shopkeeper

Public Schools

N

%

N

%

27 9 33 0 0 0 11 91 15 11 46 39 39 4 0 19 38 228 23 473

90 90 66 0 0 0 20 63 65 35 57 56 49 80 0 95 75 64 49 43

3 1 17 14 4 10 44 54 8 20 35 31 40 1 11 1 13 127 24 630

10 10 34 100 100 100 80 37 35 65 43 44 51 20 100 5 25 36 51 57

SOURCE: Adapted from Bernhard Rost, Entwicklung und Stand des hoheren Madchenschulwesens im Konigreich Sachsen (Tubingen, 1907), p p . 173-74.

became apparent: the very high percentage of its pupils who were Jewish. In a school whose enrollment fluctuated between about 700 and 850 pupils until World War I, Jewish girls never totaled less than 250 and numbered as many as 390 in 1894, compared to about 450 Protestants.88 88 Frieda Gossmann, Denkschrift zum ftinfzigjahngen Bestehen der Sophienschule in Berlin (Bielefeld, 1926), pp. 8-9, 30-33. This school was located on the Weinmeisterstrasse. For a discussion of the social origins of the pupils at Berlin's public girls' schools in the mid-1890s, see ZfwB 23 (1895): 62-66.

56

HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

Jewish girls, like their brothers, attended secondary schools in much greater numbers than did Protestant or Catholic girls. Marion Kaplan has estimated that for all of Germany in 1901, 42 percent of Jewish girls were enrolled in higher schools, compared to under 4 percent of Gentiles; for Berlin the comparable figures were 60 percent and 10 percent.89 There were Jewish as well as mixedreligion private schools, but it appears that a large percentage of Jewish girls in the higher schools attended public institutions. In Posen, the abandonment in 1848 of a rule limiting Jewish enrollment in the Luisenstiftung to 10 percent of the pupils led to a rapid influx of Jewish girls and a drop in Protestant enrollment from 133 to 67, of Catholic from 114 to 24.90 Most school histories do not supply such information, so further local studies are needed to determine if isolating their daughters from Jewish girls was a largely unspoken reason why upper-class Germans in cities with a large Jewish population tended to prefer private schools. This limited evidence about the social and religious backgrounds of pupils has carried this investigation of the rise of the higher girls' schools beyond the period of German unification. Even as of 1870, though, contrasts in the clientele, costs, faculty, and average size of public and private girls' schools were evident to most observers. Evident as well, despite the continuing lack of state regulation of higher girls' schools and the limited expenditure of public funds on them, was the tremendous expansion since 1800 in the number of institutions offering formal schooling, including foreign languages, to girls up to age fourteen or fifteen. As the next chapter will discuss, the same period also witnessed a similar, if less dramatic, expansion in the opportunities to continue formal education for several more years in seminars for women teachers. 89

Marion Kaplan, "Tradition and Transition: The Acculturation, Assimilation and Integration of Jews in Imperial Germany, A Gender Analysis," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 27 (1982): 26-29. 90 Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, pp. 31-32. For other public schools with a high percentage o( Jewish girls, see Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, p. 52; and Emil Zenz, "Die stadtische hohere Tochterschule (1879-1886) oder die Anfange der heutigen Augusta Viktoria Schule in Trier," Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 3 (1963): 81. For comments about how Christian girls would stop mixing with their Jewish classmates outside of school once they turned thirteen or fourteen, see Frankenthal, Der dreifache Fluch, pp. 3-4; Braun-Vogelstein, Was niemals stirbt, p. 203.

57

THREE

The Rise of Women Teachers to the 1870s nineteenth century, women in Germany had served as teachers in both public and private capacities. As mentioned in Chapter Two, Catholic teaching orders had operated many schools since the 1600s. Noble and wealthy burgher families had employed governesses as well as male tutors in the eighteenth century, and in many areas widows and other women who needed to support themselves opened Winkelschulen (literally, schools in a corner) in which they taught reading and arithmetic to a handful of children. Around 1800, women such as Karoline Rudolphi and Betty Gleim could establish larger and more advanced girls' schools even though they had no formal pedagogical training. The nineteenth century brought both qualitative and quantitative changes to the situation of women teachers in Germany. By the 1870s, most states had created seminars, or normal schools, for women and initiated some form of certification for those trained there as well as for others who prepared privately. Women not only expanded their role as governesses but increasingly found regular employment in elementary and higher girls' schools. These new opportunities combined with the discrimination and prejudices that women teachers encountered in their profession to lead a number of these women to become active participants in the German feminist movement after 1865. BEFORE THE

T H E D E V E L O P M E N T OF F O R M A L T R A I N I N G AND CERTIFICATION

During the first half of the nineteenth century, popular attitudes toward women teachers reflected two distinct points of view. The first was that teaching amounted almost to a form of welfare for unmarried daughters of pastors, teachers, and other civil servants. This Versorgungsprinzip, or need to provide for certain young women, figured prominently in discussions about the desirability of founding seminars for women teachers in Saxony. In 1842, a 58

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

leading Protestant minister even left money to the state for this purpose, specifying that the seminar should admit "especially the orphaned daughters or widows of pastors and schoolteachers." The legislature, however, refused to provide additional funds, because it feared that if such women later married the expenditures would be wasted, and the project failed.1 At the girls' schools in Hannover, until the 1850s "the few positions for women teachers were often seen as Versorgungsposten or even created for this purpose. Nursery governesses from better homes became French teachers, widows or destitute daughters of council members' relatives became sewing teachers or chaperones." 2 Men actively involved in training women teachers shared this attitude. August Merget, director of the Royal Augusta School and its attached seminar in the 1850s, suggested in a defense of governesses published in 1853 that only women who could not find husbands entered this field and that only parents who did not have time for their children hired them. H. H. Friedlander, who founded a private seminar in EIberfeld in the 1840s, spoke of teaching as the best use for the energies of women who did not marry. Even Luise Buchner, in her influential Women and Their Vocation (1856), viewed teaching as an activity only for those women who could not fulfill their natural calling to be wives and mothers. 3 The second frequently expressed attitude about women teachers was that they were needed to teach girls. As early as 1787, Johann Daniel Hensel insisted, "Men alone cannot possibly carry out all aspects of female education." Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel also believed that for both sexes "those duties to which each is called by its very nature" should "necessarily be taught by persons of the same sex." J.C.F. Heyse saw the need to have women handle certain aspects of preparing girls for their future careers in the household and urged the creation of seminars to train such teachers. Betty Gleim went further, declaring that "women are instructed and educated best by women" and calling in vain for the state to 1 Bernhard Rost, Entwicklung und Stand des hbheren Mddchenschulwesens vm Konigreich Sachsen (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 242, 229-34. 2 Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, 1872-1897: Festschrift zur Feier des 25jahrigen Bestehens des Deutschen Vereins fur das hohere Madchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1897), p. 25. 3 August Merget, Ueber Erzieherinnen (Berlin, 1853), p. 3; H. H. Friedlander, Die Forderungen unserer Zed hinsichtlich der Erziehung und Bildung des weiblichen Geschlechts (EIberfeld and Iserlohn, 1847), pp. 30-31; Luise BUchner, Die Frauen und ihr Beruf (Frankfurt, 1856), pp. 96-99.

59

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establish women's seminars.4 In 1850, Theodor Fliedner, creator of the order of Protestant deaconesses in Germany, maintained that women teachers did a better job than men of instilling "womanly modesty, morality, and discipline, love of cleanliness, a sense of order, and sensitivity" in young girls. According to August Merget, men could not educate girls without female assistance because "we are either too coarse or too polite, not to mention that there are many feminine things that even with our best efforts we do not understand." 5 Although all the individuals cited in the preceding paragraph were Protestants, the perceived need for girls to be taught by women was stronger in Catholic areas of Germany, especially in Bavaria. In 1799, a government decree abolishing, at least on paper, coeducational elementary schools stated that girls should be taught only by women. Yet the dissolution of the convents and teaching orders under Montgelas meant that the traditional source of women teachers disappeared. Only in 1814 did the government establish a secular seminar for women, which admitted twelve young women to a two-year program every other year. This first state-run seminar was closed in 1826, when Ludwig I readmitted teaching orders to Bavaria, but the municipal higher girls' school in Munich then absorbed its function.6 In 1836, the need for more teachers than the Catholic orders provided led the Bavarian government to admit lay women to the certification examination given male teachers. The decree stated, "Women teachers are imperative so that future mothers do not fail to learn the necessary sense of propriety and gentleness or allow knowledge to overpower the mind or lose the noble calling of Ger4

Johann Daniel Hensel, System der weibhchen Erziehung (Halle, 1787), as cited in Use Brehmer, ed., Lehrerinnen: Zur Geschkhte ernes Frauenberufes (Munich, 1980), p. 54; Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Improving the Status of Women, trans, and ed. Timothy F. Sellner (Detroit, 1979), p. 131; Elisabeth Blochmann, Das "Frauenzimmer" una die "Gelehrsamkeit": Eine Studie Uber die Anfange des Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1966), pp. 103-104; Josefine Zimmermann, Betty Glenn una ihre Bedeutung fur die Geschkhte der Mddchenbildung (Cologne, 1926), pp. 86-87. 5 Fliedner cited in Catherine Prelinger, "The Nineteenth-Century Deaconessate in Germany: The Efficacy of a Family Model," in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), p. 222; Merget, Ueber Erziehennnen, p. 8. 6 Joanne Frances Schneider, "An Historical Examination of Women's Education in Bavaria: Madchenschulen and Contemporary Attitudes about Them, 1799-1848" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1977), pp. 137-43; Gottfried Dostler, 1822-1922: Hundert jahre Hohere Madchenschule (Munich, 1922), pp. 22, 36. 60

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

man women."7 No provision was made for training such women, however, so prospective lay teachers had either to prepare privately for the examination or to enter courses at a convent. By 1869, orders supplied just 32 of 118 women teachers active in Munich, but only there and in Augsburg had lay teachers become so popular.8 The first documented seminar for women teachers in Prussia was that opened by Ernestine von Krosigk in Berlin in 1803. This institution received protection and a substantial subsidy from Friedrich Wilhelm III but never truly prospered, and it closed when its subsidy was withdrawn in 1810.9 In many ways, however, Krosigk's seminar found a successor in the Luisenstiftung established in 1811 as a memorial to the popular Queen Luise, who died in 1810. This unique institution offered a three-year course, charging no tuition, to young women between eighteen and twenty-four years of age, each of whom supervised a small group of girls between twelve and fifteen. The Luisenstiftung aimed at a family atmosphere where "feminine pursuits" received the same attention as academic subjects. As of 1838, it enrolled just six women training to be governesses and twenty-four pupils.10 In the areas of western Germany that were annexed to Prussia after the Napoleonic wars, some opportunities for formal teacher training had existed in the eighteenth century. The Ursuline nuns in Cologne had instructed some laywomen as well as members of their order. In Munster, from 1783 until 1826 the priest Bernhard Overberg had run a three-month continuation course for men and women already holding teaching positions. After Prussian rule was consolidated in the Rhineland, the cities of Cologne and Aachen instituted training programs in the 1820s, the second of 7

Schneider, "Women's Education in Bavaria," p. 148. Nuns were not required to pass any state examination. 8 Helmut Beilner, Die Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrerin, aufgezeigt an der Arbeit des bayerischen Lehrerinnenverems (1898-1933) (Munich, 1971), pp. 36, 1. For an example of lay teachers being educated in a convent, see Marianne Rieder, "Zur Geschichte der weiblichen Lehrerbildung in Schwaben wahrend der ersten Halite des 19. Jahrhunderts," Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins Dilhngen 82 (1980): 205-206. 9 Karl W. E. Bormann, Die Prufung der Lehrerinnen in Preussen nach ihrer Vorbereitung, Vollziehung und Wirkung (Berlin, 1867), pp. 1-24; Ernestine von Krosigk, Ausfithrliche Nachncht von der Einrwhtung und Verfassung des Koniglichen Seminariums fiir Erziehermnen und der damn verbundenen Tochterschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1804). 10 Bormann, Prufung der Lehrerinnen, pp. 24-29; and Blochmann, "Frauenzimmer", pp. 113-16, both of which reprint some of the original regulations of the Luisenstiftung. I have found remarkably little information about this institution. 61

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which was associated with a higher girls' school.11 In the early 1830s, the Royal Consistory of Munster issued a report calling for creation of a similar program because, as it claimed, "experience has shown that the girls' elementary schools, which are superintended by females, are in better condition than those taught by male teachers. We find in them more life and spirit, better evidence of improvement, and more confidence and attachment to their teacher." The Prussian government founded such a seminar in Munster in 1832, attaching it to a recently established higher girls' school. Although its director was a priest, the Munster seminar employed a number of women teachers in its two-year course. By 1848, about twenty girls entered the program each year. As late as 1867, however, the second-year class took only five hours of instruction on its own, six hours with the first-year class, and the rest with the upper grade of the girls' school.12 A second Catholic seminar with state support opened the same year in Paderborn. It took in students every two years, beginning with six in 1832 and admitting twenty-two by 1866. Only in 1855 did it obtain, through a bequest from a priest, a decent building where boarding facilities for some of the students could be created. Charitable donations and state subsidies allowed poor girls who could not afford the tuition, room, and board to attend the Paderborn seminar, which, its historian indicates, always had more applicants than it could admit.13 The year 1832 also witnessed the foundation of a seminar at the New Daughters' School in Berlin, later the Royal Augusta School. Only three months after this school had opened, its director, Karl Bormann, proposed such a seminar. In its early years the students did not pay tuition but served without compensation as part-time instructors in the school. Symptomatic of contemporary attitudes about women's roles and capacities was the exclusion of all science 11 Barbara Weber, "Die Geschichte der Kolner Ursulinenschule von 1639-1875" (inaugural diss., University of Cologne, 1930), pp. 35-36, 64-69, 74; "Bernhard Overberg," in Allgemeine Deutsche Bwgraphie, 25: 14-17; Marika Morschner, Entwicklung und Struktur der Lehrerinnenbildung: Studien zur Situation der Semtnare in der Rheinprovinz unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der staatlichen Einrichtungen (Rheinstetten, 1977), pp. 26-27. 12 "Seminary for Female Teachers," American Annals of Education and Instruction 1 (1831): 341-46, quotation on p. 341; Eugen Kuntze, Geschichte des staatlichen Lehrerinnen-Seminars zu Munster i. W. (Munster, 1925), pp. 14-18, 24, 67, 87, 48, 68. I would like to thank Jurgen Herbst for the first reference. 13 Wilhelm Sommer, Festschrift zur Feier des 50jahngen Bestehens des Kdnighchen Katholischen Lehrerinnenseminars zu Paderborn (Paderborn, 1882), pp. 8-25 passim.

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THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

instruction from the seminar. As early as 1838, Bormann added a special program, charging tuition, for girls who wanted just the academic courses without the special pedagogical work, though many graduates of this track would also obtain positions as governesses. This seminar had produced 140 teachers by 1845, and its alumnae filled sixty-four jobs in 1846 alone. Bormann and his successor, Merget, also gave public lectures on pedagogical topics, which were addressed mainly to governesses and women teachers interested in continuing their education.14 The Prussian state also contributed to a seminar established in 1840 in connection with the higher girls' school in Posen. An original subsidy of 200 Thaler (600 Marks) per year grew rapidly to 1,300 Thaler (3,900 Marks) as the seminar expanded from its original nine pupils to thirty by 1845 and fifty-one by 1869. Dormitories existed from 1854, for which girls could pay after they graduated and started working. The Posen seminar appears to have aimed primarily at the education of governesses for the landowning nobility of the province, but among its early pupils was the later school director and feminist leader Auguste Schmidt.15 In the 1830s and 1840s, other Protestant seminars opened as adjuncts to private or public schools in cities such as Breslau and Stargard. At the Mother House of the deaconess order in Kaiserswerth, Theodor Fliedner opened a course for elementary teachers in 1844 and added foreign languages for potential secondary teachers in 1855. An unusual aspect of the Kaiserswerth program was its willingness to admit women up to the age of thirty-five. One of the most influential early seminars was that established in 1849 by H. H. Friedlander in Elberfeld, where at first the students took some hours with the top grade at the higher girls' school and did some teaching in the lower grades.16 14

Karl Supprian, Zur Geschichte der Koniglichen Augusta-Schule una des Koniglichen Lehrennnen-Seminars zu Berlin (Berlin, 1882), pp. 22-29, 38; Bormann, Priifung der Lehrerinnen, pp. 52-55, and 30-94 passim; Karl W. E. Bormann, Ueber Erziehung und Unterricht (Berlin, 1847); and, for the case of a woman who heard Merget's lectures in the early 1850s, Klementine Wangemann, Agathe Bertling: Ein Lebensbild (Gotha, 1885), p. 19. 15 Otto Konopka, Geschichte der Koniglichen Luisenstiftung zu Posen (Posen, 1910), pp. 46-52. 16 Rudolf Dieck, Die Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen (Breslau, 1892), p. 33; Dora Prechel, Geschichte der Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Stargard in Pommern, 1837-1937 (Stargard, 1937), p. 17; Prelinger, "Deaconessate," pp. 221-22; Karl Rassfeld, "Die Entwicklung eines Lehrerinnen-Seminars seit funfzig Jahren," Die Mddchenschule 13

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This gradual proliferation of training programs for women teachers, as well as the continuing practice of young women obtaining governess or teaching positions with no formal training, encouraged the Prussian Ministry of Education to imitate Bavaria and introduce certification examinations, which began in the province of Brandenburg in 1837 and were extended to other parts of the state in 1845 and 1853. Little expertise was required beyond literacy, sound religious convictions, a smattering of pedagogical theory, and some knowledge of foreign languages for those who wanted to work in higher girls' schools. Women could be certified at age eighteen, male elementary teachers only at twenty. Women teachers themselves do not appear to have sought this form of "professionalization," which resulted more from the interest of government officials in exercising at least a modicum of control over the quality of women working in the schools.17 Formal pedagogical training for women spread to other parts of Germany after mid-century. A unique contribution came from Prince Otto Viktor von Schonburg-Waldenburg, who, motivated both by the Versorgungsprinzip and by concern for a shortage of male elementary schoolteachers, made very large donations of money to found seminars at Droyssig in the Prussian province of Saxony and at Callnberg in the kingdom of Saxony. For Droyssig, he provided 25,000 Thaler in capital, but it took several years to work out complete arrangements with the government so that the seminar could open in 1852. This institution soon consisted of a two-year course for elementary teachers, with a comprehensive fee of 180 Marks per year, and a three-year "governesses' institute," with a fee of 300 Marks. A small boarding school provided an opportunity for candidates to gain classroom experience. In the early 1860s, the seminar had twenty young women in each class, the governesses' institute, fifteen. By 1902, 1,077 women had graduated from the former, 887 from the latter. Located in such a small town, the Droyssig seminar was like a Protestant convent. (See illustrations 1 and 2.) Its first director, a pastor named Kritzinger, stayed for thirty-eight years, and many teachers remained for a quarter century or more. Yet some women found the atmosphere, as well as the requirement that they sleep in the dormitories with the pupils, unattractive enough to leave (1900): 277-82; and, for the recollections of an early student of Fnedlander's, Thekla Trinks, Lebensfiihrung einer deutschen Lehrenn (Eisenach, 1892), pp. 10-23. 17 Marie Martin, Die hohere Midchenschule in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1905), p. 36. 64

1. The Prussian seminar at Droyssig in the 1890s. Left: the seminar for elementary teachers; right: the governesses' institute.

2. The dining hall at Droyssig: elegant but austere.

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within a few years what they had expected to be a lifetime position.18 For the Callnberg seminar, Schonburg-Waldenburg provided 35,000 Thaler in 1855. After his death in 1859, the state took control of the program and established the first regulations for certifying women teachers in Saxony. The three-year course put a strong emphasis on training in religion and, contrary to the prince's original interest in elementary teachers, also devoted a significant amount of time to foreign languages for those students hoping for positions in higher girls' schools. Elsewhere in Saxony, Auguste Schmidt's private seminar in Leipzig began to train secondary teachers in 1865 and would produce 151 graduates by 1888.19 In Hannover, shortly after the city took over the former Hoftochterschule in 1853, it established a seminar modeled on that at the Royal Augusta School. In the neighboring state of Braunschweig, Henriette Breymann began training kindergarten teachers and governesses at her school outside Wolfenbiittel in 1864, then joined forces with Anna Vorwerk in a seminar at an old castle in the city itself in 1866. In this case, the pressure these women exerted helped to convince the state government to introduce rules for the certification of women teachers in 1868, the same year that the municipal girls' school in the city of Braunschweig began a seminar.20 In the south, Wurttemberg introduced its first examination for female elementary teachers in 1858 and allowed such women to work not only in girls' schools but also in the lower grades of boys' and coeducational schools. A state-supported Protestant seminar opened in that year in the small town of Markgroningen, a private Catholic institution two years later in Schwabisch-Gmund. Baden introduced similar regulations for elementary teachers in 1863.21 18 Paul Meyer, Droyssig, 1852-1902: Ein Festschrift zum 50jahngen Bestehen den Droyssiger Anstalten (Berlin, 1902), pp. 5-16, 65, 18, 36, 58, 98; Bormann, Prufung der Lehrennnen, pp. 104-34; Trinks, Lebensftihrung, pp. 155-81; D. Witt, Angenehm gemacht in dem Geliebten: Lebensbtld der Lehrenn Henriette Neumann (Neumiinster, 1908), pp. 32-33. Pages 110-30 of Meyer's book are a brief biography of Prince Schonburg-Waldenburg. 19 Rost, Entwicklung, pp. 246-53, 256. 20 Leon Wespy, Festschrift der Hbheren Tochterschule I zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens unter stadtischen Patronate (Hannover, 1903), pp. 71-72; Mary J. Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann: lhr Leben aus Briefen und Tagebuchern zusammengestellt und erliiutert, 2 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1922), 1: 243, 298-300; Martha Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk: Ein Lebensbtld (Wolfenbiittel, 1910), pp. 29-36; Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 27. 21 Pauline Herber, Das Lehrennnenwesen in Deutschland (Kempten and Munich,

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TEACHERS

The 1860s and early 1870s witnessed a rapid expansion in the number of seminars attached to public and private girls' schools. The Ursulines opened a seminar in Posen in 1860; the English Sisters, one at their school in Nymphenburg in 1873. Programs for training secondary teachers also began at two private schools in Bremen in 1859 and 1863, in Tilsit in 1860, in Dusseldorf in 1864, in Erfurt and Frankfurt in 1871, and in Brandenburg, Oldenburg, and Hamburg in 1872. In 1867, Karl Bormann could count thirtynine seminars of various types and sizes in Prussia alone.22 What accounts for this proliferation of programs for training women teachers? Shortages of male teachers for both elementary and higher girls' schools certainly figured prominently in the decisions of the state governments to create seminars and certification procedures. Especially as the elementary schools established more separate classes and as some larger cities chose to found separate schools for girls, the perceived need for women teachers expanded. In Berlin, for example, women were hired for the first time in the city schools in 1863; by 1880, they totaled 461 out of 1,490 public elementary teachers in the capital.23 As will be discussed in Chapter Four,24 the 1860s witnessed a sudden increase in concern about the number of young women from the middle classes who did not marry. Parents worried about their daughters' futures appear to have become more willing to see 1906), p. 29; Albert Deibele, Die Lehrerbildung in Schwabisch Gmiind in den jahren 1825-1962, 2 vols. (Schwabisch Gmiind, 1962), 1: 89-101; Karl A. Schmid, ed., Encyklopadie des gesamten Erziehungs- und Unterrichtswesens, vol. 4 (Gotha, 1865), p. 255. 22 Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, p. 52; Theodolinde Winkler, ed., Hundert Jahre im Dienste der hbheren Madchenbildung, 2 vols. (Munich, 1935), 1: 127; Gustaf Janson, Zur fiinfundsiebzigjdhngen Jubelfeier des Stadtischen Lyzeums Janson (Bremen, 1934), p. 21; Franz Koch, Ew Beitrag zur Geschichte des Tilsiter Madchenschulwesens (Tilsit, 1911), pp. 79-81; Viktor Uellner, Zur Geschichte der stadtischen Luisenschule und der mit ihr verbundenen Lehrennnenbildungsanstalt zu Dusseldorf (1837-1887) (Dusseldorf, 1887), pp. 46-47; Gottfried Spanuth, Jubilaumsschrift der Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Erfurt, 1811/27-1927 (Erfurt, 1927), p. 18; Maria Rudolph, Die Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Otto Schlander (Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979), p. 255; Otto Felsberg, Geschichte des stadtischen Lyzeums zu Brandenburg, 1825-1925 (Brandenburg, 1925), p. 66; Karl Wobcken, Aus der Madchenschule (Oldenburg, 1876), p. 97n; Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, "Die Klosterschule von 1872 bis zum ersten WeItkrieg: Beitrag zur Geschichte der hoheren Madchenbildung in Hamburg," Zeitschrift des Vereins fur Hamburgische Geschichte 58 (1972): 8-9; Bormann, Priifung der Lehrerinnen, pp. 135-38. 23 Walther Hardt, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Lissa, 1905), pp. 10-11. For a general discussion of the rise of women elementary schoolteachers, see Use Gahlings and Ella Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin: Sozialgeschichte und Gegenwartslage (Heidelberg, 1961). 24 See pp. 99-104. 67

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such girls continue their educations for two or three more years as a form of insurance. School directors as well had important reasons to establish seminars: they could bring higher prestige, new tuition income, a chance to instruct older pupils, and a supply of inexpensive instructors for the lower grades. Several directors continued their seminars as private endeavors after cities took over their schools. The rapid growth in the number of seminars and in their overall enrollments produced some complaints about an oversupply of women teachers. As early as the late 1850s, some graduates of the seminar at the Royal Augusta School who wanted to remain in the Berlin area could not find jobs of the type they desired. An influential private school director, Marie Calm from Kassel, claimed in 1870 that employment prospects as well as pay for women teachers were so poor in Germany that many were forced to seek positions abroad. The historian of the Paderborn seminar reported that even Catholic elementary teachers had difficulty finding jobs around 1870.25 Yet other evidence suggests that any oversupply was limited in scope and duration. Shortages of male teachers did not disappear at this time but actually worsened as the expansion of boys' secondary schools outpaced the supply of teachers of modern languages and sciences. In fact, a young widow named Marie Isenberg was hired in 1871 to teach English at a boys' Realschule in the Wurttemberg town of CaIw, a unique occurrence in Germany at this time.26 Droyssig graduates appear never to have had difficulty finding jobs, and in 1874 the demand for graduates of the Paderborn seminar was so strong that its director decided to double the enrollment. In 1874 as well, the government of Saxony opened its second state-supported seminar in Dresden, and Wurttemberg created its first seminar for female secondary schoolteachers as an adjunct to the Katharinenstift. Four years later, a shortage of elementary teachers in Schleswig-Holstein led the Prussian govern25 Supprian, Geschichte der Konighchen Augusta-Schule, p. 45; Marie Calm, Die Stellung der deutschen Lehrennnen (Berlin, 1870), p. 10; Sommer, Festschrift, p. 25. 26 This woman, after remarriage, became the mother of Hermann Hesse: see Siegfried Greiner, "Marie Hesse," in Lebensbdder aus Schwaben und Franken, vol. 11 (Stuttgart, 1969), pp. 334-35. On the shortage of teachers for boys' secondary schools, which led to the opening of the philosophical faculties of Prussian universities to Realgymnasium graduates, see James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1983), pp. 65-66.

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ment to establish a seminar in Augustenburg.27 Women may have had difficulty finding positions in wealthy families or in the locations of their choice, but a general oversupply of female teachers does not appear to have existed during the late 1860s and 1870s. Despite the variety in the size and sponsorship of seminars for women in this period, one can discern many similarities among them. AU had to cope with the minimal background that many entering students must have brought. At the Cloister School in Hamburg, all twenty-six young women in the first seminar class of 1872 proved to be "completely helpless" in doing arithmetic problems involving fractions. Because women were not expected to teach science, there was little or no instruction in it at the seminars: Callnberg, for example, offered just one hour a week during all of its three-year course. Many of these programs for training female educators relied heavily on male teachers, including some university graduates: the seminar at the Katharinenstift employed twelve men and three women in 1899; that at Schwabish-Gmund did not hire its first woman until 1904. Prussia did not even prescribe a curriculum for its seminars for women, although most other states did establish similar programs for both sexes, except for women's instruction in handicrafts.28 Most German states allowed women to take the certification examinations at age eighteen. One might expect these tests to have posed great difficulties for such young candidates, but this does not appear to have been the case. At the seminar of the Luise School in Dusseldorf, all 197 candidates passed the teachers' examination between 1864 and 1886. Thirty out of 30 passed in Hannover in 1872. According to fairly reliable sources, no student from Anna Vorwerk's seminar in Wolfenbuttel or Helene Lange's at Lucie Crain's private school in Berlin ever failed the examination. Even those who, like Gertrud Baumer, prepared privately for their certification did not have many problems passing. At the seminar 27

Meyer, Droyssig, p. 62; Sommer, Festschrift, p. 26; Rost, Entwicklung, pp. 26163; Emil Heintzeler, Festbertcht uber die Feier des 25jahngen Bestehens der hoheren Lehrennnenseminars zu Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 1899), pp. 16-18; Walter Kannegieser, ed., Das Koniglich evangelische Lehrennnen-Seminar Augustenburg (Schleswig, 1903), p. 11. 28 Hauschild-Thiessen, "Klosterschule," p. 21; Rost, Entwicklung, p. 249; Heintzeler, Festbertcht, p. 24; Deibele, Lehrerbildung, 1: 93; Arnold Sachse, Die Sonderstellung der Lehrerinnen (Munich, 1923), pp. 27, 33. See also Karl Supprian, Frauengestalten in der Geschichte der Padagogik (Leipzig, 1897), p. 277, on the lack of women teachers in the seminar at the Royal Augusta School. 69

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for Catholic elementary teachers in Paderborn, 329 out of 369 external candidates passed between 1832 and 1874.29 One other regulation affected most women teachers in Germany during this period: a ban on the employment of married women. A historian of Bavarian teachers has noted that exceptions to this ban were granted frequently before 1867 but less often thereafter. A law passed in Wurttemberg in 1877 reaffirmed this policy. Only in Hesse and Baden did laws dating from 1874 and 1879, respectively, allow the ministries of education to grant exemptions under exceptional circumstances. In Prussia, there was no relaxation of the ban on married women teachers until after the turn of the century. 30

E N T E R I N G THE T E A C H I N G P R O F E S S I O N

Available autobiographical and biographical materials about women teachers in nineteenth-century Germany provide valuable, if unquantifiable, evidence about the extent to which teaching served as a haven for middle-class young women with little hope of marrying or of being provided for by their families. Much of it confirms the contemporary view of the teaching profession as a form of last resort, but not all; German women entered seminars and educational careers for other reasons as well. In the first years of the nineteenth century, Ernestine von Krosigk's seminar in Berlin offered reduced tuition to daughters or orphans of pastors and teachers, an indication of the type of clientele she expected. According to Anna Vorwerk's biographer, almost all the young women who attended her seminar in Wolfenbuttel during the last third of the century faced the need to earn their own living. Some women such as Gertrud Baumer, whose father died when she was a child, or Hedwig Dransfeld, the future Center party deputy who was orphaned at age eight, knew from an early age that they would have no dowry and should expect to go into teaching. Others did not turn to teaching until family crises struck in their early adult years. Kathinka Halein became a govern29

Uellner, Luisenschule zu Dusseldorf, p. 47; Margarethe Muller, Carlo. Wenckebach, Pioneer (Boston, 1908), p. 100; Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk, p. 87; Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, 2: 393; Gertrud Baumer, Lebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende (Tubingen, 1933), p. 109; Sommer, Festschrift, p. 47. 30 Sachse, Sonderstellung, pp. 96-120, 138; Beilner, Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrerin, p. 160; Julius Desselberger, Geschichte des hbheren Madchenschulwesens in Wurttemberg (Berlin, 1916), p. 275; Hardt, Lehrennnenfrage, p. 47. 70

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

ess in her mid-twenties after her mother's death. The later founder of the Association of German Women Teachers in England, Helene Adelmann, began teaching some of her neighbors' children when her father died. Jenny Hirsch, later a feminist journalist and the translator into German of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, opened a private school in her home town of Zerbst after her parents died. Marie Housselle, a pastor's daughter, entered a seminar in her late teens after her father's death; although she taught only five years before marrying, she would later found an important journal for women teachers, Die Lehrerin in Schule una Haus. Orphaned at sixteen, Helene Lange does not appear to have considered any alternative other than teaching to supplement her inherited income.31 Other women turned to careers in teaching after disappointed hopes for marriage. Henriette Breymann started her first school at age twenty-seven shortly after breaking off her engagement. Anna Vorwerk, who did not have to work to support herself, nonetheless considered herself to have been saved from a life of boredom when she met Breymann and discovered her own calling for teaching at age twenty-seven. After graduating from the Katharinenstift in 1890, Vera Vollmer spent six years at home before returning to the seminar at age twenty-two; she would later become the first woman appointed to a post in Wurttemberg's ministry of education. Lucie Crain, who ran the school where Lange worked, had lived at home until her forties before being forced by her parents' deaths to find an occupation.32 Young widows could also choose to become teachers and were especially welcomed in the deaconessate. Marie Hecht, who 31 Krosigk, Nachricht, p. 27; Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk, p. 116; Baumer, Lebensweg, p. 96; Marianne Punder, "Hedwig Dransfeld," in Westfalische Lebensbilder, vol. 12, ed. Robert Stopperich (Miinster, 1979), pp. 145-46; Stanley Zucker, "Female Political Opposition in Pre-1848 Germany: The Role of Kathinka Zitz-Halein," in German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Fout (New York, 1984), p. 135; Magdalene Gaudian, "Helene Adelmann: Ein Lebensbild," in Dem Andenken an Helene Adelmann (Berlin, 1916), pp. 7-8; Lina Morgenstern, Die Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts: Biographische una culturhistorische Zeit- und Charaktergemalde, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1888-1891), 3: 217-18; "Marie Loeper-Housselle," in Sophie Pataky, ed., Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1898), 1: 513-14; Helene Lange, Lebensermnerungen (Berlin, 1930), p. 68. 32 Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, 1: 161-63; Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk, p. 29; Hildegard Guide, "Vera Vollmer: Wegweiserin der Madchenbildung, 18741953," in Lebensbilder aus Schwaben und Franken, vol. 14 (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 435-36; Lange, Lebensermnerungen, p. 116.

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would be a strong supporter of Lange in the founding of the German Women Teachers' Association in 1890, became a teacher in her home town of Tilsit following the death of her husband. Minna Latzel chose to take the certification examination and look for a job as a governess after losing her first husband and a child before she was twenty-six. In what was certainly an unusual case for the nineteenth century, Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow began her propaganda for and teaching in kindergartens after divorcing at age thirty-seven.33 Throughout the nineteenth century, many middle- and upperclass parents refused to allow their daughters to become teachers or even to enroll in seminars precisely because of this notion that such steps were taken only by unmarried and unsupported women. In the 1830s, Fanny Lewald's father would not allow her to teach outside her own family despite the fact that her marriage prospects appeared slight. Even late in the century, Alice Salomon, Helene Stocker, Marie-Elisabeth Luders, and Maria Munk were prohibited by their parents from entering seminars after graduation from higher girls' schools, because young women from respectable families were expected to stay at home.34 Yet the persistence of this view of teaching as a last resort should not cause us to ignore the positive attraction that education possessed as the only field in which talented middle-class women could find satisfying employment in this period. One indication of this appeal is the number of female pioneers in other professions who had first been teachers. The first five German women who studied medicine in Switzerland and returned home to practice— Emilie Lehmus, Franziska Tiburtius, Anna Kuhnow, Agnes Bluhm, and Elisabeth Winterhalter—had all been teachers or gov33

Helene Lange, "Marie Hecht," in Kampfzeiten: Aufsatze una Reden aus vier jahrzehnten, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1928), 2: 360-63; Else Luders, Minna Cauer. Leben una Werk (Gotha and Stuttgart, 1925), p. 15; Maria Miiller, Frauen im Dienste Fwbels (Leipzig, 1928), p. 41. After the death of her second husband, the prominent educator Eduard Cauer, Minna Latzel Cauer became one of the leading radical feminists in Germany. 34 Fanny Lewald-Stahr, Meine Lebensgeschichte, ed. Gisela Brinkler-Gabler (Frankfurt, 1980), p. 173; "Alice Salomon," in Elga Kern, ed., Fuhrende Frauen Europas (Munich, 1928), pp. 4-5; Helene Stocker, ms. autobiography in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, ch. 2, p. 1; Marie-Elisabeth Luders, Furchte Dich nicht (Cologne, 1963), p. 40; Maria Munk, "Rise and Fall of German Feminism, the Life History of a Woman Judge," ms. autobiography in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, pt. 1, pp. 14-15. 72

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

ernesses before entering the university.35 The same was true of such women as Elvira Castner, one of the first female dentists in Germany, Ella Mensch, who earned a doctorate in German from the University of Zurich before pursuing a career in journalism and writing, Frieda Duensing, later a law student and social worker, Else von Richthofen, the first woman appointed as a factory inspector, and Emmy Noether, who despite her tremendous talent for mathematics was certified to teach English and French.36 For the many girls who enrolled in seminars around age sixteen, teacher training served as an escape from the boring home life of the middle-class teenager or, as was previously mentioned, as a type of insurance policy in case they ever had to earn a living. Marie von Bunsen reports that she attended Crain's seminar in Berlin in the 1870s simply because she was not yet old enough to debut in society. Anita Augspurg also prepared for the certification examination even though she had "neither desire nor talent" for teaching. In the 1860s, the pedagogical courses at Henriette Breymann's seminar attracted many wealthy girls who, "with few exceptions, sought no teaching positions."37 As early as 1856, Luise Buchner criticized the way that pursuit of a teaching certificate had become fashionable even for young women with no interest in becoming educators. Similar comments became more frequent in the late 1860s and early 1870s, at the time when so many new seminars were being opened. For Marie Stoephasius, an influential private school director at that time, this phenomenon made women teachers appear to lack seriousness and dedication, and thus damaged the efforts of active teachers to gain respect and better working conditions. Yet as late as 1889, Lange could write on the basis of her thirteen years as a seminar director that the "great number of candidates crowding the exam35 On Lehmus, Die Frau 8 (1900-1901): 343; Franziska Tiburtius, Ennnerungen einer Achtzigjahrigen, 2d ed., enl. (Berlin, 1925), pp. 48-95; "Anna Kuhnow," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: 464; Use Szagunn, "Agnes Bluhm—Arztin und Forscherin," Die Arztin 16 (1940); 5; "Elisabeth Winterhalter," in Elga Kern, ed., Fiihrende Frauen Europas, n.s. (Munich, 1930), pp. 31-32. 36 "Elvira Castner," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: 124; "Ella Mensch," ibid., 2; 33-34; Ricarda Huch et al., eds., Frieda Duensing: Ein Buch der Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1922), pp. 230-31; Martin Green, The Von Richthofen Sisters (New York, 1974), p. 16; James W. Brewer and Martha K. Smith, Emmy Noether: A Tribute to Her Life and Work (New York, 1981), p. 9. 37 Marie von Bunsen, Die Welt in der ich lebte (Leipzig, 1929), p. 45; Lida Gustava Heymann, with Anita Augspurg, Erlebtes—Erschautes, ed. Margrit Twellmann (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), pp. 8-10; Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, 1: 279.

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ination for teachers' certificates . . . are not all driven to it by material want, but a considerable number of them simply look for a firm discipline, a definite aim to work up to." 38 Data from a few seminars support this view of teacher training serving as a continuation of general education. Of 2,595 women who attended the seminar at Hannover's municipal higher girls' school between 1856 and 1903, only 1,889 chose to take the certification examination. During the first twenty-five years of the seminar at the Katharinenstift, 37 out of 496 students did not complete the course. Excluding the class that had just graduated in 1899, only 214 out of 432 held teaching positions; 14 had died, 4 had other careers, 118 were married, and 82 were single but not working. With women eligible for certification at the age of eighteen, many could view teaching as a short-term career to be abandoned upon marriage: of 299 women who quit positions at elementary schools in Berlin between 1863 and 1889, 182 did so to marry. 39 Lay Catholic women trained as elementary teachers appear to have treated their work more as a lifetime commitment. The historian of the seminar at Paderborn indicates that of 468 graduates in its first fifty years, only 21 had not been loyal to their calling. Another male teacher reports that of twenty-nine Catholic teachers he knew in Westphalia between 1874 and 1884, not one had married. The conventlike seminar at Droyssig produced similar results: among the first 108 graduates, only 4 married, while 13 did not take teaching jobs. 40

T Y P I C A L A N D A T Y P I C A L CAREERS I N T E A C H I N G

Although the type, number, and location of women's teaching jobs, as well as the duration of their careers, varied widely in the nineteenth century, some relatively common characteristics merit brief discussion. One is the persistence, even following the establishment of numerous seminars after mid-century, of the practice of private preparation for teaching. That neither Helene Adel38 Buchner, Frauen una ihr Beruf, pp. 68-69; Morgenstern, Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2: 157; Marie Stoephasius, Ziele und Wege der weiblkhen Erziehung nach den Anforderungen der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1868), pp. 14-16; Helene Lange, Higher Education of Women in Europe, trans. L. R. Klemm (New York, 1890), p. 127. 39 Wespy, Festschrift der Hoheren Tochterschule I, p. 72; Heintzeler, Festbencht, p. 29; Wilhelm Karl Bach, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Elberfeld, 1905), p. 26. 40 Sommer, Festschrift, p. 38; Hermann Bruck, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Dortmund, 1884), p. 15; Meyer, Droyssig, p. 62.

74

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

mann, founder of the Association of German Women Teachers in England, nor Helene Lange, the key force behind the German Women Teachers' Association, attended a seminar indicates that lack of formal training did not necessarily hinder one's career. Large numbers of young women began their careers as governesses. For girls of eighteen, or in some cases even younger, working within a family provided a much more protected environment for their first experience on their own than did employment in a school. Such positions, although requiring long hours and a great deal of tact in one's relations with one's employer, were also much less strenuous than handling the typical class of forty or fifty pupils in the lower grades of a major municipal higher girls' school or the seventy elementary school pupils whom Gertrud Baumer encountered in her first job. When the Saxon legislature debated creation of a second seminar for elementary teachers in 1866, it was noted that "only half of the graduates of the Callnberg seminar are physically strong enough to take positions in public schools, the other half look for positions as governesses in families."41 For the most part, women do not appear to have remained as governesses for their entire careers. Klara Haym, a graduate of the Augusta School's seminar, worked as a governess for eleven years, then as a teacher for eight, before taking over a private school in Halle at age forty-two. Auguste Sprengel became a governess in Mecklenburg, a state that did not yet have certification for women teachers, before her seventeenth birthday; six years later she took the Prussian examination as the condition of being hired at Mecklenburg's second public girls' school in Waren. Pauline Herber, who would later create the Association of Catholic German Women Teachers, worked briefly as a governess before entering a seminar at age seventeen, then held a number of posts in families before settling down to teach in an elementary school in her home town of Montabaur. Helene Lange also experienced four years as a governess before moving to Berlin at age twentythree to prepare for the certification examination.42 41 Mathilde Lammers, Deutsche Lehrerinnen im Auslande (Berlin, 1884), p. 12; Baumer, Lebensweg, p. 114; Rost, Entwicklung, p. 259. See Bormann, Priifung der Lehrerinnen, pp. 200-209, for a discussion of the relative advantages of being a governess and a schoolteacher. 42 Eugen Rambeau, Chronik des Stddtischen Lyzeums I nebst Studienanstalt zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens der Anstalt (Halle, 1933), p. 25; Auguste Sprengel, Erinnerungen aus meinem Schulleben (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1932), pp. 18-20; Martha Freundlieb,

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THREE

Many women sought positions in foreign countries, especially England or France. Some hoped to gain a more thorough knowl­ edge of the languages so as to enhance employment opportunities at home, where many schools tried to hire only women with ex­ perience abroad to teach French and English conversation.43 It also appears that governesses earned higher pay in other countries, at least for more desirable positions. Whereas Franziska Tiburtius earned 450 Marks a year working for a Pomeranian baron in the 1860s, Anna Mues received £60, or 1,200 Marks, from a family in Kent in 1869 and Thekla Trinks drew the substantial salary of £100, or 2,000 Marks, from the Sidney family in Devonshire in 1863. Trinks even viewed her job in England as a way to raise capital to be used in taking over a private school in Germany.44 Although Helene Adelmann held various jobs in England for over a decade before founding the governesses' association in 1876, and then remained there until World War I, most women regarded positions abroad as no more permanent than governess jobs at home. Marie Hillebrand worked in France before the revo­ lution of 1848, briefly in England after it, but then opened her pri­ vate school near Frankfurt. Marie Calm, who became an influential teacher and writer on women's issues, spent three years each in England and Russia before returning to Germany to head a girls' school. Tiburtius went to England to improve her knowledge of the language before taking the Prussian examination for school di­ rectors, although she would change her mind and decide to study medicine. After graduation from the Callnberg seminar in 1867, Elisabeth Kuhne was a governess in France for three years and in England for several more before opening a Pensionat with an older sister when she was twenty-five.45 The well-documented lives of several women illustrate the variPauhne Herber: Έλη Lebensbild (Paderborn, 1936), pp. 17-29; Lange, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 94-95. 43 For examples, see Elisabeth Toelpe, Geschichte des Lyzeums der evangelischen Kirchengemeinde KoIn, 1827-1927 (Cologne, 1927), p. 98; Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, pp. 58, 63; and Prechel, Komgin-Luise-Schule zu Stargard, pp. 14, 19, 75. 44 Tiburtius, Ennnerungen, p. 48; Anna Mues, Lebenserinnerungen und Reise-Eindrticke einer Erzieherin (Osnabrtick, 1894), p. 40; Trinks, Lebensfuhrung, p. 186. 45 Gaudian, "Helene Adelmann," pp. 8-10, 26; Jean Roland, Marie Hillebrand (1821-1894): Ihr Leben und erziehliches Wirken (Giessen, 1895), pp. 17, 24; Alice Bousset, Zwet Vorkdmpferinnen fiir Frauenbildung: Luise Biichner, Marie Calm (Hamburg, 1893), pp. 28-34; Tiburtius, Ennnerungen, p. 77; Karl Hoeber, Elisabeth GnauckKuhne: Ein BiId ihres Lebens und Schaffens (Monchen-Gladbach, 1917), pp. 23-24. 76

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

ety and the extremes that a teaching career could involve in the nineteenth century. Bertha Buchwald, daughter of a mining official in a village in Braunschweig, was born in 1816. She did not seek employment until her father became ill in 1841; then she found a situation as a "lady helper" in Hamburg. After changing positions twice, she had two governess jobs before moving to a pastor's family in northern Schleswig, which still belonged to Denmark. After six years in an area where she and her employers' family were the only German speakers, Buchwald accepted a position in Valparaiso, Chile, for which she signed a five- to sevenyear contract. Following four months at sea, she discovered that her new employer had twelve children rather than the two she had expected; other conditions were also not to her liking. She managed to get out of her contract after three years, but the employer would not pay her full fare back to Germany, so she had to find another job in Valparaiso. After three more years, she and an English woman opened a school there in 1861, but in a few months Buchwald became ill and decided to return to Germany. For thirteen more years, she led a less exotic life as the director of a private school in Braunschweig.46 Agathe Bertling, a merchant's daughter, was born in 1823 in Konigsberg but grew up in Danzig. As a teenager, she began working as a glorified babysitter for a local family, then at eighteen became a governess in the house of a consul. This position took her to Berlin for a year, following which she found employment in an East Prussian parsonage for two years. Returning to Berlin in 1846 to pass the certification examination, she stayed for nine months to teach in a small school established by several families. She then went to work for a noble family in the Pomeranian town of Lauenburg, but returned again to Berlin when her employer was elected to the Prussian legislature. After four years she moved to the home of this man's brother in Schlawe, where she remained for six years. At the age of thirty-five, after five different jobs, Bertling opened her own private school in Schlawe. She moved this to the larger city of Danzig in 1864, where she finally put down roots and ran her school for seventeen years.47 A woman who spent her entire teaching career as a governess was Anna Mues, born in 1838 into a prosperous farming family in 46

Bertha Buchwald, Erinnerungsblatter aus dem Leben einer deutschen Lehrerin (Weimar, 1889), passim. 47 Wangemann, Agathe Bertling, passim. 77

THREE

northwestern Germany. An experience as a mother's helper in her mid-teens convinced Mues that she wanted to become a teacher, so she returned to her higher girls' school for two years of further private instruction. At nineteen she found a position in the household of a landowner in East Friesland, where she brought high German into the family. Here she stayed for nine years, until the youngest of the three children she taught was sent to a Pensionat. After two years with a family in Emden, she received an offer to teach the two daughters of a German general living in Constantinople, but her relatives convinced her that England would be a more desirable place to work than the Ottoman Empire. Through a friend she found a job with a family in Kent, which she thoroughly enjoyed for its four-year duration. By advertising in a clerical newspaper, she found another position in 1873 in the household of a British aristocrat. From 1875 to 1879 Mues worked for the wealthy Tindal family, who had twelve servants plus two governesses and a tutor for their five daughters. She then accompanied the family on a two-year journey to visit their property in Australia. At the age of forty-three she returned to Germany and does not appear to have taught anymore, although her memoirs include descriptions of later trips to the United States and Russia.48 Thekla Trinks was a lawyer's daughter born in 1831 in Meiningen. After graduating from the most exclusive girls' school in town, she soon found her life at home to be hollow. There were no seminars for women in any of the Thuringian states in 1850, but Trinks knew one young woman who had traveled to Elberfeld to study under Friedlander and convinced her parents to allow her to follow this example. She passed her examination after eighteen months of study and found her first job in a small three-class school in Siegen. She disliked this position, so Friedlander helped her get another in a larger school in Wesel, where she had an apartment in the school building but no place to cook her meals. (See illustration 3.) In 1857, the local pastor, a man named Wolters, aided her in obtaining a governess position with the St. John family on the west coast of Ireland. Although she liked the family and the experience of living by the ocean, Trinks felt that her intellectual life was being crippled by the isolation. She was thus ready to move when Wolters wrote the next year to ask if she was interested in a job at a school for girls that the Prussian government and the Protestant Knights of St. John (Johanniterorden) wanted to establish in Bucharest, Rumania. Arriving in Berlin from Ireland, 48

Mues, Lebenserinnerungen, passim. 78

V

•

Ii rj 1 3. Converted house occupied by the Evangelical Tochterschule, Wesel, in the 1850s.

4. Building constructed for the same school by the city of Wesel in 1899.

THREE

the twenty-seven-year-old Trinks received a promise from Ferdinand Stiehl, the official in charge of Prussian elementary education, that if conditions in Rumania proved unbearable he would try to provide her with a job at Droyssig. After traveling by train and steamer to Bucharest, she learned that the local German consul wanted deaconesses to teach in the school, to give it "not only the reality but also the appearance of respectability." So she and another woman were initiated as deaconesses by the local pastor and opened the school, which quickly had more than thirty pupils of various nationalities taking most of their classes in French. Yet Bucharest proved to be only an interlude for Trinks. In late 1859 the Mother House in Kaiserswerth agreed to take over the school and send out regular deaconesses. Trinks returned to Germany and started working at a small school in the Westphalian town of Schwelm. Soon Stiehl contacted her, offering a position in the governesses' institute at Droyssig beginning in the fall of 1860. After three years of the stern life there, Trinks began to think of ways to found her own school and decided to seek a well-paid governess job in England, which she did find. Back in Germany again by 1867, she served briefly as the senior woman teacher in the municipal higher girls' school in Dortmund, then returned to Meiningen to take over an existing Pensionat. As mentioned in Chapter Two, her building was destroyed in a fire in 1874, and Trinks moved her establishment to Stuttgart. Within several years—she does not say how many—she and her partner had earned enough "that we could have lived comfortably and worryfree on the interest of the accumulated capital."49 One of the most checkered teaching careers imaginable thus ended in prosperity. Only the career of Carla Wenckebach can compare in variety to that of Trinks. Born in 1853, Wenckebach grew up on an estate in East Friesland. Sent at age twelve to the higher girls' school in HiIdesheim, where she lived with an uncle, she quickly decided that she wanted to be a teacher like the woman who taught her French and literature there. Hildesheim had no seminar, so in 1870 Wenckebach went to Hannover for her teacher training. After obtaining her certification, she took a job with a Scottish family for a year, then switched to a second household where she had charge of five children. By early 1874 she could write, "I have come to the conclusion that the narrowing and humiliating life of a governess is extremely distasteful to me." Yet, after traveling to visit relatives living in St. Petersburg, Wenckebach took another governess job 49

Trinks, Lebensfiihrung, pp. 114, 243, and passim. 80

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

with a Russian family in Tiflis, where she again had the "Sisyphus-like activity" of teaching five children of differing ages. Her next stop was Brussels, where she worked briefly in a fashionable Pensionat, but sickness led her to return home and spend two years teaching her younger siblings and writing. In 1879, she left again to accept a post with a German-born merchant who lived in New York. After three years she gave this up to become a tutor of German, an activity that soon led her to a job at a language school in Amherst, Massachusetts. There she was called on by Alice Freeman, the president of Wellesley College, who invited her to join the faculty of this recently founded institution. Her sister even followed her to Wellesley a few years later.50 These five examples of women who had successful teaching careers suggest the problems of finding good jobs, frequent relocations, and solitude, which must have been worse for less talented or less fortunate governesses. A position in a school meant less isolation, but it could also involve severe loneliness for young women in unfamiliar towns. Suse Schmidt, who arrived in 1880 at the same school in Wesel where Trinks had worked in the 1850s, later recalled, "For two years I felt myself to be a stranger in Wesel and suffered immensely from homesickness."51 Wenckebach never sought a position in a public school because, as she wrote: If I were born a martyr and had been brought up on the whey of resignation, I might enjoy being a fifth wheel on the teaching staff of a German high school for girls, and I might learn to live on a woman's salary of two hundred and twenty-five dollars per year. As it is, I not only resent the favoritism shown to men in the unequal distribution of educational advantages, of teaching opportunities, and of salary, but I am also keenly sensible of the fact that, beside an overwhelming majority of better educated, better paid, more highly respected men of naturally aggressive inclinations, a woman teacher could not exercise either a very deep or a very wide educational influence.52 50

Miiller, Carta Wenckebach, pp. 126, 175, and passim. Suse Schmidt's recollections in Otto Hollweg, ed., Festschrift zur Feier des 75jahrigen Bestehens der Stadtische Oberlyzeums in Wesel (Wesel, 1928), p. 43. On the ambiguous social position and isolation of governesses, see M. Jeanne Peterson, "The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society," in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1972), pp. 3-19. 52 Miiller, CeWa Wenckebach, p. 178. This salary of $225 is, I assume, Miiller's conversion of a figure around 900 Marks. 51

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Salaries and opportunities for men and women certainly differed markedly. Pay for elementary teachers was not regulated by state laws before 1870; but when women were brought under Prussian pension regulations in 1885, the government recommended that their salaries be 75 to 80 percent of men's. Only in 1897 did the state stipulate minimum salaries: 900 Marks for men and 700 Marks for women. In Bavaria, a law of 1902 fixed the mininum pay at 1,000 Marks for men, 800 for women.53 Salaries were much better at public higher girls' schools, but similar disparities between men and women were the rule. When the Luise School in Berlin opened in 1838, the director received 2,400 Marks; a university graduate, 1,800: seminar-trained men, between 900 and 1,200; the senior woman teacher, 1,050; and other women, between 480 and 540. At the Katharinenstift around 1860, the director earned 2,350 Marks and male teachers between 1,350 and 1,725; the woman who headed the boarding facilities received 1,800 Marks plus room and board, but women in the elementary classes earned only 750 Marks. When the city of Luneburg took over a girls' school in 1875, pay for the director was set at 3,900 Marks, for academically trained men at 3,000, for male elementary teachers from 1,650 to 2,100, for women between 900 and 1,350. In Dusseldorf, salaries in the city school in 1876 ranged from 3,000 Marks for university graduates to 2,000 for male seminar graduates to 1,400 for women.54 Within the public higher girls' schools, women teachers continued to be concentrated in the lower grades, and in many cases they formed only a minority of the faculty. In 1871, Leipzig's new school hired fifteen men and just two women. As of 1874, the Luise School in Berlin employed three male university graduates, eleven men with seminar training, and seven women. That the faculty of Viktor Uellner's school in Dusseldorf included just two other men and eleven women in 1874 is a clear indication that it was still a private school. Eleven years later, however, after being 53 Brehmer, Lehrerinnen, p. 103; Sachse, Sonderstellung, p. 55; Beilner, Emanzipatwn der bayerischen Lehrenn, p. 121. 54 Eduard Muret, Geschichte der ersten stadtischen hoheren Tochterschule, der Luisenschule in Berlin (Berlin, 1888), p. 28; Emil Heintzeler, Das Komgin-Katharina-Stift in Stuttgart: Seine Geschichte von 1818 bis 1918 (Stuttgart, 1918), p. 34; Arthur Zechlin, Geschichte der Luneburger Hoheren Bildungsanstalten fur die weibhche jugend (Luneburg, 1925), p. 14; Uellner, Luisenschule zu Dusseldorf, p. 63. I have converted Gulden and Thaler to Marks where necessary.

82

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS TABLE 3

Women Elementary Teachers in Prussia, 1861-1891 1861

1864

1875

1879

1881

1886

1891

1,321 Catholic Protestant 431 TOTAL 1,752

1,549 463 2,012

2,689 1,180 3,869

3,155 1,876 5,031

3,410 2,308 5,718

4,233 2,551 6,784

4,853 3,527 8,380

SOURCE: Pauline Herber, Das tehrerinnenwesen in Deutschland and Munich, 1906), p . 40.

(Kempten

taken over by the city, the same school employed six men and nine women.55 As Table 3 indicates, a striking characteristic of female elementary teachers in Prussia during the second half of the nineteenth century was the overrepresentation of Catholics. The addition of Prussia's new provinces in 1866 accounts for the large overall growth as well as for the disproportionate rise in the number of Protestants between 1864 and 1875. With the inclusion of the new provinces, the number of women teachers increased almost fivefold over thirty years, while the number of male teachers only doubled, from about 30,000 to about 60,000. Protestant women tended to take jobs in cities: of 691 women teachers in Prussian villages and small towns as of 1861, 605 were Catholic, and 601 of these worked in the Rhineland and Westphalia. By 1886, Catholics still accounted for 2,309 out of 2,751 women teaching in rural areas. One illustration of the regional differences can be seen in the fact that Gertrud Baumer was one of four women in an elementary school in the Westphalian town of Kamen in the early 1890s but was the only woman when she moved to a school in the Protestant city of Magdeburg.56 Accurate statistics about women teachers in higher girls' schools in this era are more difficult to find. One estimate put the number in Prussian public and private institutions in 1878 at about 6,000. More fully documented figures for all German girls' schools 55 Rost, Entwicklung, p. 80; Muret, Luisenschule in Berlin, p. 72; Uellner, Luisenschule zu Diisseldorf, p. 56. 56 Bormann, Prufung der Lehrerinnen, p. 248; Hardt, Lehrerinnenfrage, p. 9; Gahlings and Moering, Volteschullehrerin, pp. 31-32; Baumer, Lebensweg, pp. 110, 128.

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around 1900 indicate that there were more than 9,164 women teachers.57 For both the elementary and the secondary schools, statistics from the time do not always distinguish clearly between full-time teachers and women who worked a few hours per week as sewing or music instructors. Information about graduates of individual seminars provides some indication of the relative proportion of women entering different types of teaching. Of the first 108 Droyssig graduates, 34 taught in elementary schools, 11 at higher girls' schools, and 45 as governesses. In 1884, only 4 out of 36 graduates of the Saxon seminars in Callnberg and Dresden took their first positions in public schools. Among the 214 women from the seminar at the Katharinenstift who were teaching in 1899, 88 were employed in schools, 86 in families, and 40 as private teachers. One estimate for 1899 puts 47 percent of all women teachers in elementary schools, 8 percent in public higher girls' schools, 19 percent in private schools, and 26 percent in families.58 SELF-HELP AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT

Confronted with low pay, a lack of pension rights, and limited opportunities for advancement except through the risky step of founding a private school, women teachers gradually began to establish organizations and institutions to help themselves. The first major step was the creation in 1869 of the Association of German Women Teachers and Governesses, the stimulus for which came from the recently founded German Women's Association. The latter group commissioned three individuals—Marie Calm from Kassel, Auguste Schmidt from Leipzig, and Auguste Weyrowitz, at one time governess for the children of the inventor and industrialist Werner von Siemens and then head of a private girls' school in Berlin—to represent the interests of women teachers at the annual convention of elementary teachers that met in Berlin in 1869. Eight years earlier, this organization had passed a resolution ad57

Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung ttn Spiegel reprasentativer Frauenzeitschriften: Ihre Anfange una erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), 1: 104; Gertrud Baumer, "Das Madchenschulwesen," in Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich, ed. Wilhelm Lexis, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1904), 2: 42326. Baumer provides a state-by-state listing of the number of higher girls' schools and of teachers, but does not have data on the latter for seventy-three private schools. 58 Meyer, Droyssig, p. 62; Rost, Entwicklung, p. 273; Heintzeler, Festbericht, p. 29; Gahlings and Moering, Volksschullehrerin, p. 29. 84

THE RISE OF WOMEN TEACHERS

mitting that women teachers were "necessary" in girls' schools but also insisting that women should not be school directors. The persistence of such attitudes encouraged Schmidt, Calm, and Weyrowitz to take the lead in establishing the separate association for women, which they hoped would develop a national constituency including mothers as well as teachers. These hopes were disappointed, as most of the six hundred women attracted to membership in the Association of Women Teachers and Governesses by the early 1870s were active educators from Berlin and its suburbs.59 This geographical concentration facilitated the major project of the Association of German Women Teachers and Governesses: creation of a retirement home for its members in Steglitz. With the leadership of Jeanne Mithene, a teacher at the Royal Augusta School, and support from Crown Princess Victoria, this home opened in 1879. Retired teachers could move into the home for a one-time payment of 400 Marks but would still be responsible for their own board. A separate organization, the Wilhelm-Augusta Women Teachers' Association, was created in Westphalia in 1879, and four years later it opened a home at Gandersheim where retired teachers paid, in addition to an entrance charge, a yearly fee of about 300 Marks, which covered food and some medical treatment. This organization soon opened a second home at Wissen, east of Cologne, and in 1890 it established a vacation home for women teachers on the island of Norderney in the North Sea.60 By the mid-1890s, retirement homes existed in at least seven locations, and three more were being built or planned. Anna Vorwerk, with some support from the state of Braunschweig, established one exclusively for graduates of her seminar in Wolfenbuttel. To retire there, women needed to be at least fiftyfive years old, have taught for fifteen years, and have belonged for ten years to the association that supported the home. There was an entrance fee of 300 Marks and an annual charge of 350 Marks.61 An organization that served a broader clientele was the General 59

Herrad-Ulrike Bussemer, Fmuenemanzipation und Bildungsbiirgertum: Sozialgeschichte der Frauenbewegung m der Reichsgriindungszeit (Weinheim and Basel, 1985), pp. 223-28; Robert Rissmann, Geschichte des deutschen Lehrervereins (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 82, 89n.; Morgenstern, Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2: 158; Anna Plothow, Die Begriinderinnen der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Leipzig, 1907), p. 66. On Weyrowitz's school, see M.-E. Liiders, FUrchte Dich nicht, pp. 29-30. 60 Gotthold Kreyenburg, "Ein Kapitel aus der Deutschen Frauenfrage," Preussische Jahrbiicher 84 (1896): 163-64. On Jeanne Mithene, see Supprian, Frauengestallen, pp. 258-59, 277. 61 Kreyenburg, "Kapitel," pp. 162-63; Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk, pp. 219-32. 85

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German Pension Institution for Women Teachers and Governesses, which was founded in 1875 with the support of male teachers at higher girls' schools. This organization, which also enjoyed the protection of Crown Princess Victoria, by 1894 had accumulated capital of almost 4,500,000 Marks, had 2,849 members, and was paying pensions to 377 retired teachers. In addition, it possessed a special emergency fund to provide grants to teachers in need. Bazaars sponsored by the crown princess in 1877 raised 130,000 Marks for this emergency fund, and by 1894 its capital had grown to 450,000 Marks. 62 Some schools started their own pension funds for women teachers. At the Luise School in Berlin, contributions from former pupils provided the seed money for such a fund in 1880; teachers paid an initial fee of 20 Marks and then 12 Marks per year. In Cologne, a 3,000 Mark donation from a local woman led to the creation of a pension fund at the school run by the Protestant community. At the Catholic seminar for women elementary teachers in Miinster, gifts made on the fiftieth anniversary in teaching of one faculty member served as the basis for an emergency fund that aided 588 retired women and 281 teachers who temporarily could not work because of illness. 63 A unique place among the self-help organizations founded in this period was occupied by Helene Adelmann's Association of German Women Teachers in England. Founded in 1876 to free German governesses from "the yoke of placement agents," this association had attracted 302 members by 1878 and over 700 by 1890. In the early 1880s its placement service was filling more than 250 positions per year. Contributions of 1,000 Marks from Empress Augusta and 500 from Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse helped to create a loan fund for governesses between jobs or in need for some other reason. Much larger contributions from German businessmen in London enabled the association to buy a twenty-fiveyear lease on a building to be used as a home for German governesses looking for positions and teachers who had no place to live when the schools in which they worked closed for vacation. 64 62

Kreyenburg, "Kapitel," pp. 160-61; Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin: Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1888), pp. 21-22; Uellner, Lmsenschule zu Dusseldorf, p. 65. 63 Muret, Lmsenschule in Berlin, p. 107; Toelpe, Geschwhte des Lyzeums, p. 83; Kuntze, Miinster, pp. 110-16. 64 Gaudian, "Helene Adelmann," pp. 10-17; H. Z. Konig, Authentisches iiber die deutsche Erzieherin in England (London, 1884), pp. 37-43.

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The most essential form of self-help for women teachers in this period, however, was improved education, which would justify higher pay and a greater role for women in the upper grades of the girls' schools. In 1870, Marie Calm summarized the dilemma of women teachers by noting, "Because their preparation is so faulty, their salaries are meager and their sphere of activity is limited." 65 As will be discussed in the following chapters, the need for training that went beyond the existing seminars would remain a constant theme among women teachers for the next quarter century, until Prussia created an advanced teachers' examination (Oberlehrerinnenprufung) in 1894. C O N D I T I O N S A R O U N D 1870

IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The beginnings of these self-help organizations and the emergence of demands for training beyond the seminar level illustrate both the increasing self-confidence and activism of women teachers and the continuing discrimination they faced. That German society had not yet fully accepted the existence of women teachers, much less any claim that they were equal to men, can be seen in statements made in the 1860s by a number of educators who still felt the need to justify the employment of women in the public schools. When Viktor Uellner became director of a higher girls' school in Dusseldorf in 1864, he commented that, whatever objections one might make to teaching by women, they were indispensable for the harmonious education of girls. Writing in an educational encyclopedia published in 1865, Friedrich Flashaar of the Royal Elisabeth School insisted that women working in public schools could still "be true to their feminine calling" because the only public aspect of these schools was their financing. Another writer in the same encyclopedia found it necessary to point out that most criticisms aimed at women teachers were based on individual experiences and that similar cases could easily be found among men teachers. The Versorgungsprinzip also persisted. At the dedication of the new seminar for Protestant elementary teachers at Augustenburg in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein in 1878, a local school official reiterated traditional views of the need both for job opportunities for unmarried young women and for women to teach girls. 66 65

Calm, Stellung der deutschen Lehrennnen, p. 31. Uellner, Luisenschule zu Dusseldorf, p. 44; Schmid, ed., Encyklopiidie, 4: 514, 252; Kannegieser, Lehrerinnen-Seminar Augustenburg, pp. 8, 11. 66

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Women confined to be virtually excluded from the leadership of public institutions. When Prince Schonburg-Waldenburg suggested that a woman head the seminar at Droyssig, the proposal was rejected by the Prussian Ministry of Education because the faculty would in any case have to include an ordained minister, who could be the director, and because a woman would not represent the institution well in its dealings with the authorities and the public. This ministry also refused to appoint a woman as a sort of codirector of the Royal Elisabeth School in the 1860s, despite support from the leader of the school. The supervisory board at Detmold's girls' school rejected hiring a woman as director in 1856 because this would make the school appear to be a private one.67 Such discrimination later led the German feminist Kathe Schirmacher to comment in her survey, The Modern Woman's Rights Movement, "In no other country were women teachers for girls wronged to such an extent as in Germany."68 In terms of the opportunities for training, certification, and employment, however, this assertion is difficult to substantiate for the period before 1870. In the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy, the employment of women in public elementary schools and the establishment of state-run normal schools began only in the late 1850s and early 1860s. For Czech women in the Habsburg Empire, the first seminar did not open until 1867, and its graduates could work in public schools only in the lower grades.69 For German Austrians, two institutes for the training of governesses, similar to the Luisenstiftung in Berlin, had existed since the late eighteenth century, but state seminars for elementary teachers and employment of women in public schools did not come until 1869. In the girls' secondary schools, or Lyzeen, which emerged after 1870, men taught all classes except sewing, drawing, and singing until 1904.70 In Russia, the seven-year girls' Gymnasien founded after 1858, 67 Meyer, Droyssig, p. 17; Friedrich Bachmann, Geschichte der Komglichen EUsabethschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1897), p. 65; Gerhard Bonwetsch, Hundert Jahre hohere MUdchenbildung in Detmold, 1830-1930 (Detmold, 1930), pp. 18, 21. 68 Kathe Schirmacher, The Modern Woman's Rights Movement, trans, from the 2d German ed. by Carl Conrad Eckhardt (New York, 1912), p. 145. 69 Theodor Stanton, ed., The Woman Question in Europe (New York, 1884), pp. 165, 201, 211, 224, 325, 451, 457. 70 Amalie Mayer et al., eds., Geschichte der osterreichischen Madchenmittelschule (Vienna, 1952), pp. 13, 20, 31; Martha Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung, Frauenbildung und Frauenarbeit in Osterreich (Vienna, 1930), pp. 174-79; Martha Forkl and Elisabeth Koffmahn, eds., Frauenstudium und akademische Frauenarbeit in Osterreich (Vienna and Stuttgart, 1968), p. 75.

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which despite their name were modeled on the German higher girls' schools and taught Latin only as an elective, reduced the job opportunities for governesses. These schools relied heavily on male teachers: girls who attended a pedagogical course in an optional eighth year of these institutions qualified to teach only in the lowest grades. Even graduates of the more advanced pedagogical courses established in 1876 could work only in the middle, not the upper, grades of the girls' Gymnasien.71 Women teachers in France had an advantage over their German colleagues in being allowed after 1853 to teach in coeducational elementary schools; but, as these were permitted only in villages with a population under five hundred, such positions were not exactly prime appointments. Significant growth in the number of lay women teachers occurred only after 1879, when republican legislation required the sixty-four French departments that as yet had no facilities for training female educators to build normal schools for them. According to the best historian of secondary education for girls in nineteenth-century France, until 1870 "in practice, men had virtually a monopoly" over what instruction there was for girls beyond the primary level.72 In England, pastors and male schoolmasters played an important role in the education of girls well into the nineteenth century. Formal preparation for female elementary teachers began with the creation in the 1840s of the first "training colleges," which had courses lasting only a few months—much shorter than the programs at German seminars. Advanced education for governesses or secondary teachers did not exist until the foundation of Queen's College in London in 1848 and of Bedford College the following year. As was the case with male teachers in England, women who graduated from such programs did not yet have the opportunity to obtain any formal certification. In the 1850s, women such as Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss succeeded in establishing prosperous private schools, which, in contrast to the situation in Germany, did not have to compete with public schools headed by men. When the Schools Inquiry Commission examined these and a few other secondary schools for girls in the 1860s, however, it 71 Stanton, ed., Woman Question, pp. 411-13; Ruth Arlene Fluck Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1905" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975), pp. 130-34. 72 Linda Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany, N.Y., 1984), p. 13; Frangoise Mayeur, L'iducation desfillesen France au XIXe Steele (Paris, 1979), p. 73.

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concluded that "as a class, the female teachers in Girls' Schools must be pronounced not fully equal to their task." According to commission member James Bryce, such women "have not themselves been well taught, and they do not know how to teach."73 One response to the report of the Schools Inquiry Commission was the creation by Maria Shirreff Grey in 1876 of the Teachers' Training and Registration Society, which two years later spawned the Maria Grey Training College for female secondary teachers. Before the latter opened, Grey and her sister, Emily Shirreff, visited Karlsruhe and Darmstadt to study the training of German women teachers, which thus served at least indirectly as a model for this new English institution.74 With regard to the employment of married women, both Russia and Austria exercised bans similar to those in Germany. No such formal prohibition existed in England, although local school patrons or administrators could force women who wed to resign. On the eve of World War I,.about 12 percent of female elementary teachers, and probably a lower percentage of secondary teachers, were married. Yet, after the war, vigorous efforts would be made to drive married women from the schools.75 In France, married teachers were frowned upon in the early years of the Third Republic, but by 1898 only 44 percent of the female elementary teachers were single. In part, the government's openness to married women continuing to teach stemmed from its desire to retain the services of secularly trained women in rural areas.76 73

Frances Widdowson, Going Up into the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training, 1840-1914 (London, 1980), p. 14; Mary I. C. Borer, Willingly to School: A History of Women's Education (Guildford, England, 1976), pp. 254-66; Rhama Dell Pope, "The Development of Formal Higher Education for Women in England, 1862-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972), p. 210. 74 Edward W. Ellsworth, Liberators of the Female Mind: The Shirreff Sisters, Educational Reform, and the Women's Movement (Westport, Conn., 1979), pp. 174, 190. 75 Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton, 1978), p. 173; Anna Lind, "Das Frauenstudium in Osterreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz" (law diss., University of Vienna, 1961), p. 8; Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung in Osterreich, p. 31; Alison Oram, "Serving Two Masters? The Introduction of the Marriage Ban in Teaching in the 1920s," in The Sexual Dynamics of History, ed. London Feminist History Group (London, 1983), p. 12. Schirmacher indicates that in Austria in 1909 the ban on married women teachers remained only in the province of Styria: Modern Woman's Rights Movement, p. 162. Gahlings and Moering are certainly wrong to say that Austria never banned married women from teaching: Volksschullehrerin, p. 77. 76 Peter Meyers, "From Conflict to Cooperation: Men and Women Teachers in the Belle Epoque," Historical Reflections 7 (1980): 501. Meyers corrects the mistaken 90

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As in Germany, other European countries also witnessed sharp increases in the number of women preparing for teaching careers during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, with the resulting concern about overcrowding of the profession. In France, the number of women taking the brevet supirieur rose from 356 in 1855 to 1,356 twenty years later. In a work published in 1869, George Butler, the husband of the later campaigner against regulated prostitution, Josephine Butler, indicated there was a shortage of women teachers in England; but Elizabeth Wolstenholme suggested that crowding in the field made it "more than ever desirable that those women who devote themselves to teaching should do so with deliberate intention." In Austria, prospects for women teachers were good in 1870, but a decade later fears about an oversupply had arisen. In Italy around 1880, an estimated 40 percent of seminar students did not intend to teach but, as was the case in Germany, were treating their training as a continuation of general education. In the Netherlands, the surge of young women into teacher training "developed into a veritable mania, which is encouraged by the parents, who seem to look upon pedagogy as a sort of life insurance."77 England was home to the first self-help organization for women teachers, the Governesses' Benevolent Association founded in 1843. Even at this early date, English governesses were interested in the introduction of formal teacher certification, so that English women could compete "with qualified French and German women." In 1876, a year after the creation of the General German Pension Institution for Women Teachers and Governesses, the recently founded Headmistresses' Association discussed the need for a similar pension scheme for the assistant mistresses in the rapidly expanding secondary schools. Not until 1898, however, was such a voluntary system established.78 Swiss governesses had been the first to follow the English exassertion that there was a marriage ban in France until 1900, a statement made by Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott in their widely used Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978), p. 184. 77 Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984), p. 175; Josephine Butler, ed., Woman's Work and Woman's Culture (London, 1869), pp. 49, 301; Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung in Osterreich, p. 190; Stanton, ed., Woman Question, pp. 178, 326n, 169. 78 Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of the Education of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1979), pp. 21-22; Nonita Glenday and Mary Price, Reluctant Revolutionaries: A Century of Headmistresses, 18742974 (London, 1974), p. 33. 91

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ample, creating a benevolent association in the 1840s. In Sweden, governesses founded a mutual annuity fund in 1855. The women teachers of Vienna followed the example of their sisters in Berlin, creating an association in 1870 and a retirement home a few years later.79 In France, Italy, and Russia, even such modest efforts at self-help do not appear to have developed as of the 1870s. These brief comparisons suggest the basic similarities in the position of women teachers in most European countries in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. All suffered "wrongs" in the sense used by Schirmarcher, but in general German women do not appear to have had more limited opportunities for training and employment as teachers than did their sisters elsewhere. 79

Lind, "Frauenstudium," p. 36; Stanton, ed., Woman Question, pp. 214, 179; Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung in Osterreich, pp. 30-31.

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The First Wave of Reform, 1865-1879 IMPOSING periodization on historical realities that evolve gradually is always difficult, but in the case of female education in nineteenth-century Germany one can identify a very sharp acceleration of this evolution during the mid-1860s. The amount of pamphlet literature devoted to the girls' schools increased dramatically in this period, many new organizations and institutions concerned with women's rights and various levels of female education were founded, and for the first time the question of female students at German universities was raised in a serious fashion. At a time when the "woman question" became a major issue throughout much of Europe and institutions or organizations established in one country quickly found imitators elsewhere, developments in the education of German girls and women generally paralleled those in other countries. Yet this first concerted drive to improve the girls' schools and to open new educational and employment opportunities lost momentum by the mid-1870s and nearly died out by 1880. Most organizations and institutions continued to exist, but by 1879 women had explicitly been barred from entering all German universities and from being certified as physicians. In addition, the Prussian government had made clear that it would not soon issue regulations for the higher girls' schools. Especially with regard to higher education, German women had begun to lag behind their neighbors. This period in German history was, of course, the era of Bismarck's wars with Austria and France, which resulted in the destruction of the German Confederation and the establishment of the Prussian-dominated Second Reich. Yet these momentous military and political events had relatively little direct effect on the evolution of female education. A few writers did point out that the number of men killed in the wars meant that there would be more single women in need of employment or support. Women's activities on the home front, especially in nursing, also served to stim-

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ulate thinking about more public roles for women and the possibility of opening the medical profession to them.1 For directors and teachers from the girls' schools, as for so many other groups in German society, the achievement of unification encouraged a movement toward national organizations, with the first major conference on girls' education taking place in Weimar in 1872. Longer-term economic and social developments, however, had a greater impact on the growth of interest in female education. The 1850s and 1860s witnessed the take-off of industrialization in Germany, which produced concomitant changes in the occupational structure, residential patterns, and the family. The late 1860s and early 1870s also saw the culmination of liberal reforms that removed age-old restrictions on individual freedoms. The North German Confederation of 1867 and the new Reich of 1871 not only provided for universal male suffrage but also guaranteed freedom of occupation to all citizens, eliminated discriminatory laws based on religious affiliation (especially for Jewish Germans), and moved closer to free trade than Germany had ever come before (or would come again before the creation of the Common Market). As in England, where John Stuart Mill published his famous The Subjection of Women at this time, so also in Germany did calls arise for extension of these new personal freedoms to women. The discussion of improved and expanded education for girls and women in this period began with a critique of existing conditions, especially in the Pensionaten. In the 1850s both the conservative Prussian Minister of Education Karl von Raumer and the influential writer on social questions Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl had not only attacked the way such boarding institutions removed daughters from parental control but objected to any formal education for girls beyond the elementary level. Frightened by the activities of small numbers of radical women in the revolutions of 1848-1849, both men rejected schooling that might push or lure girls away from their natural calling as wives and mothers. An anonymous supporter of Riehl argued that girls should not learn French because "Voltaire and Rousseau would be very dangerous reading" for them.2 1 Hermann Erkelenz, Ueber weibliche Erziehung und die Organisation der hoheren Tochterschulen (Cologne, 1873), p. 46; Franz von Holtzendorff, Die Verbesserungen in der gesellschaftlichen und wtrtschaftlichen Stellung der Frauen (Berlin, 1867), p. 33. 2 Karl von Raumer, Die Erziehung der Madchen (Stuttgart, 1853), p. 93; Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Die Familie, 11th ed. (Stuttgart, 1897), esp. pp. 107-109; Wider die

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Reformers in the 1860s echoed the criticisms of Pensionaten. As Friedrich Flashaar noted in an article published in a major educational encyclopedia in 1865, no important pedagogical writer of this period defended sending girls away from home in their midteens. After 1871, the boarding institutions were even attacked for being too "French" and for not adequately cultivating the "German spirit."3 In contrast to Raumer and Riehl, however, those interested in improving the position of women in German society vigorously defended the need for middle- and upper-class girls to be educated in properly constituted secondary schools rather than only in elementary schools or at home. Fanny Lewald even included in her autobiography, first published in the early 1860s, a long digression on the necessity for girls to experience a communal education.4 Proponents of reform held a variety of not always compatible views about the changes desirable for girls' schooling. One can identify four distinct concerns in the reform literature, although some individuals expressed more than one in their works: (1) a stress on equal rights for women that led to demands for girls to receive essentially the same education as boys; (2) a desire to see girls trained more effectively for their calling as wives and mothers; (3) a perception that young women who did not marry needed practical training for decent jobs; and (4) an interest in upgrading the academic quality of the higher girls' schools without turning them into either technical institutes or imitations of boys' Gymnasien. The following pages will discuss each of these concerns, then examine the response of the state governments to the pressure for reforms and the first efforts to obtain higher education for German women. WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

The year 1865 witnessed the creation, in Leipzig, of the first longlasting organization in Germany devoted to the pursuit of rights hoheren Tochterschulen: Ein Beitrag zur "Emancipation von der Frauen" (Stuttgart, 1855), pp. 252, 270. 3 Friedrich Flashaar, "Madcheninstitute," in Encyklopddie des gesamten Erziehungsund Unterrichtswesens, vol. 4, ed. K. A. Schmid (Gotha, 1865), p. 890; Gotthold Kreyenburg, Die hbhere Tochterschule (Leipzig, 1873), p. 7. 4 Luise Buchner, Die Frauen una ihr Beruf (Frankfurt am Main, 1856), pp. 38, 78; Friedrich Flashaar, "Hohere Madchenschule," in Schmid, ed., Encyklopddie, 4: 917; Erkelenz, Ueber weibhche Erziehung, p. 7; Fanny Lewald-Stahr, Meine tebensgeschichte, ed. Gisela Brinkler-Gabler (Frankfurt, 1980), p. 53. 95

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for women. The General German Women's Association planned, according to its original statutes, "to work for the improved education of the female sex and the liberation of female work from all obstacles blocking its development." The leading figure in the association, Louise Otto-Peters, who had edited a short-lived journal for women during the revolutions of 1848-1849, echoed this stress on removing obstacles to women's education and employment in an important pamphlet published the next year. She not only insisted that women's sole demand was "freedom for individual development" but explicitly compared the removal of restrictions on women to the recent achievement of freedom of occupation and of trade. Writing a few years later, Fanny Lewald extended this comparison to say that women only wanted the same freedoms recently granted to American slaves and Russian serfs. Another pamphleteer maintained that her plea for improved opportunities for women coincided with the "tendency of our age toward free self-development, self-formation, and self-determination."5 The most vocal and consistent advocate of women's rights in this period was Hedwig Dohm, who, despite her apparent agreement with the aims of the German Women's Association, never took an active part in it. In a series of witty yet scathing pamphlets in the early 1870s, Dohm attacked many opponents of education for women by following Mill's strategy of showing that the relations and achievements of the sexes until that time were not "natural" and that women had never had an opportunity fully to develop their talents. The first German woman to call for suffrage, Dohm also insisted that women had a right to enter the universities on the same basis as men did.6 5 Louise Otto-Peters, Das erste Vierteljahrhundert des Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenvereins (Leipzig, 1890), pp. 10-11; idem, Des Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb (Hamburg, 1866), pp. viii, 48-49; Fanny Lewald, Fur und wider die Frauen: Vierzehn Briefe (Berlin, 1870), p. 10; Minna Pinoff, Reform der weiblichen Erziehung als Grundbedtngung zur Losung der sozialen Frage der Frauen (Breslau, 1867), p. 3. The best treatment of the "woman question" in Germany in the years after 1865 is Herrad-Ulrike Bussemer, Frauenemanzipation und Bildungsbiirgertum: Sozialgeschichte der Frauenbewegung in der Reichsgriindungszeit (Weinheim and Basel, 1985); on the German Women's Association, see pp. 119-41. 6 See Hedwig Dohm, Die wissenschaftliche Emancipation der Frauen (Berlin, 1874), and excerpts from her Was die Pastoren von der Frauen denken (Berlin, 1872) and Der ]esuitismus im Hausstande (Berlin, 1873) in Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung im Spiegel reprasentativer Frauenzeitschriften: lhre Anfdnge und erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), 2: 178-83, 208-38. For a brief sketch of her career, see Renate Duelli-Klein, "Hedwig Dohm," in Feminist Theorists, ed. Dale Spender (New York, 1983), pp. 165-83.

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The German Women's Association, which grew slowly in its first years, also supported opening higher education to women, but it tended to stress practicality more than principle. At its meeting in 1867, the delegates resolved to press for admission of girls and women to all existing educational institutions and for creation of separate facilities for women, so that they could "take part in higher culture and become more capable of earning a living." Five years later, when the German Women's Association talked about founding a Realgymnasium that could prepare girls for higher" education, the main speaker discussed admission to the universities in terms of the need for female physicians, lawyers, and teachers to provide services to women, not in terms of basic rights.7 BETTER EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD

The second frequent theme in the literature of the time was the need for girls to receive better training for motherhood. In this matter, disciples of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement, played a decisive role. In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848^-1849, a group of women in Hamburg, led by Emilie Wustenfeld, conceived the idea of a Hochschule that would train women in child-rearing and prepare them for possible careers teaching kindergarten. Although this experiment lasted less than two years, women associated with it, as well as other followers of Froebel, kept alive this stress on education for motherhood through the 1850s, when Prussia banned kindergartens because of the democratic and irreligious ideas associated with them. The south German Luise Buchner spoke in her Women and Their Vocation of the equal rights of girls and boys in education but also emphasized that girls' schools should pay more attention to preparing their pupils for the career in the family that most would experience. Louise Otto-Peters, despite her stress on equal rights for women, had also supported the Hamburg Hochschule, and in the 1860s she would still stress the need for schools to provide better education for motherhood.8 7

Otto-Peters, Das erste Vierteljahrhundert, pp. 15, 25-26; idem, Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb, p. 97. 8 Marie Kortmann, Emilie Wustenfeld: Eine Hamburger BUrgerin (Hamburg, 1927), pp. 26-42; Catherine M. Prelinger, "Religious Dissent, Women's Rights, and the Hamburger Hochschule fur das weibliche Geschlecht in Mid-19th-Century Germany," Church History 45 (1976): 42-55; idem, Charity, Challenge, and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women's Movement in Germany (West97

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In the 1860s, Froebel's ideas received greater publicity through the activities of Countess Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow, who founded a training school for kindergarten teachers in Berlin, and of his grandniece Henriette Breymann, who offered classes in Froebel's methods at her boarding school near Wolfenbuttel until 1866, when she transferred this part of her operation to Anna Vorwerk's school in that city.9 Women who did not share the enthusiasm for Froebel's pedagogy, including even Hedwig Dohm, nevertheless argued that motherhood involved skills requiring formal education and that higher girls' schools would do better to teach these rather than superficial accomplishments for the drawing room or ball. Ulrike Henschke, for example, called for instruction in the chemistry of nutrition and the economics of household management.10 For some women, this emphasis on the motherly role became a means for reforming society. In their view, women had retained more harmonious personalities than had men, who, in pursuing their careers, had become overly specialized and rationalistic. By exercising "spiritual motherhood" in teaching and social work, women could provide an antidote to the evils produced by the male-inspired industrialization and urbanization of Germany.11 Most women holding such views explicitly accepted that men and women had different capacities for scholarly achievement, but they argued adamantly that women would be better educators of girls precisely because they would not bring false academic standards to their teaching.12 Men also expressed concern about better training for motherport, Conn., 1987), pp. 96-133; Ann Taylor Allen, "Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement, 1848-1911," History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982): 319-39; Buchner, Frauen und ihr Beruf, pp. 3, 5, 38; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 1: 9; Otto-Peters, Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb, pp. 70-72. 9 Maria Miiller, Frauen im Dienste Fnedrich Froebets (Leipzig, 1928), p. 70 and passim; Allen, "Spiritual Motherhood," p. 328; Mary J. Lyschinska, Henriette SchraderBreymann: Ihr Leben aus Briefen und Tagebuchern zusammengestellt und erlautert, 2 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1922), 1: 243, 298. 10 Dohm, Jesuitismus, in Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 212; Ulrike Henschke, Zur Frauen-Unterrichts-Frage in Preussen (Berlin, 1870), pp. 12, 17. " Marie Stoephasius, Ziele und Wege der weiblichen Erziehung nach den Anforderungen der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1868), p. 53; idem, Von Unten auf: Ein Beitrag zur Losung der Volksbildung- und Frauenfrage (Berlin, 1872), p. 10; Allen, "Spiritual Motherhood," p. 327. 12 Stoephasius, Ziele, p. 25; Miiller, Frauen im Dienste Froebels, p. 88; Luise Buchner, Die Frau: Hinterlassene Aufsatze, Abhandlungen und Berichte zur Frauenfrage (Halle, 1878), pp. 99-100. 98

THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

hood in these years. In a frequently cited pamphlet, the medical professor Rudolf Virchow, who shared Riehl's fears that emancipation of women meant a dissolution of the family and communal raising of children from infancy on, claimed that the current girls' schools, although they could produce women teachers, did not educate future housewives. He stressed in particular the need for girls to learn more about hygiene, pedagogy, and nutrition. The historian Heinrich von Sybel, who accepted the logical consequences of his professed liberalism sufficiently to favor more equal education for girls and boys and greater employment opportunities for women, nonetheless insisted that there could not be secondary coeducation because the girls' schools also had to prepare their pupils to be wives and mothers. 13

JOB T R A I N I N G FOR SINGLE W O M E N

The third major theme in the debates of the 1860s involved an extension of the Versorgungsprinzip to fields beyond teaching. Underlying this concern was the perception that Germany had rather suddenly acquired a large number of unmarried women who had to provide for themselves. Open to question is the accuracy of the numbers cited at the time, but not the fact that most contemporary commentators believed that a new situation had arisen and required a response. Central to the discussion was the Prussian census of 1863, which revealed that, of 5,861,091 women over the age of fourteen, almost half—2,918,763—were single. Although that figure included widows as well as young girls who would eventually marry, for many Germans this statistic had as powerful an effect as did the first discussions of "redundant women" in England a few years earlier.14 Most writers singled out the daughters of the educated 13

Rudolf Virchow, Ueber die Erziehung des Wetbes fur seinen Beruf (Berlin, 1865), pp. 18, 24-27; Heinrich von Sybel, Ueber die Emancipation der Frau (Bonn, 1870), esp. pp. 17-20. See also Robert von Mohl, "Die Erziehung des weiblichen Geschlechtes," in Staatsrecht, Volkerrecht, Politik, 3 vols. (1869; reprint Graz, 1962), 3: 268-315. 14 Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 1: 28. Lily Braun cites a figure of 700,000 single adult women in Prussia in 1861: Die Frauenfrage (Leipzig, 1901), p. 118. For a not entirely successful effort to determine the economic realities behind the concern with "redundant women," see Bussemer, Frauenemanzipation, pp. 23-47. She indicates that the expanded Prussia of 1867 had 760,000 adult women living with relatives, 109,000 living alone: ibid., p. 276, n. 215. For discussion of the "distressed gentlewoman" in England, see A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (Lon-

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classes as the group whose marriage prospects appeared to be the worst. Not only did men in this class have to survive years of education and long waits for jobs with decent pay before they could wed, but the rising standard of living in the middle classes required ever more income in order to be able to set up a new household. The result, according to contemporaries, was that an increasing number of educated men chose not to marry at all. Gradual changes in household and family life, including both the employment of more servants and the growth of labor-saving devices and ready-made products, appear also to have reduced the role that maiden aunts could play in the homes of their relatives.15 Concern about unsupported single women centered on daughters of the educated classes also because the only career that such young women could enter without completely losing their social status was teaching, which many people considered an overcrowded field in the late 1860s. Although many middle-class girls appear to have earned money through needlework, most writers viewed this occupation as an inadequate and ultimately unacceptable solution, one that turned these girls into manual laborers in a way that their parents would never let happen to their brothers. For many concerned individuals, the need to provide better job training and opportunities for single middle-class women constituted the core of the "woman question" in Germany around 1870. Such individuals often felt the need to distinguish explicitly their demands from calls for "women's emancipation."16 In Germany, this term had become closely associated with a few radical women of the 1840s, especially Louise Aston, whose wearing of pants and smoking of cigars symbolized for many the horrors of women's emancipation. Even Louise Otto-Peters, whose own roots went back to the radicalism of the 1840s, distanced her activities in the 1860s from the earlier demands for women's rights. Identification don, 1979), pp. 20-47; for excerpts from W. R. Greg's article from 1862, "Why Are Women Redundant?" see Janet Murray, ed., Strong-Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1982), pp. 50-54. 15 See, for example, Karl Weiss, Wie sorgen wirfur die Zukunft unserer Tochtern? 2d ed. (Berlin, 1874), pp. 5-6. 16 Lilly Hauff, Der Letteverein in der Geschichte der Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1928), p. 81; Stoephasius, Ziele, p. 4; Holtzendorff, Verbesserungen, pp. 19, 23. This distinction between the "woman question" and "women's emancipation" was also made in popular magazines: see UUa Wischermann, "Idylle und Behaglichkeit? Die Frauenfrage in der illusrrierten Presse des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Frauen in der Geschichte, vol. 6, ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Annette Kuhn (Dusseldorf, 1985), pp. 183-205. 100

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of the woman question with the single problem of job opportunities thus involved a retreat from broader demands for equality.17 In the short run, the existing higher girls' schools made few changes in response to the concern for job training, although the municipal school in Munich did introduce a course in bookkeeping.18 Much more prevalent were new programs designed for girls who had left school at fourteen or fifteen, the establishment of which proved to be a major field of organizational activity for German women. In many cases these training courses amounted to charitable endeavors by wealthier middle-class women for their less fortunate sisters, and they prepared girls for jobs less respectable and remunerative than teaching. Yet the creation and activities of these organizations did serve to stimulate demands for new rights and opportunities for women. The first such institution appears to have developed as an auxiliary to the Women's Association of Baden, founded in 1859 under the protection of Grand Duchess Luise. Beginning with a bookkeeping course in 1865, this organization within a few years added other commercial courses and instruction in fine needlework and drawing.19 More influential was an organization founded in Berlin. In 1865, Crown Princess Victoria asked Dr. Adolf Lette to submit a memorandum on the woman question to the Central Association for the Welfare of the Working Class, of which he was president. She also sent Lette and a colleague to England to study the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, which had been founded in 1859. In his report, Lette specifically rejected "political emancipation and equal rights for women," but he pointed to the need for more employment opportunities for single middle-class women—perhaps because he himself had several daughters. After a commission of the Central Association studied the issue and agreed with Lette's conclusion about the need for technical schools for girls, a new organization was created, known at first as the Association for Promoting the Employability of the Female Sex, later simply as the Lette Association. It began with a membership of three hundred, and the executive committee included one 1?

Otto-Peters, Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb, p. v; Bussemer, Frauenemanzipation, p.

23.

18 Gottfried Dostler, 1822-1922: Hundert Jahre Hohere Mddchenschule (Munich, 1922), p. 30. 19 Margarete Schecker, Die Entwicklung der Madchenberufsschule (Wiesbaden, 1963), p. 35.

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woman, Jenny Hirsch, who would become the editor of its journal, the Frauen-Anwalt.20 The Lette Association rapidly developed a broad spectrum of activities. With the help of a 1,500 Mark contribution from the crown princess, it opened the Victoria Bazaar to provide an outlet for the sale of women's handiwork and an employment bureau that tried to match applicants with available positions. It also supported a home for temporarily unemployed governesses. Most important, it took over an existing technical school run by a man named Clement, which it gradually enlarged to provide a whole complex of courses. By the early 1880s, it supported "a commercial school, a drawing and modeling school, and a cooking school" and also gave "instruction in washing, ironing, cutting, dressmaking, hand and machine sewing, the manufacture of artificial flowers, and many other kinds of manual and art work." In addition, it successfully petitioned the government to open employment in German post and telegraph offices to women.21 Although the Lette Association had been founded in part in reaction to the more radical German Women's Association in Saxony, after Lette's death in 1869 the aims of the two organizations became more similar. His successor, Franz von Holtzendorff, a professor of law, supported opening the universities and medical and legal careers to women. In 1872, Lette's daughter Anna Schepeler-Lette took over the association, which by then had an executive committee of ten men and ten women, and carried on the fight for employment opportunities for women in much the same spirit as Otto-Peters and her organization.22 The rapidity with which similar organizations were founded in 20

Bussemer, Frauenemanzipation, pp. 101-15, 302; Anna Plothow, Die Begriinderinnen der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Leipzig, 1907), p. 53; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 1: 43-46, and 2: 137-45; Hauff, Letteverein, pp. 81, 77, 83-90; Anna SchepelerLette and Jenny Hirsch, "A General Review of the Women's Movement in Germany," in The Woman Question in Europe, ed. Theodore Stanton (New York, 1884), pp. 143-45. Doris Obschernitzki, "Der Frau Ihre Arbeit!" Lette-Verein: Zur Geschichte einer Berliner Institution 1866 bis 1986 (Berlin, 1987), appeared too late to be used for this study; it provides much more detailed information about this organization than any other recent work. 21 Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 1: 46; Schepeler-Lette and Hirsch, "General Review," p. 144. 22 Holtzendorff, Verbesserungen, p. 23; Annette Kaiser, " 'Frauenemanzipation' wider Willen; Die pragmatische Politik des Lette-Vereins, 1866-1876," in Frauen in der Geschichte, vol. 3, ed. Annette Kuhn and Jorn Rusen (Dusseldorf, 1983), pp. 167-94. 102

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many other German cities indicates how widespread was the perception that something had to be done to improve the earning capacity of single middle-class women. Victoria's sister, Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse, created the Alice Association for Women's Education and Employment, which opened a bazaar for the sale of women's handiwork and sponsored both the training of nurses and a trade school. The director of the Alice Association was Luise Buchner, who would demand in 1874 that the higher girls' schools should also pay more attention to preparing their pupils for possible careers.23 Royal patronage was not needed in Breslau, where in 1866 a woman named Elise Oelsner founded a Women's Education Association. Twenty-five years later it operated eight different courses in areas ranging from cooking to kindergarten teaching to photography. In 1867, Emilie Wustenfeld, the veteran of the Hamburg Hochschule of 1850-1851, helped to establish both a general continuation school and a trade school in that city. By 1879 this organization was teaching four hundred girls in its various programs. In Braunschweig, courses begun in 1869 by the local branch of the German Women's Association also combined general education with practical training for jobs. In Kassel, Marie Calm created an evening school for girls past the age of confirmation.24 Representatives of organizations from fourteen cities met in Berlin in 1869 to discuss their common goals and problems. Among the participants were Buchner, Calm, Wustenfeld, Holtzendorff, Hirsch, Virchow, Johanna Goldschmidt of Hamburg, and Henriette Goldschmidt and Auguste Schmidt of Leipzig. After the Franco-Prussian War, a second convention of these organizations took place in Darmstadt in 1872.25 The years after German unification also saw the concern about education for motherhood merge with the interest in job training. In Berlin, Henriette Breymann, now married to the liberal politi23

Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, Biographical Sketch and Letters (London, 1884), pp. 158-63; Alice Bousset, Zwei Vorkampferinnen fur Frauenbildung: Luise Buchner, Marie Calm (Hamburg, 1893), pp. 9-12; Buchner, DiV Frau, p. 45. 24 Rudolf Dieck, Die Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen (Breslau, 1892), pp. 94-96; Kortmann, Emilie Wustenfeld, pp. 102-107; Paula Oakes, Denkschrift zum 60jahrigen Bestehen der staatlichen Schulen fur Frauenberufe zu Hamburg (Hamburg, 1927), p. 25 and passim; Lutz Rossner, Erwachsenenhldung in Braunschweig (Braunschweig, 1971), pp. 17-21; Bousset, Zwei Vorkampferinnen, pp. 35-36. See the list of organizations in Bussemer, Frauenemanzipation, pp. 96-100. 25 Die Berliner Frauen-Vereins Conferenz (Berlin, 1869); Buchner, Die Frau, pp. 301309. 103

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cian Karl Schrader, built on the foundation of support for kindergartens established by Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow and created the Pestalozzi-Froebel House, yet another endeavor that received support from Crown Princess Victoria. It offered training for both future mothers and prospective teachers. In Leipzig, Henriette Goldschmidt founded a continuation school in 1875 that would soon offer commercial, handicraft, and kindergarten courses to teenaged girls. 26 Other European countries experienced similar efforts to deal with the woman question as essentially a problem of job training and opportunities for young single women from the middle classes. In France, Elise Lemonnier founded a Society for the Professional Education of Women in 1862, which by 1874 had 600 pupils in five schools. Russia also saw a surge of interest in the problem of "surplus women," which led to the establishment of the Society for Women's Work in 1864. The Women's Employment Association of Vienna, dating from 1866, ran several trade schools by 1870. In Prague, both Czech and German women had established similar groups by the early 1870s. An institution like the Victoria and Alice bazaars, called the "Bee Hive," opened in Stockholm in 1870.27

M A K I N G THE G I R L S ' S C H O O L S I N T O T R U E SECONDARY SCHOOLS

The need for job training was not decisive for educators concerned with the fourth prominent theme in the literature about female education in this period, the desire to upgrade the higher girls' schools in terms of curriculum, prestige, and administration. Although members of the German Women's Association and the Lette Association could support these goals, the main advocates of improving girls' education through government regulation were academically trained directors of municipal schools or of private Protestant schools in the religiously mixed areas of western Prus26 Ann Taylor Allen, "The Pestalozzi-Froebel House," forthcoming in Central European History; Festschrift zur Feier des funfzigjahrigen Bestehens der Hoheren Schule fur Frauenberufe zu Leipzig, 1875-1925 (Leipzig, 1925). 27 Edmee Charrier, involution intellectuelle faminine (Paris, 1931), pp. 242^43; Ruth Arlene Fluck Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1905" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975), p. 43; Martha Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung, Frauenbildung una Frauenarbeit in Osterreich (Vienna, 1930), pp. 25, 30; Stanton, ed., Woman Question, pp. 451, 455, 214.

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sia. These men had personal reasons for desiring such changes: by bringing the girls' schools into the secondary school system, they would gain higher pay and rank, as well as more secure pension rights. In addition, they hoped that in true secondary schools male and female teachers with only seminar training would not be able to compete with them for directorships. The movement to upgrade the higher girls' schools through government regulation had its beginnings in a small meeting of educators convened in 1848 by Richard Schornstein and H. H. Friedlander, both directors of schools in Elberfeld. Truly lasting contacts did not develop until the early 1860s, when a number of schools in western Prussia began exchanging their annual programs and Viktor Uellner of Dusseldorf convened the first of a series of meetings of school directors from the Rhineland.28 By around 1870, these male directors had elaborated a more or less coherent set of ideas about desirable changes to make in girls' education. At the center of their vision was a vigorous defense of public schools and thus a critique of private institutions. Karl Wobcken of Oldenburg, for example, found private schools to be too small, to suffer from too rapid a turnover of faculty members, and to lack adequate financial resources for hiring good teachers, providing a full complement of separate classes, and buying necessary equipment and supplies.29 The university graduates insisted that more men like themselves should teach in the upper grades of the girls' schools, in part because male seminar graduates, with their generally lower social origins, were often not able to deal effectively with the pupils at this level. Although these directors wanted their schools to attain a rank similar to that of the boys' Realschulen, they nonetheless believed that direct imitation should be avoided because education to "true femininity" required different methods and curricula.30 These men made a major effort to prevent the concern for job training from affecting the girls' schools. As Gotthold Kreyenburg, 28 Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, 1872-1897: Festschrift zur Feier des 25jahrigen Bestehens des Deutschen Vereins fiir das hohere Madchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1897), p. 40; Richard Schornstein, Das hohere Madchenschulwesen (Elberfeld, 1866), pp. 10-11. 29 Karl Wobcken, Die Bestimmung und Erziehung des Weibes (Oldenburg, 1865), pp. 60, 66, 68. 30 Ibid., p. 63; Schornstein, Madchenschulwesen, pp. 16, 13; Erkelenz, Ueber weibliche Erziehung, pp. 31-33; Kreyenburg, Tochterschule, p. 10.

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director of a municipal school in Iserlohn, expressed it, there was a need to separate the "woman question" from the "girls' school question." A report to the city council of Berlin about the need for more higher girls' schools stated, "Because the great majority of their pupils will devote themselves to no special career, the girls' schools must leave all career training entirely to separate technical schools and ward off any influence of the latter on their curriculum." The director of the city school in Celle declared that his institution would "not prepare its pupils for any specific sphere of activity, . . . not even for that most closely related to the school, teaching."31 Concern for the academic integrity of the girls' schools also led the male directors to oppose any direct emphasis on education for motherhood. Wobcken insisted that the practical training called for by Virchow should take place at home, after graduation from girls' schools devoted to general education.32 The male directors wanted the state governments to issue regulations that would allow only those schools with a ten-year course divided into at least seven separate classes, two foreign languages in the curriculum, and a university graduate as director to use the name "higher girls' school." These institutions would then be placed under the provincial school boards, as were the secondary schools for boys, while other girls' schools would be reduced to "middle" schools and remain under the same inspectors as the elementary schools. In calling for this new distinction among the girls' institutions, at least some male directors hoped to make their schools into more socially selective institutions as well: any practical courses linked to job training, they felt, should be restricted to the institutions that did not qualify as higher girls' schools.33 Some women shared this view. The private school director Marie Stoephasius, for example, also argued that a clearer distinction should be made between the curricula and the clientele of intermediate and higher schools.34 Not all school directors adopted the general stance of the male 31

Schornstein, Madchenschulwesen, p. 19; Erkelenz, Ueber ioeibhche Erziehung, p. 44; Gotthold Kreyenburg, Madchenerziehung und Frauenleben im Aus- und lnlande (Berlin, 1872), p. 240; Friedrich Hofmann, Ueber die Ernchtung bffentlicher hoherer Madchen-Schulen in Berlin: Bericht an der Magistrat (Berlin, 1875), p. 31; director Kuhlgatz cited in Theophil Besch, Aus dem Leben der Kaiserin Auguste-Viktoria-Schule in Celle 1805-1930 (Celle, 1930), p. 70. 32 Wobcken, Bestimmung, pp. 76, 99. See also Schmid, ed., Encyklopadie, 4: 510. 33 Flashaar, "Hrjhere Madchenschule," in Schmid, ed., Encyklopadie, 4: 916-17. 34 Stoephasius, Ziele, pp. 65-67. 106

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directors of public schools. In 1868, the head of the Higher Girls' School of the Holy Cross in Berlin, a man named Ferdinand Hermes, organized the directors of private schools in that city to defend their own interests. As the next few years would show, this association disagreed with the group of academically trained directors on many issues.35 This desire by male directors in Germany to upgrade the academic standards of the girls' schools but maintain their emphasis on both general education and femininity resembled in many ways the attitudes expressed by contemporary reformers in France and England. Ernest Legouv£, an influential liberal writer on female education, asserted that secularized secondary schools for French girls would "render their minds vigorous . . . and prepare them to participate in all the thoughts of their husbands and all the studies of their children." Victor Duruy, minister of education under Napoleon III in the 1860s, established lecture courses for teenaged girls, taught by men, that aimed to broaden their education but not to imitate boys' lyc^es or to introduce professional training.36 In England, the Schools Inquiry Commission examined forty-eight girls' institutions in the late 1860s and found "want of thoroughness and foundation; want of system; slovenliness and showy superficiality; inattention to rudiments, undue time given to accomplishments, and those not taught intelligently or in any scientific manner; want of organization." In its recommendations, according to Rhama D. Pope, "the Commission emphasized a different education for women to prepare them for their traditional position, rather than as independent elements in the work force." In contrast to the German directors, however, English headmistresses followed the example of the headmasters of boys' secondary schools and resisted government regulation: they created their own association in 1874 to try to reform the girls' schools from within.37 35

Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 42. Legouve cited in Lillian Jane Waugh, "The Images of Woman in France on the Eve of the Loi Camille See, 1877-1880" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1976), p. 68; Frangoise Mayeur, L'&iucation des filles en France au XlXe Steele (Paris, 1979), pp. 115-29; Sandra Horvath-Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education (Baton Rouge, La., 1984), pp. 154-73. 37 Rhama Dell Pope, "The Development of Formal Higher Education for Women in England, 1862-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972), pp. 178, 181, 185; Nonita Glenday and Mary Price, Reluctant Revolutionaries: A Century of Headmistresses, 1874-1974 (London, 1974), pp. 1-14. 36

107

FOUR THE WEIMAR CONFERENCE OF 1872 AND ITS AFTERMATH

The initial preparations for a comprehensive Prussian education law begun by the new education minister, Adalbert FaIk, in 1872 led the male directors to organize a coordinated lobbying effort to make sure that their views were heard. The leader of this effort was Gotthold Kreyenburg of Iserlohn. His proposal for a special conference of directors and teachers from girls' schools was signed by the heads of thirty-eight public schools, five teachers from such institutions, and four private school directors, one of whom was a woman. On 30 September 1872, 164 educators, the large majority of whom were Protestants from northern and central Germany, gathered in Weimar to discuss desired reforms in the higher girls' schools. Among the participants, 120 came from public schools, and 110 were men. According to a report published in the FrauenAnwalt, the reception afforded to the women was less than cordial; on the night before the meeting, they had no place to gather other than the smoke-filled room where the men were drinking beer.38 Public school directors such as Kreyenburg, Schornstein, Hermann Erkelenz of Cologne, Karl Friedlander of Leipzig, Wilhelm Noldeke of Hannover, and Theodor Haarbrucker of Berlin's Victoria School dominated the meeting; but Hermes and such important women as Stoephasius, Jeanne Mithene of the Royal Augusta School, and Bertha Lindner (who had taken over a school in Breslau from Auguste Schmidt in 1861) also attended. Yet these defenders of private schools and of women's role in the education of girls could not prevent the meeting from adopting resolutions along the lines proposed by the academically trained men. The delegates accepted the minimum requirements for recognition as a higher girls' school and voted for parity in prestige and salary rules with the boys' Realschulen. The resolutions did recognize the need for women teachers in the higher girls' schools and called on state governments to open more seminars that would prepare women to teach in the upper grades.39 The ultimate aims of girls' education as outlined by the Weimar conference also reflected the views of the male directors, although the confusing statement adopted appears to represent some effort 38

Emmy Beckmann, Die Entwicklung der hoheren Madchenbildung in Deutschland von 1870-1914 dargestellt in Dokumenten (Berlin, 1936), pp. 5-6; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 298-302. 39 The resolutions are published in Beckmann, Mddchenbildung in Deutschland, pp. 6-12; and Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, pp. 63-67. 108

THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

at compromise. Rejecting both direct imitation of boys' education and any move toward technical training, the delegates recommended that the higher girls' school "should strive for a harmonious development of the intellect, the spirit, and the will in a religious-national sense on a realist-aesthetic basis." The reference to a "realist" basis meant rejection of a "humanist" education based on Latin and Greek, but the stress on the "aesthetic" indicated that modern languages and literatures, not sciences, would be the core of this schooling. On the surface, this statement seemed to extend the German ideal of Bildung to women, but the delegates went on to reassert the traditional notion of educating girls for their later Bestimmung in life. In a formulation that feminists would cite again and again as an indication of what was wrong with the girls' schools, the Weimar participants declared, "It is desirable to make possible for the woman an education equivalent in its breadth of interest [but not in its subject matter or its length] to the intellectual cultivation of the man, so that the German husband will not be bored at his hearth or crippled in his devotion to higher interests through the spiritual shortsightedness and narrow-mindedness of his wife."40 Although Kreyenburg tried to deny it, the resolutions of the Weimar meeting were a declaration of war on private schools, the large majority of which, including all those headed by women, would not qualify as secondary schools under the proposed regulations. He, Schornstein, Noldeke, Haarbrucker, and Friedlander presented the conference's resolutions to FaIk on 19 November 1872, and a few weeks later FaIk asked the provincial school boards in Prussia for their views about a separation of middle and higher girls' schools like that called for at Weimar.41 In response, Hermes organized a counter-declaration from Berlin's private schools that raised objections to a mandatory ten-year course, to the required hiring of university-trained teachers, and to what its authors saw as Weimar's exaggerated stress on academics at the expense of femininity. In defending the role of women teachers in and the family atmosphere of the private schools, these directors argued that what was "higher" about the girls' schools was as much the social origins of the pupils as the curriculum. In their view, "The efforts of the academic reform party mark a mistaken 40 Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 298; Helene Lange, Lebensennnerungen (Berlin, 1930), p. 127. 41 Kreyenburg, Tochterschule, pp. 14, 12; Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 65; Beckmann, Miidchenbildung in Detuschland, p. 4.

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departure from the healthy path of the older pedagogy; they would injure our young women to the core."42 The Association of Women Teachers and Governesses issued a more limited declaration early in 1873, calling for better training for women teachers and greater opportunities for them in the upper grades of the girls' schools.43 Yet many women teachers chose to follow the leadership of the men who called the Weimar conference. At the annual conventions of the organization that emerged from that meeting, known first as the Association of Directors and Teachers of Higher Girls' Schools, later as the Association for Girls' Secondary Education, women formed the majority of participants on several occasions. Until 1888, however, no woman gave a major address at its meetings.44 Before 1872, the Prussian Ministry of Education had paid only minimal attention to the girls' schools. In 1865, Ludwig Wiese, the official who oversaw boys' secondary education from 1852 until 1875, had argued in a widely read pamphlet that a state-controlled system of girls' schools was "unnatural and unworkable," but he suggested that it might be desirable to create model schools in each province. Wiese also directed sharp criticism at the plethora of subjects in many schools and at the growth of public schools to a size where the desired family atmosphere was lost. Similar views were expressed in the guidelines for the girls' schools of the province of Prussia that were approved by Minister of Education Heinrich von Miihler in July 1868. These emphasized close attention to local needs and traditions at the girls' schools, especially by allowing instruction in foreign languages to be optional in areas where there was only one institution above the elementary level. In tune with Miihler's conservative religious views, these guidelines also indicated that girls' schools should treat no themes that would encourage girls to "criticize and moralize."45 When FaIk took office in 1872, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education did not even know who was responsible for overseeing 42

Beckmann, Miidchenbildung in Deutschland, pp. 12-14. Kreyenburg, Tochterschule, p. 22. 44 Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin: Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1888), p. 22; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 313; Lange, Lebenserinnerungen, p. 181. 45 Ludwig Wiese, Zur Geschichte una Bildung der Frauen: Zwei Vortrage, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1873), pp. 44-45, 96, 115-17; Centralblatt . . . 1868, pp. 625-34. Wiese's suggestion that the state found model schools in each province was echoed by Mohl, "Erziehung des weiblichen Geschlechtes," p. 287. 43

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THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

the higher girls' schools. The man who assumed this task was Stiehl's successor as the official in charge of the elementary schools, Karl Schneider, a former theology student with a wide variety of teaching experience, including a stint at a girls' school. Schneider played a major role at the conference on girls' education that FaIk called in August 1873 (but did not attend himself). He also conducted a series of inspection tours, on one of which he visited the higher girls' schools in Minden and Hannover and the seminar for Catholic elementary teachers in Munster.46 Twenty individuals, including four representatives of the Ministry of Education, took part in the deliberations in 1873. FaIk invited six male directors of public schools, among them Schornstein, Kreyenburg, and Haarbrucker, as well as Merget from the Royal Augusta School and the director of the Munster seminar. To these were added six heads of private schools (three men without university degrees and three women), a woman who ran a technical school, and another who taught at the Droyssig seminar. The selection of five women for a governmental commission of inquiry was very unusual for that time—no women had served on the Schools Inquiry Commission in England, for example. Yet none of those chosen had been active in the beginnings of feminist activity in the preceding years, and none ever published an important pamphlet or book on reform of the girls' schools.47 Despite the balanced representation of public and private 46

Karl Schneider, Ein halbes Jahrhundert im Dienste von Kirche und Schule: Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1900), p. 442; Katharina Krickau, Die Geschichte des Mindener Oberlyzeums, 1826-1926 (Minden, 1926), p. 58; Leon Wespy, Festschrift der Hoheren Tochterschulen I zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens unter stiidtischen Patronate (Hannover, 1903), p. 79; Eugen Kuntze, Geschichte des staatlichen Lehrerinnen-Seminars zu Munster i. W. (Munster, 1925), p. 72. 47 The participants were: Marie Boretius, director of a private school in Berlin; Hermann Dieckmann, director of the municipal higher girls' school in Hannover; Herr Dierbach, director of a private school in Berlin; Clara Eitner, director of a private school in Breslau; Dr. Theodor Haarbrucker, director of the municipal Victoria School in Berlin; Dr. Haupt, director of the municipal higher girls' school in Stettin; Selma Kannegieser, director of a private school in Berlin; Frederike Kaufmann, director of a technical school for girls in Cassel; Dr. Gotthold Kreyenburg, director of the municipal higher girls' school in Iserlohn; Johanna Kuhne, chief woman teacher at the state-run seminar at Droyssig; Dr. Hermann Luchs, director of the municipal higher girls' school in Breslau; August Merget, director of the Royal Augusta School and seminar; C. Raaz, director of a private school in Berlin; Dr. Richard Schornstein, director of the municipal higher girls' school in Elberfeld; Father Spiegel, director of the Catholic seminar in Munster; Herr Stackel, director of a private school in Berlin and formerly a seminar teacher.

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schools, Falk's conference lent fairly consistent support to the ideas espoused by the majority at Weimar. The abbreviated protocol published by the Ministry of Education48 reveals little disagreement on the need to distinguish between middle and higher schools for girls, to teach two foreign languages in the latter, to have ten years be the normal course, or to keep job training in separate institutions. The delegates also emphasized the desirability of having higher girls' schools placed under the provincial school boards. The academically trained men called for their pay to be raised to the same level as that of their colleagues in the boys' schools, while all participants agreed on the desperate need to raise salaries for women. On the issue of requiring university graduates as directors, however, no common ground could be found between Kreyenburg's associates and the men and women with seminar training. The latter group gained support from Merget, who argued that no regulations should be introduced that could not be met for lack of academically trained candidates. The final resolution said that "as a rule" public schools should have university graduates as directors. Disagreements also arose in discussions of the desirable length for the women's seminars, the relationship between the seminars and the girls' schools, and the question of severing training of elementary from that of secondary teachers. The only significant reform to emerge out of this conference was a new set of regulations for certifying women teachers, which FaIk issued in April 1874. These applied to all of Prussia, as no previous rules for women teachers had, but did not introduce drastic changes. Attendance at a public or private seminar was not a prerequisite for admission to the examination, which could still be taken by eighteen-year-olds. The written and oral portions of the examination tested general knowledge as much as specific preparation for teaching, in large measure because even those candidates who had graduated from a higher girls' school had never passed any such comprehensive examination. Young women who chose not to take, or did poorly on, the sections devoted to French and English received the right to teach in elementary schools. Those who passed in the foreign languages were certified to work in any grade of a higher girls' school, even though they might have only two years more education than their oldest pupils. All women were required to demonstrate some capacity for teaching sewing. In addition, all had to display a knowledge of theology 48

Centralblatt . . . 1873, pp. 572-611. 112

THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

that a number of critics considered to be excessively detailed, given that women seldom taught religion in the upper grades.49 In the years following Falk's conference, the educational authorities in Prussia pressured some institutions, including the Royal Elisabeth School, to hire more university graduates for the upper grades.50 Yet plans for general reform and regulation of girls' education fell through when Falk's comprehensive education law was not submitted to the legislature because of Bismarck's gradual shift in policy in the later 1870s. Meeting with a delegation from the Association for Girls' Secondary Education in April 1879, FaIk and Schneider stated that the issue of recognizing the higher girls' schools as secondary institutions, as well as the introduction of a recommended curriculum, would have to be dealt with in a different fashion. FaIk resigned shortly thereafter, however, and his more conservative successor, Robert von Puttkamer, did nothing for female education. In 1880 Schneider informed the Association for Girls' Secondary Education that he came to its convention empty-handed.51 The resolutions of the Weimar conference received a more sympathetic hearing from some other state governments. In Saxony, the minister of education, Karl von Gerber, originally wanted to delay any reform until Prussia acted, but in 1876 he agreed to recognize as secondary institutions those girls' schools with a tenyear course and with some university graduates on the faculty. At first, only two schools, in Dresden and Leipzig, obtained such recognition. As of 1907, a second institution in Dresden and one in Chemnitz also qualified. A curriculum issued in 1885 included seven years of French and four of English, but only two hours per week each for arithmetic and science in the upper grades.52 49

Schneider, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 414 46; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 304306. For criticisms of the high demands in religion, see Biichner, Die Frau, p. 156; Horst Keferstein, Frauenberuf und Frauenbildung,rn.itbesonderer Riicksicht auf die Lehrerinnenbildung (Cothen, 1879), p. 48; Clemens Nohl, Einige wichtige Fragen, das hohere Madchenschulwesen betreffend (Neuwied and Leipzig, n.d.), p. 15. 50 Friedrich Bachmann, Die konigliche Elisabethschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1893), p. 11; Viktor Uellner, Zur Geschichte der stadtischen Luisenschule und der mit ihr verbundenen Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalt zu Diisseldorf (1837-1887) (Dusseldorf, 1887), p. 56. 51 On the meeting in 1879, see Die Madchenschule 9 (1896): 127; Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 76. The final draft of Falk's education bill, it appears, did intend to recognize some higher girls' schools as secondary institutions: see the comment by Manfred Heinemann in Peter Baumgart, ed., Bildungspolitik in Preussen zur Zeit des Kaiserreiches (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 177. 52 Bernhard Rost, Entwicklung und Stand des hbheren Madchenschulwesens im Konigreich Sachsen (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 92-102. 113

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In Wurttemberg, where the director of the Katharinenstift became the head of the local branch of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education, a law of 30 December 1877 removed the higher girls' schools from the supervision of elementary school inspectors and placed them under a new authority. Many cities took over and upgraded existing institutions in order to qualify for this recognition, so that by 1883 nine public schools had achieved it. Two private schools also gained secondary status at this time.53 As was mentioned in Chapter Three, the government of Wurttemberg also created the first seminar for female secondary teachers in 1874. In neighboring Baden, academically trained teachers at the girls' schools received the status of civil servants, including pension rights, in 1872, before the Weimar conference. New regulations issued in 1877 allowed the government to provide subsidies to towns and private foundations that operated higher girls' schools and specified a seven-year course to follow three years of elementary school. In 1879 these schools were placed under the authorities in charge of secondary education.54 A number of the smaller states also introduced regulations that in whole or in part met the demands raised by the delegates to the Weimar conference. Hesse acted in 1874, followed a few years later by Oldenburg and Braunschweig. Of the larger German states, only Bavaria, where a state branch of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education was founded in 1876, made no response at all to the calls for regulation. There the dominant position of private Catholic schools, especially those connected to convents, meant that the concerns expressed by male university graduates in Protestant schools had little relevance.55 THE

Kulturkampf

AND PRUSSIAN GIRLS' SCHOOLS

Adalbert Falk's tenure as Prussia's minister of education was also the era of the Kulturkampf, Bismarck's campaign to weaken the influence of the Catholic church and the Catholic Center party 53 Julius Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Wurttemberg (Berlin, 1916), pp. 16-19; Emil Heintzeler, Das Konigin-Kathartna-Sttft in Stuttgart: Seine Geschichte von 1818 bis 1918 (Stuttgart, 1918), pp. 46-50. 54 Jakob Wychgram, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland una Frankreich, vol. 5, pt. 2 of Karl Adolf Schmid, ed., Geschichte der Erziehung (Berlin and Stuttgart, 1901), p. 278; Beckmann, Mddchenbildung in Deutschland, pp. 21-22. 55 Wychgram, Geschichte, p. 279; M. Celsa Brod, Festschrift zur Funfzigjahrfeier des Bayerischen Landesvereins fur das hbhere Madchenschulwesen (n.p., 1926).

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within the newly united German Empire. One aspect of it, the expulsion of teaching orders from Prussia in 1875, had a great impact on secondary education for girls, even though by the late 1880s most orders had returned and reopened their schools. Even before the expulsion of teaching nuns, the contest between liberals and Catholics led to some important developments. In 1872, FaIk brought to a conclusion several years of negotiations that resulted in making the higher girls' school and seminar in Posen, which had received state subsidies since the time of Friedrich Wilhelm III, into institutions totally controlled by the Prussian state. This new Luisenstiftung was what Germans called a simultan or paritatisch school, one that enrolled Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish girls.56 FaIk also supported the local authorities in Hildesheim when, in 1872, they took over a Protestant private school and made it a Simultanschule. He even took the unusual step of placing this controversial institution under the control of the provincial school board—precisely what the Weimar conference wanted to see happen to all higher girls' schools.57 In Cologne, where discontent with the Catholic schools had finally led in 1870 to the establishment of a municipal girls' school, the closing in 1875 of schools run by nuns forced some Catholic girls to enroll in the institution operated by the Protestant community, which hired one Catholic teacher at this time. In Dusseldorf, Essen, and Wesel, the banning of teaching orders spurred city governments to create municipal Simultanschulen by taking over existing private Protestant schools. In the smaller town of Duren, negotiations about merging an Ursuline school and one run by the Protestant community into a single public school dragged on until 1879, when the new institution opened with just four teachers and three two-year classes for girls between nine and fifteen.58 56 Otto Konopka, Geschichte der Koniglichen Luisenstiftung zu Posen (Posen, 1910), pp. 33-34. 57 Hildesheim, Stadtische Hohere Tochterschule, Festschrift zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens der Stadtischen Hoheren Tochterschule zu Hildesheim (Hildesheim, 1908), pp. 14-15. This school was removed from the supervision of the provincial school board in 1892: ibid., p. 21. 58 Barbara Weber, "Die Geschichte der Kolner Ursulinenschule von 1639-1875" (inaugural diss., University of Cologne, 1930), pp. 82-84; Elisabeth Toelpe, Geschichte des Lyzeums der evangelischen Kirchengemeinde KoIn, 1827-1927 (Cologne, 1927), p. 78; Uellner, Luisenschule zu Dusseldorf, p. 56; Festschrift zum 60jahrigen Bestehen der Luisenschule Essen (Essen, 1927), pp. 4-5; Otto HoUweg, ed., Festschrift zur Feier des 75jdhrigen Bestehens des Stadtischen Oberlyzeums in Wesel (Wesel, 1928),

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The most complicated situation arose in Trier. To serve the three hundred girls who had attended an Ursuline school until 1875, FaIk urged the city to found a Catholic public school. The mayor and some liberal city councilmen declined to spend money on a Catholic school, however, and Schneider and another official from the Ministry of Education had to come to Trier to negotiate. The result was establishment in 1879 of a Simultanschule with a nineyear course that received a subsidy from the state. A few years later a seminar without specific religious affiliation was added. Yet Catholic parents refused to enroll their daughters in the school, and priests would not give religious instruction there. When Catholics complained vigorously against tax revenue going to a school attended almost entirely by Protestants, the city council threatened to close it if the state did not increase its subsidy. Under this pressure, the Ministry of Education agreed in 1885 to make the Trier girls' school into the fourth institution operated directly by the Prussian state.59 The expulsion of Catholic teaching orders from Prussia also affected the seminars that had been run by nuns. In Breslau, a private Catholic seminar replaced a disbanded program carried on by the Ursulines. At the Luisenstiftung in Posen, the sudden need for more Catholic women teachers stimulated a sharp increase in enrollments in the late 1870s. In the Rhineland, the state founded new seminars for Catholic elementary teachers at Saarburg and Xanten, while at Montabaur the instructors at a seminar for men took over a course for women previously run by the Dernbach Sisters.60 The Trier seminar was founded specifically to prepare secondary teachers, although a recent study suggests that it resulted as much from a concern with providing careers for the daughters of civil servants as from a need for more women teachers. It did attract girls of a higher social class than the clientele of the elemenpp. 13-14; Erwin Gatz and Peter Dauven, "Bildungseinrichtungen fiir die weibliche Jugend in Duren, 1681-1944," Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins 82 (1972): 2527; Albert Kessler, Geschichte des Stadtischen Oberlyceums zu Duren von 1880 bis 1930 (Duren, 1930), p. 6. 59 Emil Zenz, "Die stadtische hohere Tochterschule (1879-1886) oder die Anfange der heutigen Augusta Viktoria Schule in Trier," Kurtriensches Jahrbuch 3 (1963): 7484. 60 Dieck, Gestaltung der Breslauer Madchenschulen, p. 46; Konopka, Luisenstiftung zu Posen, p. 53; Marika Morschner, Entwicklung una Struktur der Lehrennnenbildung: Studien zur Situation der Setninare in der Rheinprovinz unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der staatlichen Einrichtungen (Rheinstetten, 1977), p. 31; Martha Freundlieb, Pauline Herber: Ein Lebensbild (Paderborn, 1936), pp. 30-31. 116

THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

tary seminars in the Rhineland and was, like the seminar at the Royal Augusta School, a day school that did not take its students completely away from their parents.61 LECTURES FOR LADIES

In addition to the debates about reform of the higher girls' schools and the establishment of technical courses for women, the late 1860s and early 1870s witnessed the creation of several institutions designed to offer further education to young women not interested in practical career training. The most famous of these institutions was the Victoria Lyceum in Berlin, but similar programs also began in Breslau, Cologne, Darmstadt, and Leipzig. The original impulse for offering lectures for women in Berlin came from a Scottish woman, Georgina Archer. Born in 1827, Miss Archer, as she was always known, had lived in Berlin since the mid-1850s, supporting herself by giving English lessons. She must have moved in influential circles, for by the mid-1860s she was tutoring the future Wilhelm II.62 Stimulated by complaints from some of her female pupils that "after they left school, they could obtain no help in carrying on their education, but were abandoned entirely to their own resources," Archer proposed to Crown Princess Victoria the establishment for such young women of lecture courses taught by professors. Similar ideas reached Victoria at this time from her countrywoman Josephine Butler, the president of the North of England Council for the Promotion of the Higher Education of Women.63 After Archer had solicited funds, assembled a board of directors, and hired teachers, the first series of lectures at the Victoria Lyceum, which until Archer's death in 1882 remained a private venture, opened in January 1869. Neither Archer nor the crown princess intended to create a women's university. Victoria did not yet want to have women lawyers or pastors, and she did not expect that German women would soon be able to practice medicine. Both she and Archer did, however, hope to provide a better education for women teachers and 61

Morschner, Lehrerinnenbildung, pp. 32, 54-55, 43. On Archer, see Ulrike Henschke, Miss Archer: Geddchtnisrede (Berlin, 1884); Heinrich von Sybel's eulogy in Deutsche Rundschau 45 (December 1885): 344-50; and Lina Morgenstem, Die Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts: Biographische und culturhistorische Zeit- und Charaktergemdlde, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1888-1891), 3: 230-33. 63 "Victoria-Lyceum, Berlin," Journal of the Women's Education Union 9 (1881): 116; Pope, "Higher Education for Women in England," pp. 382-83, 393. 62

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governesses. More ambitious plans might well have been counterproductive. As Archer admitted in 1872, if at its foundation "the Lyceum had not presented itself to the world with a certain modesty," potential women students with "a warm but timid desire for higher education would not have had the courage to satisfy it."64 The first lecture cycle included courses in modern history, German literature, French literature, and art history. In the fall of 1869, lectures on music, English literature, physics, and geology were added. Subsequent years saw the introduction of courses on chemistry, botany, philosophy, and pedagogy, with the total number of offerings reaching a high of seventeen. Seventy women signed up for a total of two hundred courses in the first cycle; by the ninth year, more than nine hundred women were attending the Lyceum.65 Over the years, many prominent professors from the University of Berlin, including Friedrich Paulsen, Erich Schmidt, Hugo von Tschudi, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, offered courses at the Victoria Lyceum. Even the radical Eugen Duhring gave philosophy lectures there from 1872 to 1876. In a separate public lecture he gave in the latter year, however, he commented that institutions like the Victoria Lyceum did not provide the kind of career training that their students actually needed. According to Duhring's own account, his enemies on the board of directors used this incident to convince Archer not to renew his contract for another year.66 Duhring's successor in the philosophy course, Friedrich Paulsen, also had an abbreviated career at the Victoria Lyceum. In the winter of 1879, in a course on social ethics, Paulsen discussed a well-publicized banquet at the home of the wealthy banker Gerson von Bleichroder, where a servant had stood behind each chair. Paulsen's comment that "society had always shown an inclination to confound" such social distinctions "with that between the vir64 Alice von Cotta, Victoria-Lyceum Berlin: Denkschrift zum 25jahrigen Bestehen (Berlin, 1893), p. 11; Bertha von der Lage, Katserin Friedrich und ihr Wirkenfiir Vaterland und VoIk (Gera and Leipzig, 1888), p. 35; Victoria to Josephine Butler, 7.XII.68, cited in Pope, "Higher Education for Women in England," pp. 400, 388; Georgina Archer, Rede gehalten in October 1872 zur Eroffnung des . . . Victoria-Lyceums (Berlin, 1872), p. 4. 65 Annual programs of the Victoria Lyceum are preserved in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I; Cotta, Victoria-Lyceum Berlin, p. 11. 66 Eugen Duhring, Der Weg zur hoheren Berufsbildung der Frauen und die Lehrweise der Universitaten (Leipzig, 1877), pp. 60-74.

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tuous and the wicked" did not appeal to a member of the board of directors who happened to be attending the lecture. She had also been present at the banquet, sitting down, for she was Bleichroder's sister-in-law. According to Paulsen, "When the series of lectures had come to an end, Miss Archer sent me a polite note, stating that henceforth no lectures on philosophy would be given at the Victoria Lyceum."67 Other courses of "lectures for ladies" did not arouse such controversy, but neither did they achieve the size or longevity of the Victoria Lyceum. In Darmstadt, Grand Duchess Alice, again with the assistance of Luise Biichner, established the Alice Lyceum in 1870. It attracted 200 women to a variety of courses but closed down after Biichner's death in 1877.68 In Breslau, a teacher named Amalie Thilo, with the assistance of professors at the local university, opened the Lyceum for Ladies in 1871. As many as 170 young women took courses there on history, pedagogy, literature, art, and physics, but it closed when Thilo moved to Vienna in 1878.69 Lina Morgenstern organized a second series of lectures in Berlin, which offered eleven different courses but lasted only a few years before abandoning the field to its larger competitor. A Victoria Lyceum opened in Cologne around 1870, under the direction of a woman named Lina Schneider. In Leipzig, Henriette Goldschmidt in 1874 added academic lecture courses to her program for kindergarten teachers. Like Archer's establishment in Berlin, the Lyceum for Ladies in Leipzig continued its work into the twentieth century.70 Eugen Duhring was not the only critic of the Berlin Victoria Lyceum and its imitators in this period. To Fanny Lewald, such programs were "luxury institutes"; to Hedwig Dohm, they were "elegant little continuation schools." Such critics believed that money and effort would be better invested in improving the higher girls' 67 Friedrich Paulsen, An Autobiography, trans, and ed. Theodor Lorenz (New York, 1938), pp. 278-80. 68 Schepeler-Lette and Hirsch, "General Review," p. 148; Alice of Hesse, Biographical Sketch, p. 235; Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 30. 69 "Amalie Thilo," in Sophie Pataky, ed., Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1898), 2: 367-68; Amalie Thilo, Rede bei der Eroffnung der Vorlesungen im Damen-Lyceum am 18. Oktober 1871 (Breslau, 1871); idem, Rede bei der Eroffnung der Vorlesungen im Damen-Lyceum am 12. Oktober 1874 (Breslau, 1874); Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 30. 70 Morgenstern, Frauen des 19. fahrhunderts, 2: 157; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 253-55; Josephine Siebe and Johannes Priifer, Henriette Goldschmidt: Ihr Leben und ihr Schaffen (Leipzig, 1922), pp. 154-58.

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schools and opening more vocational courses.71 Others questioned the intellectual value of lecture courses that met only once or twice a week, had no prerequisites, and did not test their students in any way. Helene Lange, who attended the Victoria Lyceum in the early 1870s, later recalled, "What was offered was of high quality; but if one regarded the widely varying group of listeners, one could legitimately doubt that this material could be fully absorbed and assimilated, because no demands were made on either the previous education or the performance of the listeners."72 Archer was aware of this problem, as well as of the demands for better training for women teachers raised by the Weimar conference in 1872 and by the Association of Women Teachers and Governesses in its memorandum in 1873. She decided to establish a second set of courses with more rigorous instruction and examinations; they would meet in the late afternoon so that teachers could attend without missing work. The prospectus for the winter term in 1874 indicates that such courses were planned in Latin grammar, art history, mythology, history, geometry and algebra, German, and English.73 The inclusion of Latin and mathematics shows that the Victoria Lyceum was going well beyond the curriculum of the seminars for women teachers. These classes for teachers were smaller, and thus more expensive to operate, than the general lectures. To hold down the tuition for women teachers, most of whom were not very well off, Archer raised an endowment fund for scholarships, which grew to 24,000 Marks by September 1875 and to 100,000 Marks in 1882. Yet in 1875 she felt compelled to ask for support from the Prussian Ministry of Education. Admitting in a letter to FaIk that attendance at the Victoria Lyceum had at first been more a fashionable "fad" than a sign of intellectual curiosity, Archer stressed that this phase had passed and that the teachers' courses deserved state support because they would benefit the public schools. After an exchange of several letters, FaIk agreed in June 1876 to an annual subsidy of 400 Marks, an amount raised to 800 Marks in 1880.74 These instruc71 Lewald, Fur una wider den Frauen, pp. 64-65; Dohm cited in Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 230; Erkelenz, Ueber weibliche Erziehung, p. 47. 72 Lange, Lebenserinnerungen, p. 100. 73 Archer to FaIk, 15.IX.75 and 29.V.76, and prospectus for the winter term of 1874 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I. 74 Archer to FaIk, 15.IX.75; Rudolf von Gneist to Gossler, 17. VI.82; FaIk to Archer, 16.VI.76; and Puttkamer to Archer, 20.IV.80, all ibid. Twellmann asks rhetorically, "What had happened to make the authorities so generous?": Frauenbewegung, 2:

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tional courses held public examinations in mathematics and Latin in the late 1870s and early 1880s, which helped to convince skep­ tics that serious work was being done at the Lyceum. In the winter of 1879-1880, more than two hundred teachers, mostly from pri­ vate schools, enrolled in these courses.75 Programs of lectures for upper-class women began in many other European countries at approximately the same time as in Germany. The courses established in France by Victor Duruy fell somewhere between secondary schools and the Victoria Lyceum. By 1870 these courses existed in forty cities and towns, but most closed in the next few years after serving a total of only two thou­ sand young women. 76 In Belgium, an imitation of Duruy's courses opened in Liege in 1868. A similar program had been founded in Stockholm in 1865.77 In Russia, the intermediate-level Lubyanka courses in Moscow and Alarchin courses in St. Petersburg opened in 1869, with the more advanced Gere and Bestushev courses fol­ lowing in the same cities in 1872 and 1878. Either financial prob­ lems or the repressive policies of Alexander III, however, closed all educational programs for Russian women except the Bestushev courses by the late 1880s.78 In Great Britain, lectures for women began in Oxford in 1865, in Edinburgh in 1867, and in London in 1869. The North of England Council for the Promotion of the Higher Education of Women, es­ tablished in 1867, was offering classes in twenty-five cities by 1870, but most of its courses closed within a few years because of a shortage of money. In contrast to the situation in Germany, how­ ever, the lectures in Cambridge, Oxford, and London would be­ come the bases for women's colleges. Emily Davies, the moving spirit behind Girton College, Cambridge, from the beginning snared Lewald's and Dohm's criticisms of "lectures for ladies," but Anne Jemima Clough and others succeeded in turning such lec249. In fact, this was the first occasion on which Archer had asked for support from the Ministry of Education. 75 Archer to Puttkamer, 29.ΙΠ.80, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I. 76 Mayeur, L'aducation, p. 130. See also note 36 above. 77 Bernadette Lacomble-Masereel, Les premieres iiudiantes a VUniversita de Liege (1881-1919) (Liege, 1980), p. 103; Stanton, ed., Woman Question, p. 205. 78 Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton, 1978), pp. 75-83; Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," pp. 84-96, 144; Chris­ tine Johanson, Women's Struggle for Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1900 (Kingston and Montreal, 1987), pp. 35-50, 59-76, 95-98. 121

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tures into Newnham College, Cambridge's second women's col­ lege.79 THE BEGINNINGS OF HIGHER EDUCATION FOR WOMEN

Although no women's colleges were created in Germany during the 1860s and early 1870s, these years did see the modest begin­ nings of higher education for German women. The irony of this development was that foreign women had greater success at Ger­ man universities than did natives, while a number of Germans achieved breakthroughs at foreign institutions. During the late 1860s female auditors began attending lectures at a number of German universities. At Munich, the first woman appears to have started studying in 1865, and total female enroll­ ment rose to sixteen within four years. At Heidelberg, the Rus­ sians Sofia Kovalevskaia and Iulia Lermontova pioneered study for women in 1869; by 1873, eight women attended that university. Both Russians also managed to obtain private instruction, in math­ ematics and chemistry respectively, from professors at the Univer­ sity of Berlin, where Hedwig Dohm reported that a Professor W.— probably the philosopher Karl Friedrich Werder—allowed women to attend his lectures on Shakespeare until the porter refused one day to let them into the auditorium.80 At the University of Leipzig, auditing by women commenced no later than 1870, and from the winter semester of 1873-1874 until that of 1879-1880, thirty-eight women—including eleven Germans, twelve Britishers, ten Rus­ sians, one Finn, and four Americans (Eva Channing, Harriet Par­ ker, Mary Gwinn, and M. Carey Thomas, the future president of 79 Pope, "Higher Education for Women in England," pp. 11, 120-29, 23Φ40, 310; Mary Agnes Hamilton, Newnham: An Informal Biography (London, 1936), pp. 65-79; Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London, 1927), pp. 188-89; Vera Mary Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (London, 1960), pp. 3849. 80 Caroline Schultze, Die Aerzttn im XlX. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1889), p. 60; Hans Krabusch, "Die Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Heidelberg," Ruperto-Carola 19 (1956): 135-36; Ann Hibner Koblitz, A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia (Boston, Basel, and Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 88-89, 99-103; Dohm, Eman­ cipation der Frau, pp. 32-33; "Karl Friedrich Werder," in Allgememe Deutsche Biographie, 44: 485. The early auditors at Munich are not clearly discussed in Laetitia Boehm, "Von den Anfangen des akademischen Frauenstudiums in Deutschland, Zugleich ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen," Historisches fahrbuch 77 (1958): 298-327.

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THE FIRST WAVE OF R E F O R M

Bryn Mawr Callege)—studied there.81 Another American, Erminnie Piatt Smith, accompanied her sons to Europe in the early 1870s and appears to have attended courses at the new University in Strassburg and at the Mining Academy at Freiberg in Saxony.82 A few foreigners even earned doctoral degrees from German universities during this period. Kovalevskaia and Lermontova, unable to convince authorities at Berlin to grant them degrees, succeeded in doing so in 1874 at the University of Gottingen, with the former receiving her doctorate in absentia, without any oral examination or public defense. At Leipzig, another Russian woman, Johanna Evreinova, who was a cousin of both Kovalevskaia and Lermontova and had left Russia illegally, earned a law degree in 1873. The Austrian Susanna Rubinstein obtained a doctorate in philosophy from Leipzig the following year.83 That these foreign women did not seek access to state-administered examinations for certification as secondary teachers or lawyers must have made it easier for the universities to grant doctoral degrees to them. For German women, interest in university study centered primarily on the medical faculties, which in general did not welcome foreign or native women as auditors. Yet regular matriculation, not auditing, was required for certification as a physician. In this situation, the German-language University of Zurich, which began admitting women to regular study in the later 1860s, became a crucial institution for German women. A woman who did not go to Zurich, however, took the decisive first step for the higher medical education of German women. Henriette Pagelsen Hirschfeld, a pastor's daughter from SyIt, had married at age nineteen in 1853; but her husband appears to have 81

Renate Drucker, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Leipzig," in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. Hellmut Kretzschmar (Berlin, 1956), p p . 280-81; Marjorie H. Dobkin, ed., The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent, Ohio, 1979), pp. 164-244 passim; "Mary Gwinn Hodder" and "Harriet Parker Campbell" in Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-1915 (New York, 1914), pp. 394, 157. See also the article on conditions in Leipzig, probably written by Eva Channing, in Atlantic Monthly 44 (1879): 788-91. 82 "Erminnie Adele Piatt Smith," in Notable American Women, 3: 312-13. Margaret Rossiter confused Freiberg with the University of Freiburg in Baden: Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore and London, 1982), p. 330, n. 27. 83 Koblitz, Sofia Kovalevskaia, pp. 112-26, 55, 66, 86; Drucker, "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," p. 280; "Susanna Rubinstein," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 2: 209. Rubinstein is not mentioned by Drucker. Of these four doctorates, only Kovalevskaia's is listed in Elisabeth Boedeker, ed., 25 Jahre Frauenstudium in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Hannover, 1935-1939), 1: lix-lxix. 123

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been an alcoholic, and their marriage was annulled in the mid1860s when he was in an asylum. After trying to support herself as a lady's companion, Hirschfeld became interested in dentistry when she learned about the pioneering careers in medicine of the Blackwell sisters in the United States at a time when she was having problems with her own teeth. Encouraged by an American dentist in Berlin, Francis Peabody Abbott, she decided to try to study dentistry in America, but first struggled for two years to obtain a written statement from Prussian Minister of Education Heinrich von Muhler indicating that if she earned a degree she could practice in that state. Arriving at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1867, Hirschfeld discovered that, contrary to what Abbott had told her, no women had yet studied there. Only the strong support of Professor James Truman made it possible for her to enter the college, and she had to take anatomy courses at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia. By February 1869, however, she had completed successfully as rigorous a training in dentistry as existed at that time.84 After returning to Berlin, Hirschfeld established a practice treating women and children that quickly became more successful than she had ever hoped possible. Both Hedwig Dohm and Helene Lange soon turned to her for treatment. More important, Crown Princess Victoria sent the royal children to Germany's first woman dentist, which "made her reputation." In 1872 Hirschfeld married Karl Tiburtius, a physician in the Prussian army, but continued working even after they had two children.85 Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld served as a model for a number of German women who traveled to America to study dentistry in this era. The first was Marie Gruber (or Grubert) from Berlin, who attended the Ohio Dental College in 1871-1872. Other graduates up to 1881 included Emilie Foeking from the Ohio Dental College; 84

Franziska Tiburtius, "Dr. Henriette Tiburtius," in Bahnbrechende Frauen, ed. Deutscher Lyceum-Club (Berlin, 1912), pp. 187-96; James Truman, "Henriette Hirschfeld, D.D.S., and the Women Dentists of 1866-73," Dental Cosmos 53 (1911): 1380-86; Mary Mucholl, "Dr. Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld," Die Frau 2 (18941895): 82-85; Morgenstern, Frauen des 19. ]ahrhunderts, 3: 279-83; "Women in Dentistry," Journal of the American Dental Association 15 (1928): 1735-56, esp. 1741^42, 1752. See also the sketch in Renate Feyl, Der lautlose Aufbruch: Frauen in der Wissenschaft (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1983), pp. 119-32, which unfortunately contains no references to sources. 85 Dohm, Emancipation der Frau, pp. 124-25; Lange, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 10910; F. Tiburtius, "Dr. Henriette Tiburtius," p. 192. 124

THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

Louise Jacoby, Pauline Boeck, Elvira Castner, and Adolphine Petersen from the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery; Valeska Wilcke, Clara Kunast, Anna von Doemming, and Olga von Oertzen from the Pennsylvania College; and Alma (or Anna) Fullgraff from Michigan University Dental School.86 Before her remarriage, Hirschfeld also provided direct inspiration to the first two German women who went to Zurich to study medicine. Another pastor's daughter, Emilie Lehmus from Furth in Bavaria, came in contact with Hirschfeld through a married sister living in Berlin. The dentist convinced her to abandon teaching and follow her wish to become a doctor. Hirschfeld's influence also contributed to a similar decision by the sister of her future husband, Franziska Tiburtius, who, after informal inquiries indicated that no German university would admit her, followed Lehmus to Zurich in 1871. Both women would bring their studies to satisfactory conclusions, Lehmus in 1875 and Tiburtius the next year.87 As these women joined the pamphleteers, the German Women's Association, and the Lette Association in raising the issue of matriculation in the German universities, explicit resistance to this expansion of women's rights emerged. Around 1870, even men such as Heinrich von Sybel who favored improvements in female education expressed their opposition to women students. Writing in 1872, Ludwig Wiese of the Prussian Ministry of Education also rejected admission of women to the existing universities, although he could accept an institution similar to the recently opened Vassar College in the United States.88 On 5 June 1871 Wiese's superior, Education Minister Muhler, refused to allow a Russian woman to pursue a medical degree at the University of Konigsberg, even 86 Mucholl, "Dr. Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld," p. 84; Flora N. Haag, "Women in Dentistry," Dental Cosmos 53 (1911): 1149; "Women in Dentistry/' pp. 1751-56; Morgenstern, Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts, 3: 285-86. 87 Plothow, Begriinderinnen, p. 161; Franziska Tiburtius, Ertnnerungen einer Achtzigjahrigen, 2d ed. enl. (Berlin, 1925), pp. 108-14. Not a great deal is known about Lehmus, who wrote no autobiography. See Helene Lange, "Aesculapia Victrix," Die Frau 8 (1900-1901): 343-47; and Agnes Bluhm, "Ein Gedenktag der deutschen Medizinerinnen," Die Arztin Yl (1941): 337-39. 88 Sybel, Emancipation der Frau; Mohl, "Erziehung des weiblichen Geschlechtes," pp. 309-13; Philipp Nathusius-Ludom, Zur "Frauenfrage" (Halle, 1871); Hermann Jakoby, Grenzen der weiblichen Bildung (Gutersloh, 1871); Wiese, Geschichte und BiIdung, pp. 32-33. For discussion of the arguments for and against women students, see Chapter Six.

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though the medical faculty supported her application. (See illustration 5.) After university authorities repeated their request to allow women to attend medical courses, Muhler issued a second statement, declaring that he "neither acknowledged the need for training female physicians nor, if such a need existed, viewed the proposal as the appropriate way to achieve the desired goal."89 Muhler's stance agreed with that taken in the most adamant rejection of women students in this period, a pamphlet published in 1872 by Theodor von Bischoff, a professor of medicine at the University of Munich. In his view, scientific research had shown not only that women were physically weaker on the average than men but that their "entire organization had reached a less advanced state of evolution." In an argument that would later be an embarrassment even to his fellow opponents of female physicians, Bischoff said that women were incapable of serious academic study because their brains were smaller and lighter than men's brains. He warned that young girls who studied hard during their years of puberty would probably suffer "deep and permanent injury" to their reproductive systems. From another perspective, Bischoff considered the study of anatomy and venereal disease and the dissection of corpses to be wholly incompatible with the German ideal of womanhood. He also objected to having the medical profession become a haven for middle-class women who did not marry and feared that allowing women to become physicians would lead to overcrowding of the profession.90 Opponents of women's admission to the universities and the medical profession received further ammunition from events in Zurich. In May 1873, the Russian government, because it feared that the major subject of study of the 103 women enrolled at Zurich was revolution, ordered these women to return home by the end of the year or face permanent exile. At a time when many political exiles had gathered in Zurich, this suspicion had some basis in fact: Franziska Tiburtius encountered several Russian women whose politics and lifestyles were decidedly radical, and 89

Centralblatt . . . 1871, p. 352; Centralblatt . . . 1872, p. 79. Correspondence related to these statements can be found in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. I. Annemarie Blumenthal incorrectly identifies the university involved in this matter as Halle: "Diskussionen um das medizinischen Frauenstudium in Berlin" (medical diss., Freie-Universitat Berlin, 1965), p. 13. 90 Theodor von Bischoff, Das Studium una die Ausubung der Medizin durch Frauen (Munich, 1872), pp. 14-16, 21, 22, 29, 4^44. 126

T H E F I R S T W A V E OF R E F O R M

5. "The Eternal Feminine in Medicine." The caption reads: "It was to be expected that the two women students of medicine at Konigsberg would not receive permission from the Minister of Education to continue studying."

she even met the nihilist Peter Nechaev. The decree also accused the women students of sexual immorality and asserted, "Some of these girls have fallen so low that they are making a special study of that branch of obstetrics which in all countries is punished by criminal law and despised by honest people"—that is, abortion. Almost all the Russians left Zurich; only twenty-five ever completed their studies, with most of them obtaining medical degrees 127

FOUR

from the University of Bern, which was not declared off limits by the Russian government.91 The equation made in this decree between women students and political and sexual radicalism reinforced the attitudes of many middle-class Germans toward "emancipated" women and for decades would be a major obstacle to the fight to open the German universities and professions to women.92 In the short term, many of the Russian women forced to leave Zurich applied for admission to courses or examinations at German universities. Given the reason for their applications, it is hardly surprising that the universities of Freiburg, Giessen, Erlangen, Rostock, and Tubingen all rejected the requests. At Heidelberg, several Russians did audit medical courses for a short time, but in August 1873 the university senate refused to admit them to doctoral examinations and also banned any new female auditors. The Russian women found the friendliest reception at the University of Leipzig, where the medical faculty even proposed to allow those with adequate preparation to matriculate as regular students. The university senate would not assent, however.93 As mentioned above, Leipzig continued to admit female auditors until 1879. In 1877, thirty-nine male students protested unsuccessfully against the presence of three women in medical lectures. Two years later, shortly after M. Carey Thomas had arrived in Leipzig, Saxony's minister of education, von Gerber, informed the university that henceforth women would be admitted only by the ministry. The result was that no more entered for at least a decade. The reason for von Gerber's action is not clear, although one report indicates that the suicide of a male student jilted by a Russian woman student played a key role. Women already attending 91 Jan Marinus Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution: The Russian Colony in Zurich (1870-73) (Assen, 1955), pp. 140-43, 155, and passim; Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," pp. 391-92; F. Tiburtius, Ennnerungen, pp. 114-58. For an introduction to the study of medicine by women at Zurich, see Hanny Rohner, Die ersten 30 Jahre des medizinischen Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Zurich 1867-1897 (Zurich, 1972). 92 See Chapter Six. 93 Ernst Theodor Nauck, Das Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1953), p. 13; Melanie Lipinska, Histoire des femmes madecins (Paris, 1900), p. 406; Elke Rupp, Der Beginn des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Tiibingen (Tubingen, 1978), pp. 25-27; Walther Schonfeld, "Die Einstellung der Heidelberger Medizinischen Fakultat in den achtziger Jahren zum Medizinstudium der Frauen," Ruperto-Carola 29 (1961); 199; Drucker, "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 278-80.

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THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

courses at Leipzig were allowed to stay, but most had left by 1882, when Thomas found she could not convince authorities there or at Gottingen to examine her for a degree.94 Lehmus and Tiburtius did not achieve any greater success in their efforts to gain admission to the national examination for certifying physicians. Yet, because the commercial code of the new Reich permitted anyone to practice the "healing arts" as long as he or she did not claim to be a certified physician, they were able to open a clinic for women in Berlin in 1877. Much of the necessary capital was raised by Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld through direct solicitations and benefit concerts.95 Similar difficulties with certification plagued Anna Dahms, who received her medical training in France and Scotland. After two years of a tightly circumscribed practice in Hamburg, Dahms applied in 1879 to take the certification examination in Prussia but was informed by FaIk that there was not the slightest prospect of her being allowed to do so. Having already placed her name on the British Medical Register by passing an examination in Dublin in 1878, she moved to England and founded a dispensary in Manchester.96 This failure to gain access to certification, along with the demise of Falk's education bill and the banning of new female auditors at the University of Leipzig in 1879, marked the end of the first wave of reform in the secondary and higher education of German women. Much had been accomplished in a decade and a half, especially in the upgrading of the higher girls' schools in many of the medium-sized states and in the creation of vocational and academic courses for young women who had finished their schooling. Yet the blocking of access to the universities and full membership in the medical profession left German women "behind" their sisters in several other European countries. This backwardness should not be exaggerated, however. Careers for women in law, which had hardly been mentioned in Germany, had not been opened in any other European country as of 94 Dorothea Gotze, "Der publizistische Kampf um die hohere Frauenbildung in Deutschland von den Anfangen bis zur Zulassung der Frau zum Hochschulstudium" (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1957), pp. 244-45; Drucker, "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 280-81; J.B.S. (Jane Belle Sherzer), in The Nation 58 (1894): 154; Dobkin, ed., Making of a Feminist, pp. 208-44. Thomas did obtain a doctorate at Zurich. 95 Tiburtius, Erinnerungen, pp. 179-80; Mucholl, "Dr. Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld," p. 85. 96 Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 1: 118; Sophia Jex-Blake, Medical Women: A Thesis and a History, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1886), pp. 95, 224.

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1879. Evreinova's law degree in itself was a rarity and did not enable her to practice when she returned to Russia. Kovalevskaia's degree in mathematics also failed to open career opportunities in her homeland. In Belgium and Austria, women with foreign medical degrees had less opportunity to practice their professions than did Lehmus and Tiburtius in Germany. Neither of these countries yet allowed matriculation of women in their universities, and auditing at Vienna had been more restricted than at Leipzig up to that time. Nations that had opened their universities to women did not necessarily attract many, especially natives: in both France and Switzerland, foreigners, primarily Russians, composed the major portion of female students. Only two of the first twentyeight medical degrees at Zurich in the 1870s and 1880s went to Swiss women, while at the medical faculty in Paris in 1886 only 7 out of 108 women students were French. Not until 1885 could French women obtain positions as interns in Parisian hospitals. The University of Helsinki opened its doors to women in 1870, but only two enrolled in the first fifteen years. Italy and Denmark admitted women to higher education in the mid-1870s but also attracted only a few at first.97 Conditions in Germany contrasted most notably with those in Russia and England. Russian women had attended university courses at home in the late 1850s and early 1860s but could no longer do so after 1864, and for the arts and sciences they had to rely on special women's courses similar to those at the Victoria Lyceum and its imitators in Germany. Beginning in 1872, however, they could attend a medical course for women in St. Petersburg, which was created by the government in part to keep Russian women from going to foreign universities such as Zurich where they might fall under the influence of political exiles. Although this course did not lead to full certification as a physician, but only to the status of "learned midwife," hundreds of Russian women attended it over the years and went on to a relatively unrestricted practice of medicine in a country that desperately 97 Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," p. 166; Koblitz, Sofia Kovalevskaia, p. 127; Stanton, ed., Woman Question, pp. 450, 364, 224; Anna Lind, "Das Frauenstudium in Osterreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz" (law diss., University of Vienna, 1961), pp. 41-50; Rohner, Die ersten 30 jahre, pp. 78-82; Jacques Poirier and R. Nahon, "!/accession des femmes a la carriere medicale (a la fin du XIXe siecle)," in Midecine et philosophie a la fin du XIXe siecle, ed. J. and J. L. Poirier (VaI de Marne, 1981), pp. 25-46; Kathe Schirmacher, The Modern Woman's Rights Movement, trans, from the 2d German ed. by Carl Conrad Eckhardt (New York, 1912), pp. I l l , 123.

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THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

needed more health-care professionals—and in which the medical profession enjoyed lower prestige than in Germany. When one adds to these medical students the hundreds of Russian women who went to universities in western Europe, it is clear that the economic and political backwardness of the tsarist empire did not prevent it from being the European country most open to higher education for women in these years.98 English women achieved successes in higher education in this era primarily by founding new private institutions exclusively for women, such as the London School of Medicine for Women, established in 1874, and the separate women's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford. Although students at the latter gradually gained access to other courses and facilities at these universities, neither treated women as equals, and both withheld degrees from them until well into the twentieth century. The University of Dublin was the first in the United Kingdom to offer examinations and degrees to students from the School of Medicine for Women, while the University of London, in essence only an examining body, pioneered in opening other degrees to women in 1878." These brief comments on Russia and England suggest several reasons why German women did not achieve as much success in higher education in this period. Neither of the factors that led the Russian government to create the medical course for women—the desire to prevent students from going abroad or the shortage of physicians—existed to any comparable degree in Germany. Private endeavors like those in England could not prosper in the state-controlled educational systems in Germany, where certification as a physician or secondary teacher depended explicitly on possession of the Abitur and matriculated study at a university. The tradition of philanthropic support for higher education, which both British and American women were able to draw on to finance new private colleges, also did not exist to any comparable extent in Germany. Another obstacle to the admission of German women to higher 98 Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," pp. 53, 106-108, 200; Johanson, Women's Struggle, pp. 77-94. See also Jeanette E. Tuve, The First Russian Women Physicians (Newtonville, Mass., 1984), which points out that many male physicians in Russia supported opening their profession to women and that the zemstvos offered scholarships to women who promised to practice medicine there. 99 See especially E. Moberly Bell, Storming the Citadel: The Rise of the Woman Doctor (London, 1953); Edythe Lutzker, Women Gain a Place in Medicine (New York, 1969); Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (London, 1975); and Brittain, The Women at Oxford.

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education was the nature of the universities themselves. If in England, "though many girls of secondary school age had been sent away to boarding schools, the idea of having young women of marriageable age away from home was novel and somewhat shocking,"100 in Germany the notion of young women attending institutions that did not house their students in supervised dormitories proved even more difficult to accept. In a society where drinking, duelling, and other forms of rowdiness were not merely tolerated but virtually expected of students as proofs of manliness, caricaturists needed only to depict women students pursuing the leisure activities of their male colleagues to make them appear ridiculous and thus not worthy of serious attention.101 (See illustrations 6 and 7a and b.) One must also point out, however, that German women themselves did not expend a great deal of effort in this period to gain

Sfcn iiiiifrc, Spcmt.Shliitin.

6. "The Darker Side—Women Students' Tavern in Zurich." ioo McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, p. 42. 101 See the discussion of caricatures of women students in Gotze, "Der publizistische Kampf," pp. 251-62, 312-15. 132

Studentinnen deren

Pcben,

Irciben,

ber S u f u n f t ,

80

J B i r f c n unb ©cf)nffen.

7a and b. "Women Students of the Future." Among them are the "raw freshman," the jaded upper-class student, sorority sisters from Kiev and Buffalo, the pedant, the lecturer, and the philistine. (continued on p. 134)

86

Die Studentinnen der Sufunjt.

THE FIRST WAVE OF REFORM

access to the universities, particularly in comparison to the time and money invested in vocational programs and lecture courses like the Victoria Lyceum. Even nearby Zurich attracted far fewer German women than it did Russians, Americans, and Britishers. In addition to Lehmus and Tiburtius, only three German women— Amalie Hallmann, Lina Beger, and Clare Schubert—appear to have studied there during the 1870s.102 Some other German women were discouraged by the radical reputation that the Swiss universities had acquired through the Russian decree of 1873. As Marie von Bunsen recalled, she did not consider university study in the late 1870s because it would have involved associating with "short-haired nihilists."103 Not until a decade later would a reinvigorated feminist movement launch a major campaign to open German universities to women. 102

On Hallmann, see Tiburtius, Erinnerungen, p. 165; "Lina Frey-Beger," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: 232; "Clare Schubert-Feder," ibid., 2: 276-77. 103 Marie von Bunsen, Der Welt in der ich lebte (Leipzig, 1929), p. 45.

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The Petition Campaigns, 1887-1894 AFTER THE shelving of FaIk's comprehensive education bill, the barring of new female auditors at the University of Leipzig, and the failure of Emilie Lehmus, Franziska Tiburtius, and Anna Dahms to obtain certification as physicians, the campaign for improved educational opportunities for German women languished for almost a decade. Not until late in 1887 would it be revived, sparked by a petition to the Prussian Ministry of Education and legislature submitted by Henriette Schrader-Breymann, Helene Lange, and four other women. Accompanying this petition was Lange's famous pamphlet, The Higher Girls' School and Its Destiny, more frequently referred to as the "Yellow Brochure."1 The petition itself presented no new demands but only repeated the two recommendations made in 1873 by the Association of Women Teachers and Governesses: that women be given a greater role in the upper grades of the higher girls' schools and that some form of more advanced training be provided for such teachers. Yet this petition and pamphlet touched off a widespread controversy over female education that did not die down until after major reforms were introduced in Prussia in 1908-1909. Many men teachers responded more harshly to Lange's views than they had to the expression of similar ideas by Marie Calm or Marie Stoephasius around 1870. Women who considered the demands raised in the petition too limited moved quickly to found new organizations that pressed for more radical changes. Although the original petition never reached the floor of the Prussian House of Deputies, appeals made in the next few years by a number of groups brought issues of women's education before the Reichstag and the state legislatures for the first time. As will be discussed in Chapter Six, 1 Helene Lange, Die hohere Madchenschule und ihre Bestimmung (Berlin, 1887). This is reprinted in full in her Kampfzeiten: Aufsatze und Reden aus vier fahrzehnten, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1928), 1: 9-57; substantial excerpts are in Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung im Spiegel reprasentatwer Frauenzeitschriften: lhre Anfdnge und erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), 2: 329-43.

136

THE PETITION CAMPAIGNS

these petition campaigns stimulated a much more wide-ranging debate of the "woman question" than had taken place in the later 1860s and early 1870s. To understand the intensity of the reactions the "Yellow Brochure" prompted and the increased attention that the woman question received in the late 1880s, it is necessary to examine first a number of developments during the decade when German women put forward few public demands for improved educational and employment opportunities.2 CONTINUING LIMITS ON HIGHER EDUCATION

Only a handful of German women followed Lehmus and Tiburtius to Swiss universities in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Clare Schubert studied art history in Zurich beginning in 1878, and after a brief period as one of only two female auditors at the University of Vienna she received her degree in Switzerland in 1885.3 Hope Bridges Adams, who had moved from her native England to Germany in 1873 and then studied medicine at Leipzig before transferring to Bern, earned her medical degree in 1881; after returning briefly to the United Kingdom to enter her name on the Medical Register, she began a practice in Frankfurt. She would later marry twice, both times to physicians who could sign official documents that she, without certification, could not. Adams became a socialist and was known as a doctor willing to violate German law to perform abortions.4 Two Germans, Ella Mensch and Marie Nowack, completed theses in German literature at Zurich in 1886; Emma Hoffmann, who had won several prizes in earlier years, earned her doctorate from Bern in the same field in 1887.5 By this time, enough German 2

For discussion of the general background to the revival of German feminism at this time, see Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894—1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976); and Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die biirgerhche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894-1933 (Gottingen, 1981). Twellmann, for unexplained reasons, treated 1889 as the end of the first phase in the development of German feminism. 3 "Clare Schubert-Feder," in Sophie Pataky, ed., Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1898), 2: 276-77; Anna Lind, "Das Frauenstudium in Osterreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz" (law diss., University of Vienna, 1961), pp. 48-50. 4 "Hope Bridges Adams-Lehmann," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: 2; Rahel Goitein Straus, Wir lebten in Deutschland: Erinnerungen einer deutschen JUdin, 1880-1933 (Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 138-39. 5 Elisabeth Boedeker, ed., 25 Jahre Frauenstudium in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Hannover, 1935-1939), 1: Iv, liii; Schweizerischer Verband der Akademikerinnen, Das 137

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women were enrolled at Zurich to constitute a small community of supportive friends, which Ricarda Huch, who began studying history there in 1887, described very positively in her memoirs. Obtaining permission to go to Zurich was still not easy for many of these women: Huch's grandmother feared that studying natural science might destroy her religious faith, and her father might have refused to let her go even to study the humanities if he had not been in South America on business. 6 Young women could by this time turn to the German Women's Association for help in financing their studies. This organization had begun a scholarship fund in 1879, but only in the mid-1880s did several large donations from Luise Lenz-Heymann make it possible to help a number of students. Lenz-Heymann was a native of Baden whose Swiss husband had died in 1880. She first tried to use her wealth to bribe the universities in her home state to open their doors to women. In 1883, she offered 100,000 Marks to the University of Heidelberg on the condition that 3,000 Marks of the annual interest should be devoted to scholarships for women students of medicine, chemistry, or pharmacy. The dean of the medical faculty refused the gift, referring to the university senate's decision against women auditors in 1873 and adding that admission of women "would not be to the advantage of the university." She next turned to the University of Freiburg, which in December 1884 also rejected her generous offer because of the conditions attached to it. Only then did Lenz-Heymann approach the German Women's Association, urging it to obtain recognition as a legal entity so that it could receive the sums she wanted to give. She donated 21,000 Marks in 1885, 30,000 in 1886, and 80,000 more in 1888.7 Frauenstudium an den Schweizer Hochschulen (Zurich, 1928), pp. 97, 110. Boedeker also lists Anna Baumler as receiving a medical degree from Zurich in 1887, but I have encountered no other reference to her career: see 25 fahre Frauenstudium, 1: lviii. 6 Ricarda Huch, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11: Autobwgraphische Schriften ([Cologne], n.d.), pp. 160 and 158-95 passim. For other autobiographical accounts of women at Zurich in the late 1880s, see the works cited in Chapter Seven, note 2, as well as the recollections of Hedwig Bleuler-Waser in Schweizerischer Verband, Frauenstudium an den Schweizer Hochschulen, pp. 65-73. 7 Louise Otto-Peters, Das erste Vierteljahrhundert des AUgemeinen Deutschen Frauenvereins (Leipzig, 1890), pp. 50, 63, 71; Auguste Schmidt, "Luise Lenz-Heymann und der AUgemeinen Deutschen Frauenverein," Die Frau 7 (1899-1900): 288-91; Walther Schonfeld, "Die Einstellung der Heidelberger Medizinischen Fakultat in den achtziger Jahren zum Medizinstudium der Frauen," Ruperto-Carola 29 (1961): 200-203; 138

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The rejection of Lenz-Heymann's gift by the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg illustrates the continuing opposition to women students in the Germany of the 1880s. Only in isolated cases did any women succeed even in gaining access to a single professor's lectures. Most of these women were foreigners, a few of them wives of men visiting German universities. Several reports of such clandestine study by women led Prussian Minister of Education Gustav von Gossler to issue a decree on 9 August 1886 that reaffirmed the ban on female auditors in Prussia. When the American chemist Helen Abbott visited several German universities the following year, she found a number of professors interested in her work but none willing to risk official wrath by admitting her to their laboratories.8 Gossler's decree, in combination with the failure of Lenz-Heymann's attempt to open Baden's universities to women, at least in the short term served to discourage German women from pushing for access to the existing institutions of higher education. For Lange and others, creation of separate academies for women seemed to be the quickest path to improved training for women teachers. DEVELOPMENTS IN THE HIGHER GIRLS' SCHOOLS

After the new education regulations issued in many medium-sized states during the mid-1870s and the rash of new public schools created as a result of the Kulturkampf in Prussia, no dramatic changes affected the higher girls' schools over the next decade. Many fewer new municipal schools were founded: according to Wilhelm Noldeke's statistics, only twenty-two opened between 1881 and 1887, compared to the seventy-one established from 1873 through 1880.9 Halle saw the opening of its first municipal school, as did the growing industrial city of Duisburg. In Berlin, three new institutions joined the existing Luise and Victoria schools: the SoErnst Theodor Nauck, Das Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1953), pp. 13-14. 8 Elke Rupp, Der Beginn des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Tubingen (Tubingen, 1978), pp. 29-30; newspaper clippings from 1884 and 1886 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. I; Centralblatt . . . 1886, p. 620; Helen Abbott Michael, Studies in Plant and Organic Chemistry and Literary Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1907), pp. 28-81. 9 Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin: Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1888), p. 4. 139

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phie School in 1876, the Charlotte School in 1879, and the Margarete School in 1886. More characteristic of the period was the expansion of the enrollment, faculties, and facilities of existing schools, especially at the more than 130 public schools established between 1860 and 1880. Many grew to a full complement of nine or ten separate classes in this period, with the necessary concomitants of more teachers and enlarged or even entirely new buildings. In Berlin, the Royal Elisabeth School underwent extensive renovations in the 1870s, and the Royal Augusta School received a new building in 1886. The city government not only built three new schools but also constructed a new building costing 907,000 Marks for the Luise School in 1874. One feature included in many of the new schools was a gymnasium, as required physical education classes became much more common for girls.10 The edifices constructed in this era gave a visible expression to the increasing importance placed on secondary education for girls. (See illustration 4.) In the states that had adopted rules for recognizing girls' schools as secondary institutions, there was a special motivation for cities to create enough separate classes and hire enough academically trained teachers to meet the requirements. As noted in Chapter Four, many schools in Wurttemberg made the needed changes, while few in Saxony did so. Even in Prussia, municipal higher girls' schools appear to have made greater efforts in this period to hire more university graduates, although schools in smaller towns still experienced great difficulty in retaining such men for very long.11 Easing the difficulty in finding such teachers was the rapid growth in the number of university graduates taking the examination pro facultate docendi, which reached a temporary peak in 1885. In fact, by the early 1880s there was a great deal of concern about an oversupply of male secondary schoolteachers in Germany. Realgymnasium graduates, who since 1870 had been allowed to study sciences and modern languages at Prussian universities, accounted for much of this increase in certified secondary teachers, and they were, in general, better candidates for the girls' schools than Gymnasium graduates who might have 10

Friedrich Bachmann, Geschichte der Koniglichen Elisabethschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1897), p. 72; on the Augusta School, Karl Supprian, Frauengestalten in der Geschichte der Padagogik (Leipzig, 1897), p. 277; Eduard Muret, Geschichte der ersten stadtischen hbheren Tochterschule, der Lmsenschule in Berlin (Berlin, 1888), p. 69. 11 See above, p. 50. 140

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studied the classical languages.12 To the extent that more men with university training were being hired, it became more difficult for women teachers to play the role in the upper grades that they desired. More separate classes, more teachers at the top end of the pay scale, and new facilities meant higher costs for the public higher girls' schools. Increased enrollments and tuition hikes do not appear to have covered these costs: as of 1891, tuition supplied only 56 percent of the income at Prussia's public schools, with government treasuries paying the rest.13 The large majority of private schools, even with their higher tuitions, could not keep up with the public schools in these areas; but they could still stress their smaller size, more exclusive clientele, and, of particular importance for the controversy over the "Yellow Brochure," overwhelmingly female faculties. CONFLICTS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN TEACHERS

One of the most important developments affecting female education between the mid-1870s and the mid-1880s was a heightened level of hostility between men and women teachers. Antagonisms grew against a background of troubled economic times and an ever expanding supply of women graduates from the many new seminars opened since the late 1860s. Both the male elementary teachers striving to gain recognition as educated professionals and the university graduates wanting secondary status for the higher girls' schools tended to view the women in their ranks as major obstacles to their ambitions. Conflict over the role of women teachers in the upper grades of the higher girls' schools originally peaked before the widespread concern about an oversupply of academically trained male teachers arose about 1880. In the wake of the petition by the Association of Women Teachers and Governesses in 1873 and the beginning of the afternoon courses at the Victoria Lyceum in the following year, Theodor Haarbrucker of the Victoria School in Berlin proposed to the convention of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education in 1875 that it establish an "academy" to give women teachers training beyond the level of that offered at the seminars. Discussion of the role of women in the upper grades proved so heated 12

James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1983), esp. pp. 70, 101. 13 Festschrift des Koniglich Preussischen statistischen Bureaus (Berlin, 1905), p. 119. 141

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that the question was placed on the agenda for the following year, at a convention that attracted only 102 men compared to 116 women. August Kippenberg, director of a private school in Bremen, framed a resolution stating that women were "indispensable" in the upper grades, but Haarbriicker proposed replacing this word with "desirable," and Hermann Dieckmann, director of Hannover's municipal school since its creation in 1853, argued that the proper term was "permissible." August Moldehn, who would later head the state-run seminar in Droyssig and then the Royal Augusta School, declared that he would entrust sewing instruction in the lowest grade to his senior male teacher before he would have a woman give academic instruction in the upper grades at his school. In debates described as "almost tumultuous in character," Dieckmann's view won support from the majority of men, but the whole conference adopted Haarbriicker's middle position.14 No academy for women teachers was founded. The afternoon courses at the Victoria Lyceum continued, however, and in 1878 they received strong support from a member of Berlin's school board, Eduard Cauer, whose wife Minna had not yet begun her career as a feminist leader. In a major speech, Cauer argued for the creation of academies and an upper-level examination (Oberlehrerinnenprufung) for women and suggested that the ideal public school would have six Oberlehrer, four Oberlehrerinnen, and six men and eight women with seminar training. In response, a teacher named Oswald Steiner questioned why, if the reformers believed women could educate girls better than men could, they did not propose removing men entirely from the girls' schools. "Perhaps," he stated, "that is the ultimate goal of the whole agitation." Steiner also commented, "The personality of the woman teacher is not the ideal for girls." In an essay published in 1884, the right-wing social critic Paul de Lagarde backed up Steiner by asserting that "older girls are only very seldom able to give moral education to younger ones," and that they were totally unable to give instruction beyond the elementary level.15 14

Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin, pp. 25-28; offprint, with marginal comments indicating Moldehn said this, of Marie Martin, "Die Deutsche Verein, die Petition der Schuldirektoren, und die Frauen," Frauenbildung 5 (1906): 525-35, in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, All, No. 18, Vol. Ill; Eduard Cauer, Die hohere Madchenschule und die Lehrerinnenfrage (Berlin, 1878), pp. 16-17. 15 Cauer, Madchenschule, pp. 18, 27; Oswald Steiner, Die offenthche lnteresse und die Oberlehrerinnenfrage (Berlin, 1879), pp. 7-8; Paul de Lagarde, "Programm fur die 142

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Educational officials in Berlin also supported the expanding role of women in the city's elementary schools, declaring in 1872 that the employment of women in the lower and middle grades since 1863 had been "beneficial" for the schools. By 1880, nearly onethird of the city's public elementary schoolteachers were women. For Prussia as a whole, women had not advanced so far, but the expulsion of teaching orders in the Kulturkampf contributed to a rise in the number of lay women teachers from under 3,869 in 1875 to 5,718 in 1881, an increase of almost 48 percent in six years.16 In rural Bavaria, where nuns had often taught in smaller towns and villages, lay women had great difficulties gaining acceptance because local priests tended to view them as agents of the secularizing Kulturkampf.17

As noted in Chapter Four, at least until the late 1870s the various state governments appear to have been interested in increasing the supply of women teachers. The Prussian government not only created several seminars for Catholic women needed to replace the banished nuns but also supported the opening of the Protestant seminar in Augustenburg in 1878. Bavaria founded three seminars for lay elementary teachers between 1872 and 1875, while Saxony opened its second such institution in Dresden in 1875. Wurttemberg established its first seminar for female secondary schoolteachers in 1874.18 Male elementary teachers did not welcome the rising number of seminars for women. Saxon teachers expressed sharp opposition to creation of the one in Dresden in the mid-1870s; one group in Zittau insisted that the notion that girls had to be taught by women was untenable and that women's constitutions could not withstand the rigors of schoolteaching. In Bavaria, men also resisted the intrusion of graduates of the new lay seminars into the schools, fearing that their presence would hamper efforts to improve the status of the profession. Aggravating this situation was the fact that women teachers tended to come from higher social !conservative Partei Preussens," in Deutsche Schriften, ed. K. A. Fischer (Stuttgart, 1934), p. 392. 16 Gustav Humperdinck, Ftir Frauenarbeit in der Schule (Essen, 1884), p. 11; Walther Hardt, Die Lehrennnenfrage (Lissa, 1905), p. 11; Pauline Herber, Das Lehrerinnenwesen in Deutschland (Kempten and Munich, 1906), p. 40. 17 Helmut Beilner, Die Emanzipation der bayenschen hehrerin, aufgezeigt an der Arbeit des bayenschen Lehrerinnenvereins (1898-1933) (Munich, 1971), pp. 41-42. 18 See above, pp. 67-69. Beilner, Emanzipatton der bayenschen hehrerin, p. 37; Bernhard Rost, Entwicklung und Stand des hoheren Mddchenschulwesens im Konigreich Sachsen (Leipzig, 1907), p. 268. 143

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backgrounds than men who taught in the elementary schools, which could often make it difficult for the two groups to work well together.19 In 1880, the German Teachers' Association retreated from its statement of 1861 accepting female elementary teachers as "necessary" and debated a resolution stating that the association "cannot approve in principle the appointment of women teachers in public schools, declares their employment at present as a makeshift expedient, and hopes to see this avoided in the future." Although the resolution was not brought to a vote, all speakers supported it.20 Similar hostility to any role for women in the elementary schools appeared in a frequently cited pamphlet, Women's Work in the School, published in 1884 by a Westphalian school inspector named Wilhelm Cremer. Interested in discouraging girls from adding to what he viewed as a gross oversupply of job candidates, Cremer claimed that his experience showed that only 18 percent of women teachers achieved satisfactory results in the classroom, while fully 60 percent fell below the most minimum standards expected of men. He believed that all women teachers knew that they had missed their true calling to be wives and mothers and suggested that for the first ten years or so younger women who still hoped for husbands did not approach their work with the proper sense of commitment to a lifetime career. According to Cremer, women who stayed in teaching gradually lost most of their feminine virtues.21 Lagarde's and Cremer's works were not the only ones to anger women teachers in 1884. A pamphlet published in that year by a man named Julius Einsiedel contained an inflammatory description of the fate of German governesses in England. Concerned about the rising number of young women taking the teachers' examination, Einsiedel likened the outflow of those looking for jobs abroad to the the annual tribute to the minotaur in Crete: scarcely any of those hopeful youths would find "an Ariadne's thread to 19

Rost, Entwtcklung, pp. 261-63; Beilner, Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrenn, p. 42; Use Gahlings and EUa Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin: Sozialgeschichte und Gegenwartslage (Heidelberg, 1961), pp. 45-^7. 20 Robert Rissmann, Geschichte des deutschen Lehrervereins (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 82, 199. It is interesting that this organization did not discuss the issue of women teachers again until 1906: ibid., p. 225. 21 Wilhelm Cremer, Frauenarbeit in der Schule (Gutersloh, 1884), pp. 3, 8, 21, 23. Several male teachers responded to Cremer's charges: see Humperdinck, FUr Frauenarbeit; and Hermann Briick, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Dortmund, 1884). 144

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lead them back from their false path in life." He stressed the uncomfortable social position of those who did find work but put more emphasis on the problems of what he claimed were the onethird to one-half of all foreign women in England who were looking for positions. After discussing a young German man who ended up playing his violin on street corners, he admonished, "The same happens to many German girls from honorable families, who end up on the streets, if in another way." For Einsiedel, the only way that single women should go abroad was as deaconesses.22 Under assault from several directions, women teachers became more assertive in the early 1880s. Writing in 1882, Bertha von der Lage, who taught at the Charlotte School in Berlin, declared that women teachers must organize advanced courses for themselves if they were to justify their claim to teach in the upper grades. A member of the Association of German Women Teachers in England, H. Z. Konig, and the director of a private seminar in Bremen, Mathilde Lammers, countered Einsiedel's pamphlet with positive descriptions of the possibilities for satisfying work abroad and advice about seeking positions.23 In 1885, in direct response to Cremer, five Catholic women, led by Pauline Herber, who taught at the seminar in Montabaur, issued a call for the creation of an Association of Catholic Women Teachers. This organization began publishing a journal in 1888 and counted more than 4,500 members by 1898.24 In 1885 as well, the former teacher Marie Loeper-Housselle founded Die Lehrerin in Schule una Haws, a journal that aimed to serve women teachers at all levels but put special emphasis on the struggle to increase female influence in the higher girls' schools. The first volume contained a two-part article by Helene Lange, in which she commented that she could write about men's work in the school just as harshly as Cremer had about women's work. This article contained most of the ideas that would be included in 22

Julius Einsiedel, Das Gouvernantenwesen in England: Line Warnung (Heilbronn, 1884), pp. 3, 24-26, 13, 37. 23 Bertha von der Lage, Ein Wort zur Frauenfrage (Berlin, 1882), pp. 78-84; H. Z. Konig, Authentisches iiber die deutsche Erzieherin in England (London, 1884); Mathilde Lammers, Deutsche Lehrerinnen im Auslande (Berlin, 1884). 24 Pauline Herber, "Aus der Geschichte des Vereins katholischer deutscher Lehrerinnen," Kathohsche Frauenbildung 61 (1960): 241-51, which is a reprint of an article published in 1893; Martha Freundlieb, Pauline Herber: Ein Lebensbild (Paderborn, 1936), pp. 48-68; Alfred Kail, Katholische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Paderborn, 1983), pp. 176-95. 145

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the "Yellow Brochure" two years later, but in the early issues of this new periodical they aroused none of the controversy that the petition and pamphlet would in 1887.25 During the annual meeting of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education in 1886, Loeper-Housselle organized a separate caucus of women teachers that met at the Victoria Lyceum. She wanted to discuss primarily issues involved with retirement homes for teachers, but Marie Stoephasius and Bertha Lindner raised the longstanding issue of an Oberlehrerinnenprufung. Stoephasius suggested that the Victoria Lyceum itself could be the place for teachers to receive advanced training. No petition to the government resulted from this meeting, however.26 Beginning in the late 1870s, the Prussian Ministry of Education appears to have been deeply concerned with an oversupply of women teachers. It dealt with this issue in much the same manner as it did the simultaneous surplus of male secondary teachers.27 Shortly before leaving office in 1879, Adalbert FaIk pointed out to the provincial school boards that 1,533 out of 1,693 candidates had passed the certification examination the previous year. He suggested that seminars had had enough time to adjust to the new regulations of 1874 and that board members should become more strict in examining candidates. He put special emphasis on being sure that women from private seminars had received adequate practical training.28 Another means for dealing with the overproduction of women teachers was to lengthen their training. In 1878 the new seminar in Augustenburg opened with a three-year course, and under Gossler in the early 1880s the state seminars in Munster, Paderborn, Posen, and Berlin were extended from two to three years. There were valid pedagogical arguments for a longer course; but this reform also meant that there would be one year with no graduates from these seminars, and it could serve to discourage some girls from ever beginning this longer and costlier course of study.29 25 "Marie Loeper-Housselle," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: 513-14; Hildegard Bogerts, Bildung una berufliches Selbtverstdndnis lehrenden Frauen in der Zeit von 1885 bis 1920 (Frankfurt and Bern, 1977), pp. 42-45; Die Lehrenn in Schule und Haus 1 (1885): 1-4; Helene Lange, "Das Wissen der Frau," ibid. 1: 257-64, 289-95. 26 Die Lehrerin 3 (1886-1887): 134-38. 27 See Hans-Georg Herrlitz and Hartmut Titze, "Uberfullung als bildungspolitische Strategie: Zur administrativen Steuerung der Lehrerarbeitslosigkeit in Preussen, 1870-1914," Die Deutsche Schule 63 (1976): 348-70. 28 Centralblatt . . . 1879, pp. 470-72. 29 Walter Kannegieser, Das Koniglich evangelische Lehrerinnen-Seminar Augustenburg

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Gossler did grant women teachers in the elementary schools civil servant status in 1885 and, two years later, pension rights similar to those of their male colleagues. In addition, he continued the subsidies that FaIk had begun for the afternoon courses at the Victoria Lyceum. Yet, in a speech to the House of Deputies in February 1884, he expressed strong opposition to the creation of a new class of Oberlehrerinnen. At the end of that year, he took a further step to limit the supply of women teachers: he would no longer allow private seminars "for which there is not a demonstrable need" to certify their own graduates, thus forcing young women to go before an unknown panel of examiners. Gossler also did not welcome the new assertiveness among women teachers: according to Pauline Herber, the ministry's response to her effort to organize Catholic teachers was to transfer her in late 1885 from Montabaur to the more remote seminar at Saarburg.30 THE "BERLIN CURRICULUM" OF 1886

If the ministry's various actions and pronouncements were unlikely to be welcomed warmly by most women teachers, several policies pursued by Gossler and Karl Schneider, who continued to oversee the girls' schools, served to anger men teachers, particularly those with university training. Only in one area did Gossler partially satisfy the Association for Girls' Secondary Education. Beginning in 1883, he placed some public schools with seminars under the administration of the provincial school boards rather than of local elementary school inspectors, thus treating the examination for women teachers as approximately equivalent to the Abitur that boys took at age eighteen or nineteen. This policy, however, aroused the ire of men who wanted all public schools treated this way. Oswald Reissert of Hannover argued that it would encourage (Schleswig, 1903), p. 14; Eugen Kuntze, Geschichte des staatlichen Lehrennnen-Seminars zu Miinster i. W. (Miinster, 1925), p. 82; Wilhelm Sommer, Festschrift zur Feter des 50jahngen Bestehens der Konighchen Kathohschen Lehrennnenseminars zu Paderborn (Paderborn, 1882), p. 32; Otto Konopka, Geschichte der Konighchen Luisenstiftung zu Posen (Posen, 1910), p. 60; Karl Supprian, Zur Geschichte der Konighchen AugustaSchule una des Konighchen Lehrerinnen-Seminars zu Berlin (Berlin, 1882), p. 59. 30 Gahlings and Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin, p. 29; information on subsidies granted from 1881 to 1884 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I; speech of 5.II.84 cited in Emmy Beckmann, Die Entwicklung der hbheren Mddchenbddung in Deutschland von 1870-1914 dargestellt in Dokumenten (Berlin, 1936), pp. 23-24; circular of 31.XII.84 in Centralblatt. . . 1885, p. 209; Herber, "Geschichte," p. 247. 147

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more directors to open seminars and thereby aggravate the oversupply of teachers that appeared to concern the Ministry of Education. 31 Gossler also angered the male directors by his refusal to introduce general regulations distinguishing middle and higher schools as both the Weimar meeting of 1872 and FaIk' s conference in 1873 had recommended. His interest in limiting the possibly deleterious effects of overburdening girls with schoolwork—a policy he also pursued with regard to boys' schools—militated against introduction of the more rigorous curriculum desired by many public school directors. Speaking in the House of Deputies in February 1884, he remarked that young girls' minds should not be crammed with facts from all fields of knowledge. In that year and the next, he instructed provincial school boards and local school inspectors to be sure that girls' schools and seminars were not demanding too much from their charges. The latter decree insisted that there was no place in the girls' schools for "any method of instruction that takes on a scholarly character or tries to follow the paths of Gymnasium education." 32 Conflict on this issue came to a head in the summer of 1886, when Gossler issued a recommended curriculum for the public and private higher girls' schools in Berlin. This had been worked out by Karl Schneider in consultation with the directors of the two state and four municipal schools in the capital. A curriculum written by the new director of the Royal Augusta School, Karl Supprian, served as a model, but plans for the different subjects were composed by various directors, so even Schneider had to admit that the final product was "rather like a mosaic." This curriculum did not distinguish middle from higher schools and, in its most 31 Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin, p. 42; Oswald Reissert, Der Notstand der hoheren Madchenschule in Preussen, unter besonderen Berucksichtigung der Verhaltnisse der akademisch gebildeten Lehrer (Hannover, 1887), pp. 67-68. 32 Ludwig Voss, Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschule: Allgemeine Schulentwicklung in Deutschland und Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschulen Kolns (Opladen, 1952), pp. 73-75; circulars of 10.VII.84 and 9.VII.85 in Centralblatt . . . 1885, pp. 208-209, 56061. On Gossler's general concern with overburdening, see Albisetti, Secondary School Reform, pp. 137-39. JUrgen Zinnecker has argued that the "function" of Gossler's efforts to limit academic work in the higher girls' schools was to prevent their pupils from qualifying for the privileges granted boys from the Realschulen. Yet the male directors whose wishes for a more advanced curriculum Gossler and Schneider were opposing had not pressed for such privileges. See his Sozialgeschichte der Madchenbildung: Zur Kritik der Schulerziehung von Madchen im burgerlichen Patriarchalismus (Weinheim and Basel, 1973), p. 75.

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controversial aspect, recommended the nine-year course of the state schools rather than the ten-year program the municipal schools had adopted.33 Reaction from public school directors inside and outside of Prussia was immediate and harsh. Wilhelm Noldeke of Leipzig complained that not one member of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education had been consulted about the new curriculum. Otto Sommer of Braunschweig asserted that "the specter of the radical, free-thinking, emancipated woman had filled conservative circles with an understandable"—but from his perspective inappropriate—"antipathy to the Association's efforts." Fearful that the recommended curriculum would be applied outside Berlin, leaders of the public schools in Frankfurt protested a "violation" of educational practices confirmed by long experience. When the association's annual convention in Berlin in October 1886 again attracted more representatives of private than of public institutions, directors of Prussian public schools carried out a partial secession and founded their own organization to defend their interests more vigorously.34 Faced with this hostile response, Gossler and Schneider did not move to impose the Berlin curriculum on other areas.35 Yet the anger of the academically trained male teachers continued and would color their reaction in 1887 to the "Yellow Brochure." THE INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN DEVELOPMENTS

Developments in women's education in other European nations also prepared the way for the controversy the "Yellow Brochure" would ignite. Norway opened its universities to women in 1880, although granting them the right to pursue only bachelor of arts degrees. Belgian universities also admitted women for the first time in the early 1880s. In Spain, a woman earned a medical de33

Supprian, Frauengestalten, pp. 272-73; Karl Schneider, Em halbes Jahrhundert im Dienste von Kirche und Schule: Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1900), pp. 449-50; Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, 1872-1897: Festschrift zur Feier des 25jahrigen Bestehens des Deutschen Vereins fur das hohere Madchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1897), p. 78. For the "Berlin curriculum" see Centralblatt . . . 1886, pp. 485-96. 34 Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin, pp. 56, 61; Otto Sommer in Jakob Wychgram, ed., Handbuch des hoheren Madchenschulwesens (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 36-37; Maria Rudolph, Die Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Otto Schlander (Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979), p. 230. 35 See the circular to local governments and provincial school boards of 6.X.86 in Centralblatt . . . 1887, p. 235. 149

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gree at Barcelona in 1881, but then access to higher education was cut off again in 1882. In Russia, the special medical course for women in St. Petersburg and all other forms of higher education except the Bestushev courses were closed down in the later 1880s.36 The continuing ban on women at German universities thus put the Reich more firmly among the least progressive countries in this matter. Of greater influence for the debate over the higher girls' schools was the passage in 1880 of the Sue law in France, which for the first time created state-controlled secondary education for girls. The opposing parties in Germany viewed this legislation from their own perspectives. Bertha von der Lage of Berlin's Charlotte School considered the law's most noteworthy aspect to be its clear decision in favor of women teachers and directors for girls' schools, a plan that no legislator seriously challenged. She also viewed favorably the creation of the Ecole Normale Superieure for women at Sevres, precisely the kind of advanced training that German women had been proposing since 1870.37 For Jakob Wychgram, then a teacher in the Leipzig public school headed by Noldeke, the most impressive aspect of the See law was the willingness of the French government to regulate the girls' schools and to spend significant sums on them. In fact, he noted that women teachers in French public schools earned more than many men at German girls' schools. Wychgram found the role of women teachers in the French schools to be excessive, however, and suggested that having women in charge of the lyc£es and the normal school at Sevres might cause the new institutions to fail despite the large expenditures on them. Writing immediately after publication of the Berlin curriculum, he explicitly linked his criticism of women teachers in France to the recent efforts of "a German state" to put most instruction in the hands of women. 38 36 Theodore Stanton, ed., The Woman Question in Europe (New York, 1884), p. 191; Bernadette Lacomble-Masereel, Les premieres itudiantes a I'Universito de Liege (18811919) (Liege, 1980), pp. 6-8 and passim; Edmee Charrier, L'uvolution intellectuelle faminine (Paris, 1931), p. 442; Ruth Arlene Fluck Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1905" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975), p. 185. 37 Bertha von der Lage, Das hohere Madchenschulwesen Frankreichs serf der Repubhk (Berlin, 1885), pp. 21, 32-35. For the best study of the origins and aftermath of the See law, see Frangoise Mayeur, Lenseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la HIe Rfyublique (Paris, 1977). 38 Jakob Wychgram, Des weibliche Unterrichtswesen in Frankreich (Leipzig, 1886), pp. vii, 246, 165, 195.

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The new women's colleges in England drew particular attention from women in the circle of Crown Princess Victoria, where the petition of 1887 would originate. Anna von Helmholtz visited Newnham College in 1881; Henriette Schrader-Breymann inspected Girton College two years later. Following the death of Georgina Archer, leadership of the Victoria Lyceum went to Alice von Cotta—over, among others, Minna Cauer and Helene Lange—largely because she had studied at Newnham College. In July 1887, Victoria herself attended a meeting to raise money for the Maria Grey Training College, an institution for educating female secondary teachers that had been founded in London in 1878.39 The first volumes of Die Lehrerin also contained detailed reports on women's education in England, including articles by Marie Calm on Girton College and the new high schools being founded by the Girls' Public Day School Company.40 THE "YELLOW BROCHURE" AND ITS AFTERMATH

The increasing conflicts between male and female teachers, the discontent of both groups with the Prussian minister of education, and the growing sense among reformers that Germany was lagging behind foreign countries in female education provide the general background to the petition campaigns of the years around 1890. The original stimulus to the first major petition, however, came from another source: the discovery that Crown Prince Friedrich had throat cancer, which meant that he and his wife Victoria would not reign for long, if at all. For women who had placed their hopes for reform of female education on Victoria's reign, this extremely disappointing news meant that change had to be pursued by other means.41 Five of the six original signers of the petition—Henriette Schrader-Breymann, Minna Cauer, Helene Lange, Luise Jessen, and the wife of Berlin's Stadtsyndikus Eduard Eberty—had been associated with the crown princess for several years; the sixth was 39

Ellen von Siemens-Helmholtz, ed., Anna von Helmholtz: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 1: 255; Mary J. Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann: lhr Leben aus Briefen und Tagebiichern zusammengestellt und erlautert, 2 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1922), 2: 226, 236; Else Luders, Minna Cauer: Leben und Werk (Gotha and Stuttgart, 1925), p. 52; Edward W. Ellsworth, Liberators of the Female Mind: The Shirreff Sisters, Educational Reform, and the Women's Movement (Westport, Conn., 1979), p. 221. *» Die Lehrerin 1 (1885): 166-73; ibid. 2 (1885-1886): 225-31, 269-71. 41 Helene Lange, Lebensennnerungen (Berlin, 1930), pp. 140-41. 151

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Marie Loeper-Housselle. All, with the possible exception of Eberty, had backgrounds in teaching or in educational organizations, though only Lange was still active as a full-time teacher. They did not try to obtain massive support for the petition, but it did eventually gain about 1,500 signatures.42 Much more important than the signatures, however, was the pamphlet Lange wrote to accompany the petition. Although in its insistence that women should play the predominant role in the upper grades of the girls' schools the "Yellow Brochure" did not say anything new, its general tone, some of the specific points it raised, and its association with the crown princess made this work highly controversial. Lange began by rejecting the aims of the girls' schools as framed by the Weimar meeting in 1872, arguing that girls should be educated for their own sakes, not for their husbands'. The goal should be not wives but cultivated women who had developed both their "specifically feminine and their purely human capacities." Although critical of aspects of the Berlin curriculum of 1886, Lange echoed Gossler's attack on men teachers who tried to stuff too many facts into teenaged girls in an effort to give them a "finished" education by age sixteen. In her blunt phrasing, "Our schools neither provide Bildung nor educate temperate women of refined morals; they only teach."43 Lange did not believe that men and women had exactly the same mental abilities and was willing to leave the teaching of subjects like grammar, mathematics, and science to men, with their "greater capacity for abstraction"—even though she believed that most men who took jobs in the girls' schools did so only because they could not find positions in Gymnasien. For "ethical subjects" such as religion, history, and literature, however, Lange insisted that women must be the educators of their own sex. She also claimed women should head all girls' schools. Such teachers would need better training, but she did not want this to occur at the existing universities, which trained scholars rather than educators. As had others before her, Lange proposed separate Hochschulen for women to meet this need, making a specific reference to Girton College as an example of the type of institution she had 42 ZfwB 16 (1888): 122. Luise Jessen, married and the mother of several children, was a leader of the Berlin Association for Family and Popular Education and the founder of an organization that provided vacations in the country for poor urban children. See Bahnbrechende Frauen, ed. Deutscher Lyceum-Club (Berlin, 1912), pp. 131-38. I have been unable to discover any information about Frau Eberty. 43 Lange, Kampfzeiten, 1: 10, 19-20, 17-18, 14.

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8. Helene Lange.

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in mind. "Create better women teachers for us," she concluded, "and we will have better mothers and through them better human beings."44 Several public school directors admitted that they saw nothing to object to in the petition, but the "Yellow Brochure" aroused the ire of many male teachers in the girls' schools. One teacher suggested Lange aimed "at a total upheaval not merely in girls' secondary education, but in the higher education of women in general and finally in the social position of educated women." Director Schafer of Altona's municipal school saw the logical consequences of Lange's views about the unsuitability of men as educators of girls to be the creation of convent schools that would artificially isolate girls from men until marriage, to him a totally unacceptable prospect. Wilhelm Noldeke commented bitterly that the Berlin curriculum had set academic standards so low as to encourage women to think they could take over the schools, which he feared would mean a return to previous "bad experiences with Pensionaten and female leadership."45 Karl Schneider, although supporting the petition's call for giving women teachers an opportunity to continue their education, also responded negatively to the "Yellow Brochure." Shortly after its appearance, he conducted a surprise inspection of the private seminar where Lange taught, and he suggested to her that he would not be able to sleep at night if he had written such a pamphlet. In a major speech a few weeks later, Schneider reaffirmed the view of girls' education expressed at Weimar, quoting Scripture on woman's role as a helpmate to man and speaking of the need to prepare a girl to fulfill worthily "the place in the home that God will allot to her." He also evinced complete surprise at Lange's assertion that women could teach religion and German to young girls more effectively than men could, an idea he had not encountered in any pedagogical work.46 Several women who were active in the Association for Girls' Secondary Education attempted to mediate between Lange and « Ibid., 1: 32, 45, 26, 33, 51, 39. 45 Supprian, Frauengestalten, p. 279; Otto Sommer in Wychgram, ed., Handbuch, p. 39; Lothar Werner, as cited in Gertrud Baumer and Helene Lange, eds., Handbuch der Frauenbewegung, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1901-1906), 1: 84; Dr. Schafer, "Neue Bahnen," ZfwB 16 (1888): 121-36; Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Berlin, p. 64. 46 Lange, Lebensennnerungen, pp. 155-57; Schneider, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 44748; Karl Schneider, Bildungsziel una Bildungswege fur unsere Tochter (Berlin, 1888), pp. 8, 17, 27. 154

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her male opponents. Both Auguste Sprengel from Mecklenburg and Anna Vorwerk from Wolfenbuttel defended the goals of the petition—including the creation of separate academies for teachers rather the admission of such women to the universities—while distancing themselves from what they considered the extreme statements in the "Yellow Brochure." Vorwerk certainly favored employing women in the upper grades and stressed more than Lange had that such work would not only benefit the pupils but provide new satisfaction to the teachers as well. Although she considered German, history, and foreign languages the best subjects for women to teach, she thought no field should be handled exclusively by one sex. "To drive out the talented male teacher," she wrote in 1888, "or to put him in a situation that would take away his job satisfaction, would mean partially orphaning the higher girls' schools."47 Barbara Greven-Aschoff has written that the petition had "no success politically."48 In a strict sense this is correct, for the petition never reached the floor of the Prussian House of Deputies and Gossler, after a ten-month delay, rejected most of the points raised in the "Yellow Brochure." In this response, he argued that local authorities and parental wishes, not the Ministry of Education, restricted the employment of women in the upper grades. In addition, he stated that the government could not and should not build an institution like Girton College.49 Yet the ninety-nine-day rule of Friedrich and Victoria did produce some positive actions. On 2 April 1888, Victoria told Schrader-Breymann that she wanted to speak with Lange about ways to achieve the goals of the petition. In the wake of this discussion, the board of directors of the Victoria Lyceum, acting at the express direction of the empress, submitted to the Ministry of Education on 18 April a detailed proposal for establishing advanced courses for women teachers. The board did not think it appropriate to try to prepare women for the examination pro facilitate docendi taken by male secondary teachers but suggested instead advanced training in individual fields through six semesters of six hours per week of university-level courses. Victoria herself handed this proposal to Gossler, and within five weeks he had approved establishment of courses in German and history at the 47 Sprengel cited in Beckmann, Madchenbildung in Deutschland, p. 41; Martha Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk: Em Lebensbild (Wolfenbuttel, 1910), pp. 246-51. 48 Greven-Aschoff, Frauenbewegung, p. 54. 49 Gossler's reply of 18.IX.88 in Centralblatt . . . 1888, pp. 768-73.

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lyceum and promised an annual subsidy of 3,000 Marks.50 These courses opened in October 1888. More far-reaching plans did not come to fruition during the ninety-nine days. In this period, Victoria did dispatch Helene Lange to England to visit the women's colleges. She also succeeded in getting Gossler to send Stephan Waetzoldt, then director of the Royal Augusta School, to make a similar inspection tour, including a visit to the extravagant new institution under her mother's protection, Royal Holloway College. Their reports, not completed until after Friedrich's death, differed in much the same way as had Bertha von der Lage's and Jakob Wychgram's views of the new girls' lyc£es in France. Waetzoldt was impressed with the luxury for the few at Girton and Newnham, and noted the "independence, energy, and tenacity" that English women had displayed in the fight to obtain the educational opportunities the colleges provided. Yet he considered the academic demands of even the honors, or Tripos, examination to be only slightly above those of the Abitur, certainly not requiring independent research of the sort candidates for German doctorates conducted. Waetzoldt also noted that "no consideration is given to the claims of woman's nature and destiny."51 This report could only have confirmed Gossler's view that Prussia should not found a similar college. Lange obtained different impressions of both the secondary schools and the colleges from her visit. Primarily because she found the prevalence of women directors and teachers so attractive, she concluded, "The English public girls' schools are preferable to the German." Lange also used her report to inform her German readers that women students at Girton enjoyed good health, were not "that strong-minded type which is justly so abhorred," did not disrupt lectures by their presence, and often married soon after graduation.52 A vague note in the archives of the Ministry of Education, dated 50

Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, 2: 417; Lange, Lebenserinnerimgen, p. 161; curatorium of the Victoria Lyceum to Gossler, 18.IV.88, and Gossler to Victoria and Alice von Cotta, 23.V.88, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I. 51 Waetzoldt's report of 30.VI.88 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I. On Royal Holloway College see Caroline Bingham, " 'Doing Something for Women': Matthew Vassar and Thomas Holloway," History Today (June 1986): 46-51. 52 Helene Lange, Higher Education of Women in Europe, trans. L. R. Klemm (New York, 1890), p p . 11, 75, 27-33. The original version of this work was Frauenbildung (Berlin, 1889). 156

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19 April 1888, suggests what the empress hoped these visits would lead to. She apparently ordered that a parcel of land near the Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin should be reserved for construction of "various institutions for female education, in the middle the Victoria Lyceum." It appears that she intended to bring together in one place several types of institutions—such as the Victoria Continuation School headed by Ulrike Henschke, the various schools of the Lette Verein, and a nursing school she had founded earlier in the 1880s—and create next to them a college for women teachers. Nothing came of this plan before Friedrich's death on 15 June, however, and a few days later Victoria suggested that people interested in establishing a memorial to her husband might consider supporting such an institute for female education.53 The empress's project represented the one serious opportunity for a women's college or university in Imperial Germany. Its failure to get beyond the most preliminary stage was, in the view of one historian of women's education in Germany, a good thing, for this meant that German women would have to fight for admission to the existing universities rather than be content with separate institutions for higher education that would inevitably have had second-class facilities and faculties.54 As will be discussed in the next chapter, by the late 1890s virtually no one in the women's movement still favored single-sex higher education. Yet German women may well have purchased a short-term gain in the quality of higher education at a very high long-term cost. It is difficult to believe that women's colleges or universities would not have provided greater opportunities for women as professors and administrators than the traditional male universities have done during most of the twentieth century.55 Lange's visit to England did have more positive results. Her observations helped to convince her that, despite the temperamental and psychological differences that she still believed existed be53

Gossler's (?) note of 19.IV.88, and Finance Minister von Scholz to Gossler, 26.IV.88, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I; Lyschinska, Hennette Schrader-Breymann, 2: 41. On the importance of this project to Victoria and Friedrich, see Arthur Gould Lee, ed., The Empress Frederick Writes to Sophie, Her Daughter (London, 1955), p. 78. 54 Elisabeth, Baroness Meyn-von Westenholz, Der Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerinnenverein in der Geschichte der deutschen Madchenbildung (Berlin, 1936), p. 142. 55 As late as 1959, women composed less than 2 percent of the faculty of West German universities, and a survey revealed that 79 percent of male professors did not think there should be any women in their ranks: Hans Anger, Probleme der deutschen Universitdt (Tubingen, 1960), pp. 452, 489. 157

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tween men and women, science was the same for both sexes. Exposure to the views of Emily Davies and discussions with Constance Jones at Girton persuaded her as well that women must pursue knowledge along the same pathways as men did, so that there could be no question of an inferior education. "Though I personally believe that one might unhesitatingly use other roads than the customary ones without falling into the error of aiding Halbbildung," she commented, "the men would not recognize any other Bildung as profound and sufficient enough, except one like their own and acquired like their own." Lange did not want to impose Latin and Greek on the majority of girls, whom she believed would "find ample occupation in the care of their families and the education of their children," but did now favor the creation of "at least a certain number of classical schools for girls." Anticipating that neither girls nor their parents would be ready to choose a classical track at age nine or ten as boys did, she proposed that such schools begin no earlier than age fourteen. Lange had not yet abandoned her idea of separate academies for women teachers, but she admitted "the hopelessness of seeing my own plans realized" now that Victoria was no longer empress and expressed a willingness to have upper-level teachers study at the universities.56 What Lange helped to establish at this time, however, was not a girls' Gymnasium but so-called Realkurse for women. It appears that Gossler's steadfast opposition to women students made pursuit of the Gymnasium Abitur seem to be a waste of effort. Even before her trip to England, Lange had discussed with Franziska Tiburtius the possibility of creating a school that could offer both continuation classes for girls interested in preparing for useful employment and preparation for the "maturity" examination required for admission to Swiss universities, which did not demand knowledge of Greek. In December 1888, Lange, Tiburtius, and Minna Cauer sought support for their plan from two organizations in Berlin, the Academic Union and the Humboldt Academy. Finding some moral and financial backing, Lange was able to inaugurate the Realkurse in October 1889 with a two-year program in mathematics, science, economics, history, modern languages, and Latin. These courses differed from the ones at the Victoria Lyceum in aiming to develop the pupils' capacities for further learning rather than simply to impart knowledge through public lectures. 56

Lange, Higher Education, pp. 13-15, 21, 100-104, 141-42. 158

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The classes attracted 214 young women in the first year, and several graduates eventually gained admission to Swiss universities.57 In addition to the advanced courses for teachers at the Victoria Lyceum and the Realkurse, the petition and the "Yellow Brochure" contributed to a third major development: the foundation in 1890 of the German Women Teachers' Association. Although in 1888 the Association for Girls' Secondary Education allowed a woman to give a major address at its convention for the first time, this meeting also reaffirmed the men teachers' belief that they should predominate in the upper grades. For Lange and several other women teachers, this action was the final confirmation that this organization would never adequately represent their interests. Along with Marie Loeper-Housselle and Auguste Schmidt, whom she had met only after the publication of the "Yellow Brochure," Lange decided to found a separate organization of women teachers that would attract a national membership of the sort never attained by the older Association of German Women Teachers and Governesses. This new German Women Teachers' Association was founded early in 1890 at a meeting attended by Helene Adelmann from England, Bertha von der Lage from Berlin, Helene Sumper and Bertha Kipfmuller from Munich, Marie Hecht from Tilsit, and many others who had been rallied to their own defense by Lange's pamphlet. Lange became president of the new group, which grew to 9,000 members by 1895 and 16,000 by 1900.58

PETITIONS FROM ORGANIZATIONS OLD AND NEW

The original petition of November 1887 was soon followed by many others. The German Women's Association, still led by Louise Otto-Peters, became more active in pursuit of women's rights, and two new organizations with somewhat more radical views came on the scene. The sudden discovery that Victoria would not be empress long enough to introduce a new era for German women played a crucial role in stimulating this burst of activ57 Lange, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 175-80; Gertrud Baumer, Geschichte der Gymnasialkurse fur Frauen zu Berlin (Berlin, 1906), pp. 7-21. Another possible reason for starting courses with Latin but not Greek may have been the hope, not fulfilled until 1900, that graduates of the boys' Realgymnasium would soon be allowed to matriculate in the medical faculties. On sources of funds for the Realkurse, see Die Lehrerin 7 (1890-1891): 43. 58 Lange, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 181-87; Meyn-von Westenholz, Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerinnenverein, pp. 144-70.

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ity. Important as well was a pamphlet that appeared shortly after the "Yellow Brochure": Female Physicians for Women's Diseases: An Ethical and Sanitary Necessity, written by Mathilde Weber, the wife of a professor at the University of Tubingen and a long-time member of the executive committee of the German Women's Association. As was the case with Lange's work, Weber's pamphlet did not raise any radically new ideas. She even emphasized that her demands for female physicians to treat women rested not on "desires for emancipation, but on feminine delicacy of feeling."59 Yet, like the "Yellow Brochure," her pamphlet ignited a much more vigorous debate than had any previous call to open the medical profession to women, including a negative response from Professor Wilhelm Waldeyer at the convention in 1888 of the prestigious Association of German Natural Scientists and Physicians.60 Back in 1885, Auguste Schmidt had proposed that the German Women's Association should endeavor to found a Gymnasium course for girls beginning at age fifteen and then find a state government willing to let women take the Abitur and matriculate in the universities. No petitions were sent at that time, however, and no steps were taken toward founding such a classical school. But with the stimulus of Lange's and Weber's pamphlets and the large sums of money provided by Luise Lenz-Heymann, the German Women's Association began more actively to pursue these goals. In petitions sent early in 1889 to the governments and legislatures of all states with universities, to which these two pamphlets were attached, this organization demanded the admission of women to careers in upper-level teaching and medicine as well as to the necessary training for these jobs. These petitions echoed Lange in saying that "university training does not appear to be obligatory" for women teachers, but they called for admission to the philosophical faculties because "there are as yet no institutions for the higher education of women."61 59 Mathilde Weber, Arztinnen fur Frauenkrankheiten: Eine ethische una eine sanitare Notwendigkeit, 2d ed. (Tubingen, 1888), p. 12 and passim. See Clara KramerSchlette, "Mathilde Weber geb. WaIz," in Lebensbilder aus Schwaben und Franken, vol. 13, ed. Robert Uhland (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 291-313. 60 Wilhelm Waldeyer, "Das Studium der Medizin und die Frauen," Tageblatt der deutschen Naturforscher und Arzte, vol. 61, pt. 2 (1888): 31-44. Specifics of the debate will be discussed in the next chapter. 61 Otto-Peters, Das erste Vierteljahrhundert, pp. 70, 78-82. In a letter to the International Council of Women, dated March 1888, the executive committee of the German Women's Association said it planned "to found a German university for women equal to the best now existing for men": Report of the International Council of Women (Washington, D.C., 1888), p. 220. When one considers that Otto-Peters

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The demands of the German Women's Association had been preceded by those of a new group, the Women's Reform Association (Frauenverein "Reform"), founded early in 1888. The moving spirit behind this organization was Hedwig Kettler, a married woman then living in Weimar. Among other women signing the original call for formation of the new group were Hedwig Dohm and Maria Schneegans, an American-trained dentist working in Elberfeld. This call did not emphasize the desirability of having women teach and treat members of their own sex but stressed instead the rights of single middle-class women to suitable employment. It also spoke of the need to create Gymnasien, Realschulen, and "institutions which correspond to" the men's universities. A month later, however, at the rounding meeting of the Women's Reform Association in Weimar, this idea of separate higher education for women was abandoned in favor of pressing for admission to the existing universities.62 The Women's Reform Association attracted ninety-nine members in its first year and soon grew to more than nine hundred members. It sent petitions to the ministers of education in Prussia, Bavaria, and Wurttemberg in November 1888 and dispatched similar appeals to other states in June 1889. These called for admitting women to the Abitur and to all faculties of the universities, even though Kettler's group did not intend that women should enter the clergy or obtain civil-service jobs requiring law degrees. In 1890, after various state governments pointed out that the certification of physicians was a national matter, both the Women's Reform Association and the German Women's Association petitioned the Reichstag to support opening the medical profession.63 Kettler's group continued to criticize what it viewed as Lange's too moderate position, arguing in particular that the Realkurse would not provide an adequate preparation for university studies and stated two years later that the intention had always been to found a girls' Gymnasium, I assume that the use of "university" in the letter involves a mistranslation, although the date of the letter suggests this may be a reference to Empress Victoria's project in Berlin. 62 Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 353-60; Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsche Frauen vox dem Parlament, Bibliothek der Frauenfrage, vol. 7 (Weimar, 1892), pp. 3-14. For this stress on the need for jobs, see Frau Julius (Hedwig) Kettler, Was wird aus unsern Tochter? (Weimar, 1889). For biographical information, see Hugo Willich, "Hedwig Kettler," in Niedersachische Lebensbilder, vol. 4, ed. O. H. May (Hildesheim, 1960), pp. 155-77. 63 Willich, "Hedwig Kettler," p. 159; Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 356, 367. AU the petitions from this period are most clearly sorted out in Boedeker, ed., 25 Jahre Frauenstudium, 1: xxvii-xxx. 161

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thus would play into the hands of opponents who doubted women could handle academic work. 64 Another new organization at this time was the Women's Welfare Association (Verein Frauenwohl), founded in 1888 as an affiliate of the Academic Union in Berlin. This group also took a generally more radical line than Lange or the German Women's Association, although its leader, Minna Cauer, had signed the petition submitted in 1887 and also supported creation of the Realkurse in 1889. The Women's Welfare Association did not enter the parade of petitioners until after the Reichstag and state legislatures had already considered the first appeals from the other two organizations. Then, in June 1891, it delivered to the Prussian House of Deputies an appeal for opening the philosophical and medical faculties that carried twelve thousand signatures. This substantial number would soon be topped by the nearly fifty-five thousand signatures ultimately appended to a petition for opening medical certification that the German Women's Association originally sent to the Reichstag in November 1891.65 T H E F I R S T R E S P O N S E S FROM LEGISLATURES A N D GOVERNMENTS

The support given these petitions indicates that the four years since the "Yellow Brochure" and Mathilde Weber's call for female physicians had seen a major broadening of the movement for improved educational and employment opportunities for German women. As these petitions brought the issue of higher education for women before legislatures for the first time, many politicians and officials also displayed a rapid change of heart, especially with regard to opening the medical profession. Although these appeals did not result immediately in new legislation—few petitions of any sort did so in Imperial Germany—they succeeded in making improved education for girls and women a topic that would not fade from public view. The first petitions of the German Women's Association and the Women's Reform Association, like Lange's appeal in 1887, had great difficulty getting out of committee. In both the Prussian House of Deputies in 1890 and the Reichstag in 1891, majorities in the relevant committees voted against bringing the petitions up for 64

Twellmann, Frauenbewegung, 2: 376-77. Die Lehrenn 4 (1887-1888): 632-33; Luders, Minna Cauer, pp. 56-57; Boedeker, ed., 25 Jahre Frauenstudium, 1: xxx. 65

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debate. Yet left-wing liberals, aided in the Reichstag by Social Democrats, managed to have at least token discussion of the issues take place. In Louise Otto-Peters's home state of Saxony, the first appeal to the legislature by the German Women's Association was stopped in committee by the representative of the Ministry of Education, who argued that the state government could do nothing about medical certification. When this organization then appealed to the Ministry of Education to open the universities to women teachers, it received no reply.66 Officials in several smaller states resisted any suggestions that they should be the ones to introduce experiments in female education. In Saxony-Weimar, where Hedwig Kettler lived, a government official told the legislators in March 1891, "I would be the last person who would want to make the school system of the Grand Duchy and our state's university into experimental stations for the German women's movement."67 In Wurttemberg, after the petition committee of the lower house recommended opening the medical but not the philosophical faculties to women, Chancellor von Weizsacker of Tubingen opposed coeducational study of medicine and argued that in any event his university was too crowded to admit women. He and other speakers maintained that Wurttemberg did not have the money to build or the students to fill a Gymnasium or a university for women, views later echoed by Minister of Education von Sarwey.68 The first positive response came in Baden, where in 1891 a committee of the legislature responded to appeals from the Women's Reform Association by supporting access for women to the Abitur and university study, although it rejected construction of a girls' Gymnasium and the admission of girls to boys' schools. When the lower house as a whole supported this view, the Ministry of Education carried through by decreeing that girls who had prepared privately could take the Abitur examination.69 On 11 March 1892, the education committee of the Prussian 66 Prussia, Haus der Abgeordneten, Stenographische Benchte, 17th leg., 2d sess., Drucksache no. 196; ibid., p. 2078 (12.VI.90); Reichstag, Verhandlungen, 8th leg., 1st sess., pp. 1995-2008 (11.III.91); Renate Drucker, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Leipzig," in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. Hellmut Kretzschmar (Berlin, 1956), p. 282. 67 Staatsrat Guyet cited in Grimm, Frauen vor dent Parlament, p. 88. 68 Ibid., pp. 90-112. See also Rupp, Beginn des Fmuenstudiums, p. 36; and KramerSchlette, "Mathilde Weber," p. 306. 69 Grimm, Frauen vor dem Parlament, pp. 121-34. See Chapter Seven for discussion of the admission of the first women to Baden's universities.

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House of Deputies discussed the latest petitions of the Women's Reform Association and the Women's Welfare Association much more seriously than it had the earlier appeals in 1890. At this time, Karl Schneider reported that the new minister of education, Count Robert von Zedlitz-Trutzschler, had recently asked the faculties of all Prussian universities whether they perceived any need to alter the ban on women students. Schneider also suggested that the ministry was sympathetic to the desire to have female physicians to treat women and thus to admission of women to the Abitur and medical study. He expressed concern, however, about the cost of separate medical lectures, which he thought necessary, and indicated that the state would not found any Gymnasien for girls. Pointing to the new advanced courses for women teachers at the Victoria Lyceum, Schneider insisted there was no reason to open the philosophical faculties. The committee, and then the entire House of Deputies, recommended that the government consider opening the Abitur and medical study to women.70 A similar favorable response emerged from the Reichstag's petition committee when it considered the mass petition from the German Women's Association in February 1893. The issue of female physicians was discussed in the Reichstag as a whole, but a vote was delayed pending a report on all the petitions and then never took place owing to a dissolution of that body by Chancellor von Caprivi. In the course of the debate, however, Minister of the Interior Karl von Boetticher commented that the ministers of education in several states were not averse to moving forward on the issue of medical study.71 The petitions from the women's organizations had, it is clear, produced significant swings of opinion in official circles in a relatively short time. That Helene Lange had earned respect from the Prussian Ministry of Education, despite Karl Schneider's original reaction to the "Yellow Brochure," is illustrated by the fact that she was asked to write a history of the higher girls' schools for the official German educational exhibit at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.72 Her influence also became apparent in the prep70 Committee proceedings and plenum debate of 30.III.92 as reprinted in Grimm, Frauen vor dem Parlament, pp. 135-56. The circumstances surrounding Zedlitz's request to the universities are discussed in Chapter Seven. 71 Reichstag, Verhandlungen, 8th leg., 2d sess., vol. 131, Anlage no. 144, pp. 77881; plenum debate of 23.11.93 in vol. 128, pp. 1206-22, with Boetticher's comment on p. 1215. 72 Helene Lange, Entwicklung und Stand des hbheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1893).

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aration of a recommended curriculum for all Prussian higher girls' schools that was issued in 1894. Robert Bosse, minister of education from 1892 to 1899, had originally considered a conference like Falk's to discuss the new curriculum worked out by Schneider with the directors of the two state-supported schools in Berlin, but in the end only Lange, a woman teacher named Laura Herrmann, and two men teachers were consulted before publication of the new regulations in May 1894. According to Schneider, Lange accepted the changes as an "installment payment" toward her ultimate objectives.73 The decrees of 31 May 1894 amounted to the most comprehensive effort yet by the Prussian government to regulate the higher girls' schools, but they still left many areas less tightly controlled than in the boys' Gymnasien.74 The curriculum itself was only recommended, not mandatory. In many ways, it revealed the continuing belief that education for girls and boys should differ. In arithmetic, the curriculum required only two hours per week in the last three grades, and instruction was supposed to concentrate on problems related to the middle-class household. In history, detailed coverage of politics, diplomacy, and war, which formed the core of instruction in boys' schools, was discouraged in favor of cultural and social history.75 Girls also devoted more hours per week to religion and fewer to science than their brothers did, and they still had two hours per week of needlework from the third grade on. Following up on a decree issued in 1893 that had required all seminars to adopt a three-year course, Bosse now raised the minimum age for taking the teachers' examination to nineteen. Although explicitly rejecting Lange's denigration of the value of male teachers in the girls' schools, he accepted her argument that a greater role for women would be beneficial for the development of "true femininity" among the pupils. The new regulations, therefore, stated that a woman should be the main teacher (Klassenlehrerin) in at least one of the last three grades of all girls' schools. In addition, the government recommended that male directors 73

Schneider, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 450-52. See Centralblatt . . . 1894, pp. 446-518, for all of the new regulations. See also Bosse's defense of what these did and did not do, in a letter to Oberburgermeister Becker of Cologne, in Centralblatt . . . 1895, pp. 350-60. 75 See the discussion of history instruction in Eva Dodge, The Teaching of History in Girls' Schools in North and Central Germany (Manchester, 1908), pp. 90-95, 138. 74

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should appoint a woman as an assistant (Gehilfin) to provide aid in moral and disciplinary matters. Bosse went even farther to meet the demands raised in the "Yellow Brochure" by establishing an Oberlehrerinnenprufung open to women with several years of teaching experience. The rules for this examination were rather vague, but it demanded advanced work in two fields that approximated two or three years of university courses. This new examination provided an opportunity to women with seminar training that was not available to men from a similar background. Prussia led other German states in this matter but did not directly establish any courses in which women could prepare for the new examination.76 The Prussian regulations of 1894 meant more government intervention than ever before for the private girls' schools. The male director of the school operated by the Protestant community of Cologne objected to this intrusion, lamenting the loss of the previous freedom to develop in accord with local needs.77 These regulations also did little to satisfy either the Association for Girls' Secondary Education or the separate group of public school directors founded in 1887, both of which had wanted a conference to discuss any new curriculum. Most galling to the male directors was the recommendation of the same nine-year course that appeared in the Berlin curriculum of 1886, although the new rules did say that tenyear schools could retain their existing structure. Extremely distressing as well was the failure to separate middle and higher schools as had been demanded since 1872. Bosse's defense of allowing seminar-trained teachers to be directors of girls' schools also drew the ire of the men with university degrees.78 At a time when many of the pioneering directors of public schools were passing from the scene, their two decades of work in the Association for Girls' Secondary Education appeared again, at least for Prussia, to have been in vain. As Wilhelm Noldeke, who had retired in 1890, wrote on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this organization, "That the Prussian girls' school is still so far from realizing its legitimate wishes is attributable in large measure to the frequent replacements of the Minister of Education . . . and 76

See Chapter Seven for the further evolution of the Oberlehrerinnenprufung. Elisabeth Toelpe, Geschichte des Lyzeums der evangehschen Kirchengemeinde KoIn, 1827-1927 (Cologne, 1927), p. 96. 78 Beckmann, Madchenbildung in Deutschland, p. 45; Schneider, Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 453-54; ZfwB, 23 (1895): 1, 5; Die Miidchenschule 9 (1896): 99; Otto Sommer in Wychgram, ed., Handbuch, pp. 44-47. 77

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even more to the stubborn endurance with which the privy councillors have stayed at their posts."79 The petition campaigns that followed publication of Lange's "Yellow Brochure" did, it is clear, bring the need for improvements in girls' education before a much broader public than ever before. Especially in Prussia, the limited reforms introduced by the Ministry of Education up to 1894 went farther toward meeting the demands of at least the moderate women's organizations than they did toward satisfying the older program of the academically trained male teachers. Along with the new feminist organizations and their petitions, this first substantial involvement of the Prussian government in reforming girls' education helped to stimulate a more wide-ranging debate of the woman question during the 1890s than Germany had experienced before that time. 79

Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, p. 97. Theodor Haarbriicker of Berlin's Victoria School died in 1880, Hermann Dieckmann of Hannover in 1887, Heinrich Matzner of Berlin's Luise School after a fifty-year career in 1892, Richard Schornstein of Elberfeld in 1893, Karl Wobcken of Oldenburg in 1896, and Hermann Erkelenz of Cologne, Otto Sommer of Braunschweig, Viktor Uellner of Dusseldorf, and Gotthold Kreyenburg of Iserlohn all in 1898. Noldeke lived on until 1905.

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The Debate over Woman's Nature and Place

THE YEARS between the publication of Helene Lange's "Yellow Brochure" and the beginning of World War I witnessed the most extensive debate of the "woman question" that Germany had yet experienced. Compared to the discussions of the late 1860s and early 1870s, the revived debate covered a wider variety of issues and involved many more organizations. The paragraphs dealing with women and family matters in the new German Civil Code that was finally adopted around the turn of the century aroused a great deal of controversy. New feminist groups demanding votes for women, although less influential than their British or American counterparts, made suffrage into an issue that conservatives could no longer simply ignore. Women became more active in their fight against state regulation, and thus tacit approval, of prostitution. The League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund fur Mutterschutz), founded in 1904, raised questions about sexuality, contraception, and abortion that most earlier activists had left unasked. Within this wide-ranging debate, issues related to female education continued to occupy a significant place. Although reform of the higher girls' schools may have remained the concern primarily of interested parents and teachers, discussions about opening the Abitur, the universities, and the professions to women involved a much broader segment of German society. Many opponents of the emancipation of women considered this to be the place to make a stand: fearful that once women gained access to the universities, especially to the legal faculties, it would be impossible to deny them the right to enter the civil service, such men believed that this sequence of events would inevitably lead to female suffrage. The tenacity of these opponents of higher education for women, the transparent self-interest often motivating their stance, and the many dubious arguments employed in their pamphlets and speeches caused even women who were not personally interested 168

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in academic studies to support vigorously the struggle to open the universities.1 Demands for opening higher education and the professions to women thus provided a major stimulus to debate about the place of women in German society. The major confrontations were, of course, between female advocates of change and male defenders of the status quo, although some men supported the feminists and some women opposed them. Interesting divisions also existed among the feminists themselves, who at least in the short run disagreed sharply on a number of issues related to secondary and higher education. DISAGREEMENTS WITHIN THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

The widest split within the women's movement in Imperial Germany was that between middle-class and working-class women. This found an organizational expression in the refusal of Social Democrats to join the League of German Women's Associations established in 1894. Yet this division had little impact on the debate over reforming the higher girls' schools and admitting women to the universities, issues that did not directly affect the working class. Some bourgeois feminists did try to interest women workers in these issues by stressing how female physicians and lawyers would serve women from all classes, but few raised any challenges to the existence of elite schools for middle- and upper-class girls.2 The Social Democrats' leader, August Bebel, strongly supported opening the universities and professions to women, but the women's organizations in his party did not expend much effort on this struggle. Of greater importance for the debate over female education was the division between what historians have referred to as the "moderates" and "radicals" within the middle-class women's movement, a split apparent earlier but more sharply defined by the proliferation of themes in the debate of the woman question after 1887. Radicals, including members of the Women's Reform Association and the Women's Welfare Association, generally viewed the older German Women's Association, Helene Lange's Women Teachers' Association, and even the League of German 1

Elsbeth Krukenberg, Die Frauenbewegung (Tubingen, 1905), p. 73. Eliza Ichenhauser, Die Ausnahmestellung Deutschlands in Sachen des Frauenstudiums (Berlin, 1897), pp. 24-25; Hedwig Kettler, Das erste deutsche Madchengymnasium, Bibliothek der Frauenfrage, no. 9 (Weimar, 1893), p. 5. 2

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Women's Associations under Auguste Schmidt's leadership in the mid-1890s to be too timid in pursuing equal rights. On issues such as suffrage, the sexual double standard, and educational reform, radicals tended to want to move farther and faster than the moderates. In 1899, they expressed their dissatisfaction by founding a new League of Progressive Women's Associations independent of the League of German Women's Associations, even though the latter had recently come under the more radical leadership of Marie Stritt.3 Yet the extent of the disagreements between moderates and radicals should not be exaggerated: the two groups had much in common, including a strong commitment to greater educational opportunities for women, and their conflicts often involved temperament and tactics as much as principles. As noted in Chapter Five, both the moderate German Women's Association and the radical Women's Welfare Association submitted major petitions calling for admission of women to the practice of medicine. Even if the former group was concerned primarily with protecting feminine modesty and the latter more with equal rights and employment opportunities, their petitions aimed at the same ultimate reform. Frequently underlying the divisions between moderates and radicals was disagreement on the question of whether or not women had an innate nature different from that of men. During the era considered here, Helene Lange, through her activities as an educator, as the leader of the Women Teachers' Association, and as editor of the periodical Die Frau, expressed most fully and consistently the moderates' view that men and women had different natures and should perform varying services to society. After her trip to England in 1888, Lange wrote, "Different tasks, no doubt, are assigned to men and women." In memoirs published in the 1920s, she still insisted that she was writing for those who believed in "the special cultural tasks of women." Her views did not waver in the intervening years: at a liberal political meeting in 1912, Lange stated that women "want to work together with men, 3 The various feminist organizations are discussed in ch. 2 of Amy Hackett, "The Politics of Feminism in Wilhelmine Germany" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976). For the general history of German feminism in this era, see Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976), and Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die biirgerhche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894-1933 (Gottingen, 1981).

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so that a generally human culture arises out of a purely masculine one."4 The goal of Lange and other moderates was to enable women to exercise "spiritual motherhood" in careers such as teaching, medicine, and social work, where their natural talents for educating and nurturing could be used for the benefit of society as a whole.5 Even in scholarship, moderates believed that women could provide perspectives and contributions that would be especially their own, ones men could not supply.6 Not always explicit in their arguments, but frequently so, was a suggestion that spiritual motherhood would offer a needed corrective for the social problems of the industrial world men had created. As Margarete Heine, one of the first Abiturientinnen in Germany, wrote in 1906, if women students were going to end up just like their male colleagues, "What is emancipation for?"7 By stressing the motherly rather than the womanly or the feminine (weiblich), the moderates put forward an image of women as being active and strong, not passive and weak, as they were so often characterized by believers in woman's special Bestimmung. More radical feminists, however, tended to view this belief in a special woman's nature as merely a variation of the traditional arguments about the complementarity of the sexes that had been used to justify the oppression of women and their restriction to their supposedly natural place in the household. In general, the radicals echoed John Stuart Mill's assertion that what contempo4 Helene Lange, Higher Education of Women in Europe, trans. L. R. Klemm (New York, 1890), p. 13; idem, Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1930), p. 7; Hackett, "Politics of Feminism," p. 804. 5 On this general theme, see the sympathetic treatments by Ann Taylor Allen, "Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement, 18481911," History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982): 319-39; and by Irene Stoehr, " 'Organisierte Mutterlichkeif: Zur Politik der deutschen Frauenbewegung um 1900," in Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte, ed. Karin Hausen (Munich, 1983), pp. 221-49. Much more critical views can be found in Monika Simmel, Erziehung zum Weibe: MadchenMdung iml9. jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York, 1980). Examinations of Lange's views include Use Brehmer, "Von geistigen Mtittern und anderen Bildern der Mutterlichkeit in Helene Langes Autobiographie," and Barbara Brick, "Die Mutter der Nation—zu Helene Langes Begrundung einer 'weiblichen Kultur/ " in Frauen in der Geschichte, vol. 4, ed. Use Brehmer, Juliane Jacobi-Dittrich, Elke Kleinau, and Annette Kuhn (Dusseldorf, 1983), pp. 88-98 and 99-132. 6 Gertrud Baumer, Die Frau und das geistige Leben (Leipzig, 1911), p. 188; Hedwig Dransfeld, "Die Bedeutung des Frauenstudiums fur die Gegenwart," Hochland 9 (1912): 440. 7 Margarete Heine, Studierende Frauen (Leipzig, 1906), p. 86.

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raries considered to be the nature of woman was "an eminently artificial thing," the result of nurture rather than nature. In fighting for educational and employment opportunities for women, most radicals argued in terms of basic rights rather than of the benefits society would reap from educated women.8 Yet few radicals did not expect that new opportunities for women would lead to the kind of social changes envisioned by the moderates. Minna Cauer, who had cooperated with Lange in the petition of 1887 and the Realkurse founded in 1889 but then moved away from her, nonetheless played a major role during the 1890s in creating an organization of women involved in social work in Berlin. Hedwig Kettler of the Women's Reform Association at times retreated from speaking of rights to careers and stressed how female physicians would benefit other women. She also used utilitarian arguments, asking, "Is the German nation so rich that it can permit itself the luxury of supporting in permanent idleness thousands of healthy women who are begging for work?"9 Radicals in the League for Protection of Mothers, who in sexual matters disagreed vehemently with the moderates, nonetheless shared the positive emphasis on woman's role as mother—if not necessarily the concern with spiritual motherhood—that Lange and others expressed. Helene Stocker, a leader of this organization, also believed that women had a nature different from men's, being less "purely analytical" and having a stronger emotional side.10 With regard to educational reforms, moderates and radicals held opposing views on a number of issues. While the moderates, especially the teachers, supported the continued existence of a reformed higher girls' school, the League of Progressive Women's Associations declared in its initial program that this school was "an anachronism which is totally unsuited to preparing the German woman for participation in all the cultural endeavors of her people." The program called for the creation of Realschulen and Gymnasien for girls, but two years later this organization went further and adopted Stocker's suggestion that the best way to im8 For much more detailed discussions of the splits between moderates and radicals, see the works cited in note 3. 9 Stoehr, " 'Organisierte Miitterlichkeit/ " p. 238; Kettler, Madchengymnasium, pp. 5, 27. 10 Greven-Aschoff, Frauenbewegung, p. 41. On Stocker's activities in the Bund fur Mutterschutz, see Ann Taylor Allen, "Mothers of the New Generation: Adele Schreiber, Helene Stocker, and the Evolution of a German Idea of Motherhood, 1900-1914," Signs 10 (1985): 418-38.

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prove secondary education for girls would be through introduction of universal coeducation—a Utopian proposal for any European country at that time.11 In the first decade of the new century, other radicals, including Hedwig Dohm and the successor of the Women's Reform Association, the Association for Women's Education and University Studies, also switched to supporting secondary coeducation. Yet Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler, who abandoned the bourgeois women's movement to join the Social Democrats, opposed coeducation on the basis of her experience in trying to teach the curriculum of the boys' Gymnasium to girls.12 The most vigorous opponents of secondary coeducation at this time were Germany's Catholics, including the Association of Catholic Women Teachers headed by Pauline Herber. At a major meeting of women teachers and feminists in 1907, Catholic women refused to support a resolution that approved of coeducation where there were mixed faculties as well as classes and chose instead to reject any mixing of boys and girls in secondary schools.13 For the Protestant moderates, especially the Women Teachers' Association, secondary coeducation had little appeal in the short run because it would mean enrolling girls in schools run and taught exclusively by men, exactly the opposite of what they had been fighting for. Only in 1913 did this organization adopt a resolution favoring secondary coeducation for those areas without adequate secondary schools for girls.14 Radicals and moderates continued to disagree about how best to prepare girls for possible entry into institutions of higher education. As will be discussed in the next chapter, when Lange finally 11 Program of the Verband fortschrittliche Frauenvereine as cited in Hackett, "Politics of Feminism," p. 144; Stocker's views summarized in Die Frauenbewegung 7 (1901): 170-71; resolutions of the Verband, ibid., Beilage no. 20, p. 77. 12 Hedwig Dohm, "Einheitsschule und Koedukation," in Die Frauenfrage in Deutschland, 1865-1915, ed. Elke Frederiksen (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 232-39; Emmy Beckmann, Die Entwicklung der hoheren Mddchenbildung in Deutschland von 1870-1914 dargestellt in Dokumenten (Berlin, 1936), p. 172; Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler, "Erfahrungen im Gymnasialunterricht fur Madchen als Beitrag zur Frage der gemeinschaftlichen Erziehung beider Geschlechter," Zettschnft fur pddagogische Psychologie 4 (1902): 212-22. For further information about Wegscheider-Ziegler, who was the first Abiturientin in Germany, see pp. 208, 214, 228, 230. 13 Beckmann, Mddchenbildung in Deutschland, p. 175; Kongress fiir hohere Frauenbildung, Die hohere Mddchenbildung (Kassel, 1907), p. 93. 14 Helene Lange, Die Frauenbewegung in ihren modernen Problemen, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1914), pp. 60-63. See also the comments by Marianne Weber in Kongress fur hohere Frauenbildung, Mddchenbildung, p. 62; and Paula Miiller, ed., Handbuch der Frauenfrage (Gross Lichterfelde, 1908), p. 76.

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moved to found a course leading to the Abitur, she remained true to the views she expressed in 1889 and designed it to follow graduation from a higher girls' school. The German Women's Association would also follow this plan. Radicals such as Hedwig Kettler, however, insisted on longer courses that began earlier and thus provided girls with an educational experience more like that of their brothers.15 Similar conflicts emerged with regard to the question of separate "academies" or universities for women. As noted in Chapter Five, the Women's Reform Association at its first meeting abandoned its founders' original emphasis on women's universities and instead demanded access to the existing institutions, a position that all radicals would continue to espouse. After the death of Emperor Friedrich, Helene Lange and the leaders of the German Women's Association grudgingly accepted the desirability of having those women teachers interested in advanced training enter the universities, but the idea of separate academies like that envisioned by Empress Victoria did not disappear. As late as 1896, the Women Teachers' Association stated its preference that advanced training take place in separate institutions.16 Radicals and moderates also disagreed about the desirability of offering training in home economics to graduates of the higher girls' schools. In 1903, the Women Teachers' Association proposed, in conjunction with plans for Abitur courses, the creation of a three-year continuation course for girls not hoping to enter the universities. The curriculum was to include elements of pedagogy, psychology, mathematics, economics, and law that the teachers believed would be useful to both housewives and single women. Radicals tended to prefer more practical vocational education for girls in their later teens. At the meeting of feminists and teachers in 1907, the radical Lydia Stocker opposed separation of girls wanting job training from those expecting to marry, claiming, "No human being should be destined in advance for marriage or celibacy."17 15 See pp. 206-17. For defenses of longer courses, see Kettler, Madchengymnasium, pp. 18-19; Gertrud von Uxkiill, "Das Madchengymnasium in Stuttgart," ZfwB 27 (1899): 472-76; and Paula Schlodtmann's comments in Frauenbildung 3 (1901): 56164. 16 Die Lehrerin 13 (1896-1897): 256-66. 17 Petition of the AUg. Deutscher Lehrerinnenverein, Dec. 1903, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5B, Vol. I; Kongress fur hohere Frauenbildung, Mddchenbildung, p. 38. See ibid., pp. 28-44, for debate about this Frauenschule.

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One of the sharpest conflicts arose over the issue of combining marriage and career. Although Louise Otto-Peters had been open to employment for the middle-class wife,18 the women's movement had, since its inception in the 1860s, concentrated so much on winning new job opportunities for single women that it had seldom addressed the question of employment for those who were married. Few teachers appear to have tried to fight the various state regulations requiring them to resign upon marriage: even the future radical Minna Cauer abandoned her career when she wed her second husband. When in 1892 a case arose where a woman did resist dismissal because she had not been informed that remaining single was a condition of her employment, the Prussian Ministry of Education reaffirmed its ban on married women teachers—without provoking a storm of protest from women's organizations.19 Debate over combining marriage and employment became much more intense following the publication in 1898 of Ellen Key's controversial essay, Misused Women's Energy. Key agreed with the moderates' view of inherent differences between men and women and argued that feminists, by concentrating on the needs of single women, had neglected the majority of their sex and the most valuable use of women's energies: motherhood. Although she accepted the idea that spiritual motherhood could be exercised in social work and teaching, Key suggested that most women could not find satisfactions in their jobs equivalent to those provided by raising their own children.20 One response to Key's essay was a historical study and contemporary survey, carried out by Adele Gerhard and Helene Simon, 18

Otto-Peters's views as discussed in Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung im Spiegel reprdsentativer Frauenzeitschriften: lhre Anfange una erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), 1: 56. 19 Centralblatt . . . 1892, pp. 412-13, 835. Compare Mechthild Joest and Martina Nieswandt, "Das Lehrerinnen-Zolibat im Deutschen Kaiserreich," in Die ungeschriebene Geschichte: Historische Frauenforschung: Dokumentation des 5. Historikerinnentreffens in Wien, 16. bis 19. April 1984 (Vienna, n.d.), pp. 251-58, which exaggerates the newness of this policy and relates it to the oversupply of male secondary teachers, even though these would not have wanted the jobs vacated by elementary schoolteachers who married. 20 Ellen Key, Missbrauchte Frauenkraft: Em Essay, trans. Therese Kriiger (Paris, Leipzig, and Munich, 1898), pp. 2-3, 68, 13, 34. On the response to Key's views, see Kay Goodman, "Motherhood and Work: The Concept of the Misuse of Women's Energy, 1895-1905," in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), pp. 11027. 175

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of the possibilities for women to combine creative or intellectual activity with motherhood. Although this work stressed the difficulties in such a dual role, it did convey a cautious optimism: women did not face an absolute "either-or" choice.21 Within the League of German Women's Associations, debate of this topic led to disagreements between Marie Stritt, then the head of the league, and Marianne Weber (wife of the sociologist Max Weber), who remained convinced that most married women would lose more than they would gain by trying to fulfill the demands of both a job and a household.22 The first significant challenge to the marriage ban arose at a teachers' convention held in conjunction with the International Congress of Women in Berlin in 1904. Before an audience of almost twenty-five hundred, the radical Maria Lichnewska, at the time the vice-chairwoman of the Prussian Association of Women Elementary Teachers, attacked the ban as detrimental to both the women themselves and to the quality of their teaching. In many cases, she argued, the lonely existence forced on teachers caused them to be spiritually as well as physically "barren, cold, even embittered." Associating her views with those of Ruth Bre, the founder of the League for the Protection of Mothers, Lischnewska insisted that women teachers should not have to deny their sexual and motherly instincts and that mothers should not be denied the satisfactions of employment. Married teachers would, in fact, be better educators, she argued, and working mothers, being happier with their lives, would be better models for their children. Having a pregnant woman in the classroom would be not a scandal but an aspect of the greater candor about sexual matters that the League for the Protection of Mothers desired. Lischnewska went on to say, "The form of marriage which the new woman must demand will arise through the liberation of the woman teacher from celibacy." Two-income marriages would allow middle-class men to marry earlier and thus help to eliminate the double standard that tolerated such men using prostitutes during the years in which they could not yet afford to wed. Allowing married women to teach would also enable the educated classes to 21 Adele Gerhard and Helene Simon, Mutterschaft und geistige Arbeit: Etne psychologische und soziologische Studie, auf Grundlage einer internationalen Erhebung mit Beriicksichtigung der geschtchtlichen Entwicklung (Berlin, 1901). 22 Greven-Aschoff, Frauenbewegung, pp. 62-65; Marianne Weber, "Beruf und Ehe," in Frauenfragen und Frauengedanken: Gesammelte Aufsiitze (Tubingen, 1919), pp. 20-37.

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have more children, which Lischnewska saw as being beneficial to the "population growth, military strength, and world power position of the nation." Such arguments, as Ann T. Allen has shown, played an important role in the efforts of some radicals to counter male eugenicists who used Germany's need for a higher birth rate as a justification for denying employment opportunities to women.23 At this meeting in 1904, Helene Stocker suggested that the division within the women's movement over careers for married women reflected a generation gap, with the younger women wanting to have both jobs and families. There was certainly some truth in this assertion, although with regard to the ban on married teachers the main split actually appears to have been between radicals who—unlike Lischnewska—were not active in the schools and teachers in the moderate camp. The chairwoman of the Prussian Association of Women Elementary Teachers, Elisabeth Schneider, for example, disagreed totally with Lischnewska's views. She insisted that sexual abstinence did not damage the mental or physical health of teachers and suggested that allowing married women to continue teaching would be "a danger for the school, for our profession, and for the family." As another speaker at the conference put it, "No one can serve two masters." Married teachers would almost necessarily be absent more often than single women and would thus disrupt continuity in the classroom and lower the prestige of all women teachers. In addition, the married teacher would be taking a job that a single woman needed more desperately.24 Most women teachers continued to support the exclusion of married colleagues from the schools, even after the Prussian Ministry of Education in 1907 allowed their provisional employment under exceptional circumstances.25 That Catholic women accepted the church's views on celibacy even for lay teachers is not surprising: in Bavaria, the local organization of women teachers in 1904 had voted by a two-to-one margin in favor of retaining the ban, 23

Die verheiratete Lehrerin, ed. Landesverein Preussischer Volksschullehrerinnen (Berlin, 1905), pp. 5, 7, 16-18, 26, 21-22; Ann Taylor Allen, "German Radical Feminism and Eugenics, 1900-1918," German Studies Review 11 (1988): 31-56. 24 Die verheiratete Lehrerin, Landesverein Preussischer Volksschullehrerinnen, pp. 50, 7-9, 54-55, 58. See also Allen, "Mothers of the New Generation," p. 430, for Adele Schreiber's opposition to the ban. 25 Arnold Sachse, Die Sonderstellung der Lehrennnen (Munich, 1923), p. 119. 177

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and the editor of a new journal established by this group in 1910 opposed the employment of married women. Most Protestant teachers also believed that their calling could not be combined with running a household and raising a family: a poll conducted in 1911 revealed that a large majority still considered this dual burden to be "impracticable" and "in no way in the interest of the teaching profession." The leader of the Protestant teachers, Helene Lange, also viewed the demands of teaching and marriage as too strenuous for most women to meet, but she nonetheless opposed the ban on married teachers as an "unjustifiable invasion of the private sphere" by the state governments. For Lange, women teachers should have the right to marry, but few should make use of it.26 THE DEFENSE OF MALE PRIVILEGE

The disagreements between moderate and radical feminists pale in comparison to the conflicts between both groups and male defenders of the status quo. During the entire era of the Second Reich, but especially in the period from 1888 to about 1900, men from various walks of life expressed vehement opposition to the the demands for new educational and employment opportunities for women. Feminists went to great lengths to counter the arguments of these opponents, sometimes refining their thinking and demands in the process. Defense of the status quo often rested on an uncritical acceptance of custom as nature. The way in which opponents of emancipation cited over and over again the same biblical passages about woman's place being in the home or the same hackneyed phrases about men being "active" and "creative" while women were "passive" and "receptive" reveals how deeply ingrained was the belief that relations between the sexes were ordained by either God or nature. Such prejudices proved to be extremely difficult for feminists to undermine, because they had to alter the terms of the discussion from what was to what could or ought to be.27 26 Mddchenbildung auf christlicher Grundlage 1 (1904-1905): 24-27, 398-99, 590-604; Helmut Beilner, Die Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrerin, aufgezeigt an der Arbeit des bayerischen Lehrerinnenvereins (1898-1933) (Munich, 1971), pp. 162-63, 63; Use Gahlings and Ella Moering, Die Volksschullehrenn: Sozialgeschichte und Gegenwartslage (Heidelberg, 1961), pp. 78-79. 27 Compare Joan Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London, 1980), esp. pp. 99-115.

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Much of the more active opposition to the feminists' demands came from men who felt that these threatened not only their traditional view of the world but also their wallets, social prestige, and self-esteem. As Carl Bernhard Bruhl, a professor of medicine at the University of Vienna and a supporter of female physicians, put it in 1883, "As is well known, a prejudice is all the more difficult to purge from human thinking, the more individuals derive material profits from it."28 Industrialists, landowners, and army officers may have shared the general view of woman's Bestimmung, but they did not offer the most vocal resistance to feminist demands. It was instead representatives of those professions to which the women desired access, especially medicine and secondary teaching, who added a defense of privilege to the ideology of woman's nature and place developed earlier in the century. Journals of many organizations of male students also contributed to the active opposition to feminists' demands, most often by reporting and repeating the ideas expressed by leading professors and professionals.29 The pamphlets, speeches, resolutions, and petitions of these opponents often put other arguments against expanded rights for women ahead of defenses of self-interest. Yet these sources almost always reveal some concern about an overcrowding of the relevant profession or a decline in its prestige if women were to enter it. Particularly revealing is the frequency with which such men argued that professions other than their own were better suited for women looking for new job opportunities.30 As was discussed in Chapter Five, male elementary teachers organized in the German Teachers' Association had adopted a hostile position toward women teachers as early as 1880. Not until 1905, however, did this organization again put the "question of 28

Carl Bernhard Bruhl, Frauenhirn, Frauenseele, Frauenrecht (Vienna, 1883), p. 31. Sigrid Bias-Engels, " 'Rosenknospen ersticken im Wiistensande': Das Frauenstudium im Spiegel der studentischen Presse, 1895-1914," in LiIa Schwarzbuch: Zur Disknminierung von Frauen in der Wissenschaft, ed. Anne Schluter and Annette Kuhn (DUsseldorf, 1986), pp. 34-57. I would like to thank Dr. Bias-Engels for sending me a copy of this article. 30 This was noted at the time: see, for example, Emanuel Hannak, Prof. E. Alberts Essay 'Die Frauen una das Studium der Median' kritisch beleuchtet (Vienna, 1895), p. 31. Roger Checkering does not note this direct economic and personal threat as a source of the antifeminism of the social groups he sees as being particularly active in the Pan-German League: We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914 (Boston, 1984), pp. 170-71. 29

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women teachers" on its agenda for the upcoming year. Before the next convention, a number of pamphleteers resurrected Wilhelm Cremer's spurious statistics about the minimal achievements of women teachers and put forward other evidence suggesting that men performed better than women in the elementary schools. At the convention in 1906, a teacher named Laube, from the Saxon city of Chemnitz, proposed resolutions declaring that the interests of the elementary schools must outweigh those of women looking for jobs and that men must continue to provide leadership for the schools. Only the third resolution revealed the central concern of the male teachers: it rejected the demand that only women be hired at girls' elementary schools, which were becoming increasingly common in the bigger cities. As a teacher named Walther Hardt pointed out, this issue was the key to the whole discussion, because men teachers felt that women were taking the more desirable urban jobs and forcing men to fall back on coeducational rural schools where women were less welcome and less eager to go.31 Another teacher argued that the influx of women into elementary teaching had prevented the shortage of male teachers from leading to the substantial increases in salaries that might have occurred without the new source of instructors.32 Male teachers at the higher girls' schools also tended to speak in terms of the interests of their institutions rather than of themselves. In 1903, for example, the Association for Girls' Secondary Education resolved that courses aiming to prepare girls for the Abitur should not "hold up, disturb, or influence in any way" the existing schools.33 Yet this stance meant that talented girls interested in pursuing the Abitur would remain several years longer in the schools headed by men and would continue to pay tuition that supplied part of the teachers' salaries. More transparent were the arguments about the need for male directors to deal with other 31

Robert Rissmann, Geschichte des deutschen Lehrervereins (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 22526; citations of Cremer in H. Troster, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Berlin, 1905), p. 18, and H. Drewke, Die Uhrerinnenfrage (Bielefeld, 1906), p. 6; Walther Hardt, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Lissa, 1905), p. 5. These hostile resolutions spurred a protest by women teachers, which eventually led to a compromise resolution that confirmed the value of women teachers but still rejected having them take all the positions in girls' elementary schools: Rissmann, Geschichte, p. 26; and Gahlings and Moering, Volksschullehrerin, pp. 59-61. 32 Troster, Lehrerinnenfrage, p. 25. 33 See the petition of the Deutscher Verein fur das hohere Madchenschulwesen, 26.11.04, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5B, Vol. I. 180

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public officials: many men simply could not accept that they might have a female boss. Similar resistance developed when women began to enter other careers. In 1896, 3,000 poor-relief officials (Armenpfleger) in Berlin threatened to resign if the city added women to their number, even though in the same year the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity resolved that bringing women into public char­ ity work was an "urgent necessity."34 The League of German Den­ tists' Associations resisted the admission of women to dentistry because this might damage ongoing efforts to raise the certification requirements and prestige of what was not yet recognized as a full-fledged profession.35 In 1898, the Pharmacists' Association op­ posed the admission of women to the practice of pharmacy "as long as women are not simultaneously admitted to all other learned professions."36 This qualification may appear to be a justi­ fiable appeal to equal treatment; but at a time when there was vir­ tually no chance of women being admitted to the legal profession, the male pharmacists were in effect claiming they should be pro­ tected from all female competition. Ever since the publication in 1872 of Theodor von Bischoff's pamphlet opposing admission of women to the practice of medi­ cine, many male physicians had put forward similar claims to pro­ tection from female competition. Wilhelm Waldeyer, in his re­ sponse to Mathilde Weber's Female Physicians for Women's Diseases, maintained that Germany did not need any more doctors. Several physicians tried to reverse the feminists' arguments by insisting on men's rights to job opportunities at a time when the medical profession was considered to be overcrowded.37 Not until 1898, 34

Gerda Caspary, Die Entwicklungsgrundlagen fur die soziale und psychsche Verselbstixndigung der biirgerlichen deutschen Frau urn die Jahrhundertwende (Heidelberg, 1933), p. 89. 35 Renate Feyl, Der lautlose Aufbruch: Frauen in der Wissenschaft (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1983), p. 128. Neither Julius Parreidt, Geschichte des Central-Vereins Deutscher Zahnarzte, 1859-1909 (Berlin, 1909), nor Uta Althoff, Die Geschichte der Deutschen ΰεεβΙΙεΛαβ fur Zahn-, Mund- und Kieferheilkunde (Dusseldorf, 1971), gives adequate attention to the fight male dentists waged against women in their ranks. 36 Die Frau 6 (1898-1899): 55. 37 Theodor von Bischoff, Das Studium und die Ausubung der Medizin durch Frauen (Munich, 1872), pp. 43-44; Wilhelm Waldeyer, "Das Studium der Medizin und die Frauen," Tageblatt der deutschen Naturforscher und Arzte, vol. 61, pt. 2 (1888), p. 41; Hermann Fehling, Die Bestimmung der Frau (Stuttgart, 1892), p. 22; Ludwig Kleinwachter, Zur Frage des Studiums der Medizin des Weibes (Berlin, 1896), p. 11. For fur­ ther details, see James C. Albisetti, "The Fight for Female Physicians in Imperial Germany," Central European History 15 (1982): 99-123. 181

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however, did the threat of women being admitted to full status in the medical profession appear serious enough for the Physicians' Congress to make this theme the subject of its annual meeting. The main speaker, Franz Penzoldt of Erlangen, stressed several times that fear of competition was not the motivating factor for the opposition raised by many male physicians. He also commented that Germany did not have a shortage of doctors and suggested that women interested in health professions should be allowed to enter pharmacy and dentistry. The theses that Penzoldt proposed, and that the meeting adopted, asserted that "it is not appropriate to use medicine in the first attempt at admitting women to the learned professions" and that "especially from the viewpoint of the social standing of physicians . . . at least a simultaneous admission to all academic careers" would be necessary.38 Such maneuvers were not unique to Germany. In the late 1870s, an examiner in surgery at the University of London had attempted to derail admission of women to medicine by introducing a motion stating that the university's convocation should not "admit women to degrees in medicine before it shall have considered the general question of their admission to the degrees of all the faculties." The convocation accepted this motion but then, against the wishes of the large majority of graduates in medicine, voted to open all degrees to women. In 1895, the Vienna Physicians' Chamber also insisted women should not gain access to medicine unless the legal profession was opened at the same time, and it asserted that Austria did not need any more physicians. French physicians also resorted on occasion to claims that their profession was overcrowded and could not absorb any women.39 Practicing physicians defended their own incomes and reputations by challenging the assertion that women were needed to treat female patients. They often argued that most women, if given the choice, would continue to choose male physicians, especially in cases of serious illness. Their insistence that they did all that was necessary to protect their patients' modesty received valuable support from one of the first female physicians in Germany, 38 Franz Penzoldt, Das Medizinstudium der Frauen: Referat auf dem XXVI. Deutschen Aerztetag (Jena, 1898), unpag. preface, pp. 19, 11, 23, 21-22. 39 E. Moberly Bell, Storming the Citadel: The Rise of the Woman Doctor (London, 1953), p. 103; Wilhelm Svetlin, Die Frauenfrage und der arztliche Beruf (Leipzig, 1895), pp. 10-11, 19; Kleinwachter, Frage des Studiums, pp. 6-7; Jacques Poirier and R. Nahon, "L'accession des femmes a la carriere midicale (a la fin du XIXe siecle)," in Madecine et phtlosophie a lafindu XIXe Steele, ed. J. Poirier and J. L. Poirier (VaI de Marne, 1981), p. 37.

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Hope Bridges Lehmann-Adams, who argued in an article in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift in 1896 that "science has no sex." She thought that only the unnatural conditions of contemporary society had nurtured women too modest to be treated by men and argued that physicians should fight against such excessive prudery rather than cater to it.40 Most male physicians did not accept the other side of Lehmann-Adams's argument, however, that women could treat male as well as female patients. One must point out that many men with academic training could be encouraged by self-interest, or at least by the interest of their wives and daughters, to support increased educational and employment opportunities for women. Belief in the need to protect feminine modesty led about fifteen thousand men to sign the petition for female physicians organized by the German Women's Association in the early 1890s.41 In addition, as virtually all participants in the debate about new jobs for women pointed out, the young women who most needed better opportunities were precisely the daughters of the "educated classes." As will be discussed in the following chapters, a much higher percentage of the first generation of Abiturientinnen and women students than of contemporary male students had fathers with a university education. At a lower social level, 2,159 of the 13,758 women elementary teachers in Prussia in 1901 were daughters of male elementary teachers.42 Thus many fathers could have very strong personal reasons to oppose the views of the majority of men in their professions. Feminists had little difficulty formulating rebuttals of the blatant defenses of male privileges, although their arguments did not necessarily succeed in changing their opponents' minds. Their basic tactic was to insist that women had as much right to work as men did. One of the most succinct formulations of this idea came from August Bebel, who responded to the concern about a possible oversupply of physicians by asking rhetorically what law guaranteed anyone "an income appropriate to his station"—an unusual 40 Bischoff, Studium der Medizin, pp. 35-36; Eduard Albert, Die Frauen und das Studium der Median (Vienna, 1895), p. 34; L. Henius, "Uber die Zulassung der Frauen zum Studium der Medizin," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 21 (1895): 613; B. Langer, Die Frauen in der Heilkunde (Wiesbaden, 1894), pp. 12-13; Max Runge, Miinnliche und weibliche Frauenheilkunde (Gottingen, 1899), pp. 14-15; Hope Bridges Lehmann-Adams, "Frauenstudium und Frauentauglichkeit," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 22 (1896): 28. 41 Sidonie Binder, Weibliche Arzte (Stuttgart, 1892), p. 72. 42 Hardt, Lehrennnenfrage, p. 18.

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defense of free competition by the socialist leader! Hedwig Kettler questioned why middle-class parents allowed their daughters to earn needed income through the manual labor of sewing, something they would never allow to happen to their sons, instead of supporting access to more respectable and lucrative careers. Helene Stocker linked the fight for new educational and career opportunities to other concerns of the women's movement: "A state that through a trade license permits a woman to sell her body," she wrote in 1898, "has certainly no right to withhold life's most precious possessions from earnestly striving women 'in the name of femininity.' " 43 Although most women stressed that the need for jobs or the desirability of female physicians and teachers should override male fears of competition, some tried to defuse the opposition by pointing out that, especially in medicine, not enough women would enter the field to create any serious overcrowding. This admission, however, sometimes played into the hands of the opponents. Franz Penzoldt noted in his speech to the Physicians' Congress in 1898 that if so few women were going to enter the profession the goals of providing more jobs for women and female physicians for most women patients would not be achieved. He concluded that there was thus little reason to admit women to medicine.44 More successful in undermining the opponents' views was a point made by Lange, Kettler, and many other women: that fears of female competition demonstrated the inconsistency, if not the outright insincerity, of those male professionals who also opposed women's rights by claiming that women were incapable of handling jobs in the fields they were trying to enter. "Why," Lange asked in 1889, "does Professor Waldeyer call upon the authorities to protect the stronger sex against the weaker?"45

QUESTIONING WOMEN'S CAPACITIES

Challenging women's mental and physical capacities for academic studies and careers constituted one of the prime strategies of the 43 Bebel's comments in Reichstag, Verhandlungen, 8th leg., 2d sess., p. 1216 (23.11.93); Frau Julius (Hedwig) Kettler, Was wird aus unsern Tochter? (Weimar, 1889), p. 26; Helene Stocker, Das Madchengymnasium im preussischen Abgeordnetenhaus (Berlin, 1898), p. 13. 44 Lange, Higher Education, p. 56; Anna Kuhnow, Gedanken und Erfahrungen tiber Frauenbildung und Frauen-Beruf, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1896), p. 18; Penzoldt, Medizinstudium der Frauen, pp. 10-11. 45 Lange, Higher Education, p. 136; Kettler, Was wird aus unsern Tochter? p. 34.

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defenders of the status quo. They employed both biological and historical arguments to try to show that women could not, even if given the opportunity, approach the average level of achievement of male professionals. In attempting to counter these arguments, feminists usually repeated Mill's view that nurture had deprived women of the chance to match male achievements and that only in a future of equal educational and employment opportunities could female capacities be known. Other responses emerged as well, including some efforts to challenge the men's view of history and occasional expressions of a willingness to accept that women would never achieve what some men did. In the post-Darwinian age, arguments based on physiological differences between the sexes added a new element to the ideology of woman's natural Bestimmung. Even the crude materialism of Theodor von Bischoff's denigration of women's capacities based on their smaller brains reappeared in many writings of the 1880s and 1890s, despite the efforts of other researchers to demonstrate its inaccuracy or irrelevance. More effective in discrediting this theory was what August Bebel called "a special irony of fate": an autopsy on Bischoff revealed that his brain weighed less than the average for women.46 Yet Waldeyer still spoke about the varying development of different brain lobes in men and women as a factor that made the latter unfit for medical study, and many other physicians linked what they saw as women's limited mental capacities to their physiology. Among the most notorious of these were Max Runge, a professor of gynecology at the University of Gottingen, and Paul Mobius, whose pamphlet On the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women, first published in 1900, had gone through twelve printings by 1922.47 Some opponents of female physicians admitted that women might succeed in medical studies but argued that they would be seriously hindered in their practice by either physiological or men46 Briihl, Frauenhirn, passim; Ludwig Buchner, "Das Gehirn der Frau," Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 308-14; August Bebel, Woman under Socialism, trans. Daniel DeLeon (1904; reprint New York, 1971), p. 196. An English version of Biichner's article is available: "The Brain of Women," The New Review 9 (1893): 166-76. 47 Waldeyer, "Studium der Medizin," p. 40; Max Runge, Das Weib in seiner geschlechtlichen Eigenart (Berlin, 1898); idem, Frauenheilkunde; Paul Mobius, Lifer den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes, 12th ed. (Halle, 1922). On Runge's efforts to block medical study at Gottingen, see Antke Luhn, "Geschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Medizinischen Fakultat der Universitat Gottingen" (medical diss., University of Gottingen, 1972), pp. 60-70. Mobius's work also circulated widely in a Russian translation: see Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton, 1978), p. 158n.

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tal handicaps. Most frequently cited was menstruation, which, according to many men, so affected women's mental powers that they could not function as physicians for one week every month— perhaps during the week when their patients would need them the most. Because most opponents did not expect female physicians to marry, or assumed they would abandon their practices if they did so, the possible disruption of their careers by pregnancy does not figure as often in the literature, although Bischoff saw this as yet another reason to bar women from the medical profession.48 Some opponents doubted that women would have the stamina to survive a physician's schedule, especially in the countryside. Others questioned whether women would have the physical strength needed to perform operations. Karl von Stengel, a professor of law at the University of Munich, suggested that most women would not be able to maintain the confidentiality required of physicians.49 When feminists attempted to counter such arguments by pointing to the undeniable success of female physicians in other countries, opponents developed two responses. One used the foreign examples to demonstrate that in fact few women who began the study of medicine ever finished their educations and established practices. Hermann Fehling noted that 789 matriculations by women at Swiss universities between 1864 and 1891 had led to only 141 doctorates. At the University of Geneva, according to a Professor Laskowski, only 14 out of 175 female medical students between 1872 and 1892 had brought their work to a successful conclusion. Citing statistics from the Philadelphia Times, Wilhelm Svetlin asserted that only 18 percent of American women who entered medical school actually ended up practicing the profession. Various opponents cited figures from Alice Gordon's report, "The After-Careers of University-Educated Women," which indicated that only 11 of 1,486 graduates of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges had become physicians.50 48 Among many examples, see Fehling, Bestimmung der Frau, pp. 15-16; Runge, Das Wetb, pp. 3-4; Bischoff, Studium der Medizin, pp. 38-39. 49 Penzoldt, Medizinstudium der Frauen, pp. 13-14; Hermann Senator in Arthur Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau (Berlin, 1897), p. 87; Langer, Frauen in der Heilkunde, p. 15; Stengel cited in Laetitia Boehm, "Von den Anfangen des akademischen Frauenstudiums in Deutschland, Zugleich ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Ludwig-Maxirnilians-Universitat Munchen," Historisches Jahrbuch 77 (1958): 310. Compare Burstyn, Victorian Education, pp. 75-78; and Poirier and Nahon, "!/accession des femmes," pp. 34-36. 50 Fehling, Bestimmung der Frau, p. 28; Laskowski's article in the Revue scientifique

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The second response to examples of successful foreign female professionals involved more specific criticism of those German women interested in academic studies and careers. Both Helene Lange and Mathilde Weber had stressed as a special reason for opening medicine to women what the former referred to as "a phenomenal increase of female maladies." Weber attributed this to the "hurried and wearying life of the present," a diagnosis repeated by several other writers.51 Opponents were then moved to ask how the frail, anemic, and nervous young women of the German middle class who were supposed to need the care of female physicians could possibly withstand the rigors of the Abitur, university study, and medical practice.52 To support this argument, defenders of the status quo turned to various statistics about women teachers that implied the limited physical and mental stamina of middle-class German women. As early as 1871, one can find the alleged damage to health suffered by women teachers being cited as a reason women should never be allowed to study medicine. Two decades later, the physician B. Langer warned that the deleterious effects on young women of preparing for the teachers' examination portended even worse health problems if women gained access to the Abitur and medical certification.53 At the turn of the century, male elementary teachers in Bavaria endeavored to take advantage of this general concern by proposing that prospective women teachers be given an easier examination, a measure that would have reduced their marketaof 27.1.94 as cited in Albert, Frauen und das Studium der Median, pp. 24-25; Svetlin, Frauenfrage und der arztliche Beruf, p. 34; Emil Warburg in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, p. 257; Alice Gordon, "The After-Careers of University-Educated Women," The Nineteenth Century 37 (1895): 958. The official history of women's university studies in Switzerland indicates that in fact only thirteen medical degrees were awarded at Geneva between 1872 and 1892: Schweizerischer Verband der Akademikerinnen, Das Frauenstudium an den Schweizer Hochschulen (Zurich, 1928), p. 145. 51 Mathilde Weber, Arztinnen fur Frauenkrankheiten: Fine ethische und eine samtdre Notwendigkeit, 2d ed. (Tubingen, 1888), pp. 15-16; Lange, Higher Education, p. 132; Lina Morgenstern, Ein offenes Wort uber das medizinische Studium der Frauen an Prof. Dr. W. Waldeyer (Berlin, 1888), p. 7; M. Kronfeld, Die Frauen und die Medizin (Vienna, 1895), p. 42. 52 Henius, "Zulassung der Frauen," p. 613; Albert, Frauen und das Studium der Median, p. 33; Peter Miiller, Ueber die Zulassung der Frauen zum Studium der Medizin (Hamburg, 1894), p. 20. 53 Hermann Jakoby, Grenzen der weiblichen Bildung (Giitersloh, 1871), p. 12; Langer, Frauen in der Heilkunde, p. 4. See also Historisch-politische Blatter fur das fatholische Deutschland 120 (1897): 940, and ibid. 126 (1900): 587. 187

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bility. Education Minister von Landmann, however, perceived the likely consequences of such a change and rejected the proposal.54 Among the more concrete evidence used to demonstrate the fragility of women teachers was a study that indicated that those in Berlin's elementary schools took an average of more than seventeen sick days per year while men took only eight. One male teacher reported that even healthy women averaged only fifteen years of teaching before being pensioned, and another suggested that women retired on the average eight years sooner than did men.55 For the male teachers, such facts indicated that city officials were mistaken if they thought women teachers were less expensive: despite women's lower salaries, they cost more in the long run. The most frequently cited statistics involved the high rates of mental illness among women teachers. Of 317 teachers housed in Prussian mental hospitals in 1879, well over half—187—were women, at a time when women made up only a small fraction of the total teaching corps in the state. In the 1890s Langer could refer to the "frequency of hysteria among women teachers" as a known fact.56 The fate of Emilie Kempin, who in 1887 was the first woman to earn a law degree in Switzerland but who died in a mental hospital in 1900, also supplied ammunition to those who wanted to warn women of the dangers inherent in efforts to break out of their natural sphere.57 Feminists responded to these arguments in a variety of ways. With regard to the supposedly disabling effects of menstruation and pregnancy, many were quick to point out that men did not express such concern for working-class women, but only for those who threatened their jobs. Hedwig Dohm's suggestion that men 54

Beilner, Emanzipation der bayenschen Lehrerin, p. 88. Wilhelm Karl Bach, Die Lehrerinnenfrage (Elberfeld, 1905), p. 20; Hardt, Lehrerinnenfrage, p. 31; Julius Gressler, Moderne Mddchenbildung und die Frauenfrage (Gotha, 1888), p. 76; Troster, Lehrerinnenfrage, p. 23.1 do not vouch for the accuracy of these statistics but only note that women teachers do not appear to have disputed them. 56 Carl Georg Wilhelm Pelman, Nervositat und Erziehung: Warum ist die Frau ah Lehrerin und Arzt unentbehrlich?, 6th ed. (Bonn, 1888), p. 29; Langer, Frauen in der Heilkunde, p. 15. See also, if only for the crudity of its research design, RaIf Wichmann, Geisttge Leistungsfahigkeit und Nervositat bei Lehrern und Lehrerinnen (Halle, 1905), which concluded (p. 73) that half of all women teachers were "nervous" even though not overworked. 57 Sidonie Griinwald-Zerkowitz, Die Schattenseiten des Frauenstudmms (Zurich, 1902), p. 9; Augustin Rosier, "Die Frauenfrage," Historisch-Polihsche Blatter fur das katholische Deutschland 128 (1901): 274. 55

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were as incapacitated by hemorrhoids as women were by menstruation was not, however, repeated by other defenders of women's mental and physical capacities.58 In a more positive vein, many women relied on the evidence of the successful careers of individual female physicians. They noted, for example, that the Swiss physician Marie Heim-Vogtlin had required assistance from a male colleague only once in fifteen years and that in Austria Rosa Kerschbaumer treated six thousand patients at her eye clinic between 1888 and 1895. Within Germany, there was the striking example of the clinic run by Emilie Lehmus and Franziska Tiburtius, which had handled over seventeen thousand patients by 1892.59 Efforts to rebut the claims made about the high attrition rate among women students were a key aspect of the propaganda for opening the universities and the medical profession to women. Several pamphleteers stressed that well over half of the women who enrolled in the medical courses in St. Petersburg between 1872 and 1882 obtained their degrees. With regard to England, it was pointed out that the overwhelming majority of female physicians did not attend the women's colleges at Cambridge or Oxford, so that Gordon's figures were being misused by the opposition. Most important, several articles pointed out that Laskowski's figures from the University of Geneva, although correct, were also highly misleading because many of the women students there had been foreigners who completed their degrees elsewhere.60 With regard to the evidence about the poor health or limited stamina of women teachers, feminists tended to try not to challenge the statistics but to explain them. As early as 1882, Bertha von der Lage of the Charlotte School in Berlin admitted that 58 Binder, Weibliche Arzte, p. 19; Lischnewska in Die verheiratete Lehrenn, ed. Landesverein Preussischer Volksschullehrerinnen, p. 25; Hedwig Dohm, Die wissenschaftliche Emancipation der Frau (Berlin, 1874), p. 144. 59 References to Heim-Vogtlin in Mathilde Weber, Ein Besuch in Zurich bei den weiblichen Studierenden der Mediztn (Stuttgart, 1888), pp. 14-15, and Binder, Weibliche Arzte, p. 63; to Kerschbaumer in Die Frau 2 (1894-1895): 220-22, and Kronfeld, Frauen und die Medizin, p. 21; and to the Berlin clinic in Elise Oelsner, Die Leistungen der deutschen Frau in den letzten vierhundert Jahren auf wissenschafthchen Gebiete (Guhrau, 1894), p. 79. 60 Rosa Kerschbaumer, "Professor Albert und die weiblichen Aerzte," Neue Revue 6 (1895): 1383-87; Otto Neustatter, Das Frauenstudium im Ausland (Munich, 1899), p. 10; Agnes Bluhm, "Die Entwicklung und der gegenwartige Stand des medicinischen Frauenstudiums in den europaischen und aussereuropaischen Landern," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 21 (1895): 648-50; Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 624-25; Die Lehrenn 11 (1894-1895): 123.

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women teachers were sick more often than men, but she blamed the long hours that women had to work in order to earn enough to live. A quarter century later, Elsbeth Krukenberg still stressed better pay as the best means to reduce the frequency of sick days and early retirements among women teachers. The strain caused by the certification examination was often blamed on the poor preparation most girls received before arriving at the teachers' seminars or on the young age at which girls took this test. At the conference in 1904 that discussed marriage for women teachers, a supporter of Marie Lischnewska went so far as to attribute the high level of mental illness among such women to their "unnatural life" of celibacy, an argument that many teachers certainly did not accept.61 In any case, most women attributed the unfavorable statistics to environmental rather than natural causes. Defenders of the status quo also turned to history for evidence about the limited intellectual capacities of women. The crux of their argument was that the minimal achievements of women in fields of endeavor that had long been open to them demonstrated that few positive results would come from their admission to medicine or other academic professions. Few writers were as blunt as the Austrian professor of medicine Eduard Albert, who wrote in 1895, "Men have produced all human creations that you see surrounding you." But his was only an exaggerated form of a common sentiment. Over and over again, men made assertions such as that the "learned ladies" of the Renaissance had made no contributions to scholarship or that female writers and composers had produced virtually no masterpieces, and argued that nature rather than nurture, limited capacities rather than restricted opportunities, were responsible. In the essay Misused Women's Energy, Ellen Key claimed that fewer than ten women had achieved fame in the arts or scholarship during the nineteenth century, and she used this "fact" to buttress her insistence that women should redirect their concern toward motherhood.62 61 Bertha von der Lage, Ein Wort zur Frauenfrage (Berlin, 1882), p. 44; idem, "Wie erklart sich die oft beklagte korperliche Schwache der Lehrerinnen?" Die Lehrerin 2 (1885-1886): 645-46; Elsbeth Krukenberg, Ueber das Eindringen der Frauen in mannliche Berufe (Essen, 1906), p. 31; Otto Dornbluth, Die geistige Fdhigkeiten der Frau (Rostock, 1897), p. 26; Klara Muche in Die verheiratete Lehrerin, ed. Landesverein Preussischer Volksschullehrerinnen, p. 67. 62 Albert, Frauen und das Studtum der Median, p. 1; Jakoby, Grenzen der weibhchen Bildung, p. 15; W. A. Freund, Rede zur Eroffnung der neuen Universitats-Frauenklinik (Strassburg, 1888), p. 5; Key, Missbrauchte Frauenkraft, p. 6. Compare Burstyn, Victorian Education, p. 73; and Poirier and Nahon, "!/accession des femmes," p. 36.

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Many men were not content simply to highlight women's inability to compete in male spheres of activity; they further pointed out how men often made greater contributions in female spheres. Paul Mobius, for example, argued that the best cooks and tailors were usually male. An elementary schoolteacher noted that the sewing machine had been invented by a man. Of greatest importance for the question of female physicians was the conviction shared by numerous opponents that scientific obstetrics had developed only after men took over the field from midwives. As was frequently pointed out, women had not even invented the forceps.63 Women responded to this appeal to history in various ways. One, perhaps the least successful as a tactic for changing men's minds, was to challenge the men's accounts of female achievements with revisionist histories of women in the arts and sciences. As early as 1874, Hedwig Dohm attempted to show that "women have already played a not unimportant role in the history of medicine." Twenty years later, Elise Oelsner, long active in women's organizations in Breslau, published the most wide-ranging of such works, a study entitled The Accomplishments of the German Woman in the Last Four Hundred Years in Scholarly Areas. The 1890s also saw the appearance of Sophie Pataky's two-volume Lexikon of German Women Writers, which was designed to show that women "have already known how to achieve a position in the intellectual realm that can no longer be disdained or overlooked by the educated world." In 1899, Adalbert von Hanstein, a member of the Academic Union, which had supported the foundation of both Helene Lange's Realkurse and the Women's Welfare Association, published a lengthy study that particularly emphasized the great renown of women poets in the mid-eighteenth century. The same year, another male supporter of opening the universities to women, the young economist Heinrich Herkner, wrote an essay suggesting that in his field women had already done scholarly work that could not be ignored "without seriously damaging the state of our knowledge."64 63

Mobius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, p. 7; Drewke, Lehrerinnenfrage, p. 18; Waldeyer, "Studium der Medizin," pp. 37-38; Albert, Frauen und das Studium der Median, p. 23; Langer, Frauen in der Heilkunde, p. 17; Fehling, Bestimmung des Weibes, pp. 9-10; Runge, Das Weib, p. 4. 64 Dohm, Emancipation der Frau, p. 101; Oelsner, Leistungen der deutschen Frau, passim; Sophie Pataky, ed., Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1898), 1: viii; Adalbert von Hanstein, Die Frauen in der Geschichte des deutschen Geisteslebens des 191

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The multivolume Handbook of the Women's Movement, edited by Gertrud Baumer and Helene Lange, also served to stress the positive accomplishments of women and thus to justify their admission to new fields of endeavor. Adele Gerhard's and Helene Simon's study of the possibilities for combining motherhood with scholarly or creative work also did this, although the editors admitted that "women have achieved only modest successes so far in certain fields" and that "we encounter an almost complete lack of creative capacity in dramatic literature, musical composition, and architecture."65 Such admissions, as well as the marginally important figures occasionally included in these revisionist histories, could have the effect of confirming male views of women's limited capacities for intellectual and artistic work.66 A more successful tactic employed by some women to combat the appeal to history involved stressing how women's achievements had been limited by the education or training they had received and by the conditions under which they had worked. Hedwig Dohm, even as she emphasized the contributions women had made, pointed out how in the 1870s most institutions for advanced training in the arts still remained closed to women. Lina Morgenstern responded to male physicians' comments about the development of obstetrics by observing that midwives could not be expected to have made significant advances when they had had almost no opportunity for scientific training. This general stress on environmental factors as the reason for women's modest intellectual achievements also received support from the materialist philosopher and physician Ludwig Buchner, who suggested in 1893 that "in face of their social disadvantages it would be wonderful if it were otherwise."67 From this perspective, many women could argue that only with equal educational and employment opportunities for both sexes could a true measurement of their relative mental and physical capacities be made. While many male professionals resisted the idea 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. Leipzig, 1899-1900); Heinrich Herkner, Das Frauenstudium der Nationalokonomie (Berlin, 1899), p. 28. Herkner was then teaching at the University of Zurich. 65 Gertrud Baumer and Helene Lange, eds., Handbuch der Frauenbewegung, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1901-1906); Gerhard and Simon, Mutterschaft, pp. iii, 37. 66 See, for example, the denigration of many of the women Oelsner discussed in Penzoldt, Medizinstudium der Frauen, p. 13. 67 Dohm, Emancipation der Frau, pp. 53-56; Morgenstern, Fin offenes Wort, p. 10; Ludwig Buchner, "The Brain of Women," p. 173. 192

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of making this trial, one skeptic about female intelligence was eager for it to occur. The philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, writing in 1896, said that, if an experiment with letting women into the Abitur examination and the universities were tried, "I am convinced that it will for the most part remain harmless, because it will fail to achieve its goal." In Hartmann's view, this was the only way to convince women that their capabilities were in fact inferior to those of men.68 Some moderate feminists tried to defuse the opposition based on the appeal to history by insisting on its ultimate irrelevance to the key issue. Willing to admit that even in the future women might not make major advances in science or the arts, but noting as well that most male physicians and teachers never made contributions to knowledge, these feminists believed that the exercise of spiritual motherhood in the treating and teaching of women and children was more important than the possible breakthroughs to be made by female researchers. As Helene Lange stated in 1889, "It may be possible that a woman rarely if ever essentially promotes science, but is that a reason why she should not practice it?" In a major speech to the International Congress of Women in 1904, Marianne Weber commented that all the progress of recent decades still had "not answered for us the question of whether woman is able to contribute to the increase of scholarly culture," but she also expressed confidence in the capacity of women to be competent physicians and teachers.69 THE THREAT TO GERMAN SOCIETY

In addition to asserting male privilege and questioning women's capacities, defenders of the status quo claimed that any significant movement of women into higher education and the academic professions would pose a variety of threats to German society. On the most general level, many writers argued that any move toward increasingly similar social roles for the sexes would be contrary to the trend of both biological and historical evolution and thus would be regression rather than progress. Rather surprisingly, this stress on evolution even figured prominently in the writings of the priest Augustin Rosier, the main analyst of the woman question 68 Eduard von Hartmann, "Die Jungfernfrage," in his Tagesfragen (Leipzig, 1896), pp. 99-132, quotation on p. 105. 69 Lange, Higher Education, p. 134; Marianne Weber, "Die Beteiligung der Frau an der Wissenschaft," in Frauenfragen, pp. 1-9, quotation on p. 1.

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for the Historisch-politische Blatter fur das katholische Deutschland and

author of a massive volume that addressed this theme from a Catholic perspective.70 More frequently mentioned was the threat that academically trained women would pose to the future quality of the German population. By creating or aggravating an oversupply of professionals, it was argued, such women would make it even more difficult for men in these fields to marry and support families and would thus be responsible for a further lowering of the birth rate among the educated classes.71 Moreover, these women themselves, even if their studying did not make them sterile, would not often marry, either because they would not want to give up their work for a husband or because they would have lost their attractiveness to men. As an Austrian woman opposed to female students asked, "Would any fiance" feel attracted to kissing the girl's hand that has just wielded a scalpel for half a day in the dissection room?"72 Hedwig Waser encountered such attitudes when she began her medical studies at Zurich in 1889: "the young men were unanimous in saying that they would never marry something as degenerate as a femaie physician." Her own fiance viewed her studies as a "refusal of his proposal." A similar fate befell Rahel Goitein, although her fiance" eventually changed his mind.73 Given the ban on married women teachers and the minimal number of German women who had attended foreign universities as of the early 1890s, those who believed that female graduates would not marry had little direct evidence to substantiate their convictions. They did not often cite foreign statistics to back up this contention, although the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, who had left Freiburg University for Harvard, reported on what he considered the low marriage rate among educated women in 70 Augustin Rosier, "Die Frauenfrage," Historisch-Politische Blatter fur das katholische Deutschland 127 (1901): 884; idem, Die Frauenfrage vom Standpunkte der Natur, der Geschichte und der Offenbarung, 2d ed. (Freiburg, 1907), p. 108. 71 Viktor Birch-Hirschfeld and Julius Lessing in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, pp. 63, 231; Hartmann, "Jungfernfrage," p. 110. 72 Jakoby, Grenzen der weibhchen Bildung, p. 13; Georg Lewin, Franz Riegel, Heinrich Spitta, and Carl Stumpf in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, pp. 73, 77, 174, 177; Felix Lindner, Vom Frauenstudium (Rostock, 1897), p. 5; Grtinwald-Zerkowitz, Schattenseiten des Frauenstudtums, p. 42. 73 Hedwig Bleuler-Waser's recollections in Schweizerischer Verband der Akademikerinnen, Frauenstudium, p. 66; Rahel Goitein Straus, Wir lebten in Deutschland: Ennnerungen einer deutschen Jiidin, 1880-1933 (Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 87-88.

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the United States.74 In fact, this conviction involved something of a contradiction, for many opponents of female professionals believed that the only women who considered higher education were those who because of their looks, personalities, or poverty would be unable ever to attract husbands. The Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, noted in 1892 that "in general it is not the fairer part of the fair sex who throw themselves into the arms of scholarship, which in the end is understandable, because most have decided to study only if they have said Valet to hopes from other quarters." Four years earlier, the liberal Kolnische Zeitung had reported, "In Berlin, a great number of weary old women of scarcely thirty years creep about in an attempt at acquiring a man's education; all vivacity of feeling, all womanly emotions, and physical health as well have left them. Truly educated and cultured men avoid them, uneducated ones flee them, and the healthy, natural women shun their society. Thus these girls stand like hermaphrodites between the two sexes."75 The prevalence of such attitudes may account for the infrequent use in Germany of the argument that money spent on educating women students would be wasted because most would marry. Feminists and their supporters made more use of foreign evidence. After visiting England in 1888, Helene Lange reported, "The students of Girton and Newnham, after completing their studies, marry soon, and marry men of distinction." This view was repeated in an article about these women's colleges at Cambridge in the prestigious Preussische Jahrbiicher.76 Other writers often referred to a survey indicating that 191 out of 409, or 47 percent, of the women who graduated from the medical course in St. Petersburg between 1872 and 1881 married. Elisabeth GnauckKuhne noted in 1891 that "hundreds" of female physicians in the United States had wed; Eliza Ichenhauser later indicated that 25 percent of such women had husbands. Frequently mentioned as 74 Hugo Munsterberg, American Traits from the Point of View of a German (Boston and New York, 1901), p. 146. See also Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 22 (1896): 402. 75 Bischoff, Studium der Medizin, p. 22; Eduard von Hartmann in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, p. 153; Allgemeine Zeitung cited in Wanda von Baeyer, "Die Frau in der Wissenschaft," in Die Frau in unserer Zeit (Oldenburg, 1954), p. 202; Kolnische Zeitung of 14.X.88 cited in Lange, Higher Education, p. 183. I presume that this last article was occasioned by the opening of the advanced courses for women teachers at the Victoria Lyceum. 76 Lange, Higher Education, p. 33; Karl Breul, "Die Frauencolleges an der Universitat Cambridge," Preussische Jahrbiicher 67 (1891): 57.

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well was the fact that at least five professors at the University of Zurich had wives who had graduated from that institution, although this variety of student-teacher relations may have been rather disturbing to those concerned about the propriety of having women at the universities.77 Many women also chose to counter the fears about low rates of marriage and motherhood among female professionals by emphasizing the motherliness of active professionals who had children. The dentist Henriette Tiburtius and the Swiss physician Marie Heim-Vogtlin served as the prime examples, although women such as Ulrike Henschke, director of the Victoria Continuation School for girls in Berlin, were also mentioned occasionally.78 Sophie Pataky hoped that her Lexikon of German Women Writers would show that, contrary to the popular image, "the married writer had proven to be a self-sacrificing, dutiful, devoted housewife, spouse, and mother." Many of the teachers and physicians surveyed by Adele Gerhard and Helene Simon, however, doubted the possibility or advisability of combining motherhood with the practice of a profession, at least under current social conditions.79 Missing from the feminists' responses was any significant effort to put forward a positive image of remaining single or to claim that marriage did not suit all women. Neither their doubts about combining career and motherhood nor their interest in new job opportunities for unmarried women led most German feminists openly to challenge the traditional view of marriage as the greatest source of personal fulfillment for women. Only with the foundation of the League for the Protection of Mothers in 1904 did some radical feminists begin to defend more actively the choice to remain single. A second variation of the view that opening new educational 77

Kerschbaumer, "Professor Albert," p. 1383; Neustatter, Frauenstudium im Ausland, p. 10; Elisabeth Gnauck-Kuhne, Das Unwersitatsstudium der Frauen (Oldenburg, 1891), p. 21; Ichenhauser, Ausnahmestellung Deutschlands, p. 43; Kuhnow, GedankentiberFrauenbildung, p. 11; Clare Schubert-Feder, Das Leben der Studentinnen in Zurich (Berlin, 1893), pp. 16-17. 78 Luise Buchner, Die Frau: Hinterlassene Aufsatze, Abhandlungen und Berichte zur Frauenfrage (Halle, 1878), pp. 413-14; von der Lage, Wort zur Frauenfrage, p. 38; Mary Mucholl, "Dr. Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld," Die Frau 2 (1894-1895): 82-85; Franziska Tiburtius, "Frauenuniversitaten oder gemeinsames Studium?" Die Frau 5 (1897-1898): 581; and on Henschke, Else Luders, Minna Cauer: Leben und Werk (Gotha and Stuttgart, 1925), p. 55. 79 Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: viii; Gerhard and Simon, Mutterschaft, pp. 239, 253-57, 315. 196

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and employment opportunities to women posed a threat to German society rested on the belief that women students would inevitably become political radicals. In Reichstag debates about the many petitions of the early 1890s, opponents harked back to the nihilist Russian women twenty years earlier at Zurich as evidence of the probable result of allowing German women to matriculate. At a time of widespread concern about the potentially dangerous consequences of an "academic proletariat," deputies argued that underemployed female professionals would be especially likely to turn to radicalism.80 That socialist politicians such as August Bebel offered the strongest support to feminists' petitions reinforced this perception on the part of many middle-class Germans. The equation of the emancipation of women with socialism led at least one defender of the status quo to claim that all feminists, "whether consciously or unconsciously, were playing into the hands of the Social Democrats." For the priest Augustin Rosier, the demands of Hedwig Kettler's Women's Reform Association to open the Abitur, the universities, and the professions to women would lead "to the dissolution of the present order and to the socialist state of the future."81 Bourgeois feminists and their supporters tried very hard to break this association of their goals with the broader aims of the Social Democrats. They also endeavored to prove that women students in other countries showed no tendency toward moral or political radicalism. In 1874, shortly after the Russian decree calling home the women studying in Zurich, Hedwig Dohm remarked that "among the many female physicians in America there is not a single example of a depraved, immoral creature." Helene Lange, by her description of the students she encountered at Girton College, also attempted to counteract the common image of women students as radicals.82 The most important aspect of this campaign to change popular perceptions, however, was a continuing effort to establish a more positive picture of women students at the University of Zurich. 80 Comments by the Center party deputy Oerterer in Reichstag, Verhandlungen, 8th leg., 1st sess., pp. 1998-2000 (11.111.91); and by the National Liberal Endemann, ibid., 2d sess., pp. 1215-16 (23.11.93). 81 P. Muller, Zulassung der Frauen, p. 5; H. Kersten, Die Frau und das Universitatsstudium (Stuttgart, 1892), pp. 17, 39-40; Rosier, Frauenfrage, p. 446. 82 Albert Moll in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, p. 134; Anna BenfeySchuppe, Frauenfrage und Madchen-Erziehung (Kempten, 1897), p. 6; Dohm, Emancipation der Frau, p. 131; Lange, Higher Education, pp. 149-51.

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Such efforts began almost immediately after the Russian decree of May 1873. Later that year, a Mrs. Hallmann, whose daughter was then studying natural sciences in Zurich, reported to the German Women's Association her impression that the behavior of only a few Russian students had been "improper and immoral." Dohm cited this report in her essay of 1874 and also noted how university officials in Switzerland had challenged the claim that women students had caused special problems. After visiting Zurich in July 1875, Luise Buchner published a glowing description of conditions there, noting that "a salutary calm" had reigned since the departure of the Russians.83 As the debate over opening German universities to women ebbed after the mid-1870s, such reports on Zurich also faded from prominence. In 1888, however, Mathilde Weber followed up her pamphlet on female physicians with a description of her own visit to the women students in Zurich. She stayed with Anna Eysoldt, another young woman whose mother had accompanied her to Switzerland. Weber found the students to be "fresh and vital," and she noted that they wore sensible, fashionable clothes and were "filled with the seriousness of their difficult life's work." She emphasized that they "led a truly cloister-like existence" in order to avoid "evil gossip" and suggested that a special "home" for women students should be opened.84 Many similar reports soon followed. The physician Agnes Bluhm spoke to a Viennese women's organization in March 1890 about her experiences in Zurich, pointing out the matter-of-fact spirit that prevailed in the anatomy laboratories and the "mutually beneficial effect of an unforced, friendly interaction between scientifically educated men and women." Hermann von Meyer, for many years a professor of anatomy in Zurich, wrote in the popular periodical Die Gartenlaube in 1890 that coeducation had caused no problems since the imposition of more rigid entrance requirements after the Russians' departure in 1873. Two years later, Clare Schubert-Feder published recollections of her student years in the Preussische Jahrbucher. She stressed that the jealousy of women students sometimes felt by professors' wives "lacked any factual basis" and claimed that "few relationships that would qualify as flir83

Louise Otto-Peters, Das erste Vierteljahrhundert des Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenvereins (Leipzig, 1890), pp. 30-31; Dohm, Emancipation der Frau, p. 133; Luise Buchner, Die Frau, pp. 405-18, quotation on p. 409. 84 Mathilde Weber, Besuch in Zurich, pp. 3, 4, 7. Weber misspells Eysoldt as Eishold. 198

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tations" developed among students. In addition, she pointed out that women students, who decorated their rented rooms and often cooked their own meals, had "a good deal of the little housewife" in them.85 Kathe Schirmacher provided a more variegated picture of conditions in Zurich in a pamphlet published in 1896. She confirmed Bluhm's comment that an excellent atmosphere reigned in medical classes, even when sexual matters were being discussed, and noted that German men studying at the university were often surprised to find that most female students looked and dressed just like other young women of their acquaintance. She admitted, however, that politically radical women, especially Russians, had reappeared in Zurich. Among them, although not noted by Schirmacher, was the future cofounder of the German Communist party, Rosa Luxemburg. German women were not immune to the revolutionary ideologies circulating in Zurich: Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler would later date her conversion to socialism to the time of her arrival at the Swiss university in 1893.86 Many of the comments in these descriptions of women students at Zurich were aimed at defusing a variation on the fears of radicalism: the conviction that allowing women into German universities would inevitably lead to sexual immorality. It is not always easy to determine whether the men who expressed this fear thought male students would seduce women or vice versa, but in either case it is ironic that the supposedly unattractive and undesirable "blue-stockings" or "Amazons" who wanted to study at the universities were perceived as likely to develop into promiscuous women once they matriculated.87 One wonders how many adult men, recalling their own casual liaisons with lower-class girls 85 Agnes Bluhm, "Leben und Streben der Studentinnen in Zurich," Jahresbertcht des Vereins fur erweiterte Frauenbildung 2 (1889-1890): 17-27, quotation on p. 22; Hermann von Meyer, "Die Frau und der arztliche Beruf," Die Gartenlaube (1890): 67475; Clare Schubert-Feder, "Das Leben der Studentinnen in Zurich," Preussische Jahrbiicher 70 (1892): 747-64. I used the version published separately, cited in note 77. See also Kuhnow, Gedanken tiber Frauenbildung, p. 9. 86 Kathe Schirmacher, Zuricher Studentinnen (Leipzig and Zurich, 1896), pp. 17, 21-24, 29-31; J. P. Nettl, Rose Luxemburg, 2 vols. (London, 1966), 1: 63-64; Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler, Weite Welt im engen Spiegel: Ermnerungen (Berlin, 1953), pp. 24-27. 87 Among many examples, see Bischoff, Studium der Medizin, p. 40; and Georg Lewin in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, p. 73. Compare Burstyn, Victorian Education, p. 114.

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when they were students, feared that their successors would treat their daughters in a similar fashion. The concern with immorality also agitated professors and former students accustomed to all-male classes. Many professors claimed that they could not conceive of giving their usual lectures to a mixed audience, either because of their own unease in discussing certain themes before women or because of a belief that there were limits on what women should learn about certain subjects. At the Physicians' Congress in 1898, Franz Penzoldt recalled "the indelible and disagreeable impression" he had had as a student when sitting next to an American woman auditing a medical course on a day when a man suffering from venereal disease was displayed to the class.88 He did not note, however, whether or not the woman experienced similar feelings. This inability, or unwillingness, to conceive of the possibility of coeducational universities did, of course, have several centuries of tradition behind it. As the law professor Otto von Gierke stated bluntly in 1897, "Our universities are men's universities . . . adapted to the male spirit." The academic senate at the University of Leipzig, in rejecting matriculation of women in 1900, appealed to the "interests of the real, that is the male, students." Even men such as the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who accepted the need for female physicians and for better training for women teachers, opposed admission of women to the existing universities. "In any case," he remarked in his lectures on politics, "the best institutes for men's education would disdain to be used for such an experiment. It would be an insult to their students to expect them to sit side by side with persons who do not enjoy the liberty of their University."89 For men willing to concede the desirability of higher education for German women but unwilling to see this take place at the existing institutions, the solution appeared to be the creation of a women's university. As Treitschke himself put it in the 1890s, "The state must build a small medical school for women in some 88 Lindner, Frauenstudium, p. 14; Runge, Frauenheilkunde, p. 18; Waldeyer, "Studium der Medizin," pp. 42-43; Victor Birch-Hirschfeld and Johannes Orth in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, pp. 64, 69; Penzoldt, Medizinstudium der Frauen, pp. 18, 25. 89 Gierke in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, p. 23; Renate Drucker, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Leipzig," in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. Hellmut Kretzschmar (Berlin, 1956), p. 285; Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, trans. Torben de Bille, 2 vols. (New York, 1915), 1: 258.

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respectable little town. When this has been tried and proved successful, a philosophical faculty for female secondary teachers could be added." A quarter of a century earlier, when the first female auditors had appeared at German universities and Vassar and Girton were opening, there had been rumors that one of the existing institutions, perhaps Giessen in Hesse, would be converted to a women's institution. M. Carey Thomas reported similar rumors in the early 1880s.90 Male support for a women's university grew dramatically in the later 1890s as the probability that women might gain entrance to the German universities increased. Many of the professors polled by the journalist Arthur Kirchhoff in 1897 viewed such a new institution as by far the best way to satisfy women's demands for higher education. Saxon Minister of Education Paul von Seydewitz accepted the need for a women's university but suggested on several occasions that the larger states—that is, Prussia—should make any experiments in this area.91 By the later 1890s, though, not only the radical feminists but also many of the moderates—led on this issue by Franziska Tiburtius— had come to oppose the creation of a separate university for German women. The arguments about having women teach and treat members of their own sex were seldom—if ever—extended to a claim that women students should be instructed primarily by women or that an all-female environment would enhance such students' intellectual and personal development. German feminists feared that a women's university, especially in its early years, would have second-class facilities and faculty members and would thus fail to provide its graduates with an education equal to that obtainable at the men's universities. In this matter, they agreed with Dorothea Beale and 150 other British headmistresses who, in 90 Treitschke, Politics, 1: 257; on Giessen, Wilhelm Noldeke, Von Weimar bis Weimar, 1872-1897: Festschrift zur Feier des 25jahrigen Bestehens des Deutschen Vereins fur das hbhere Mddchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1897), p. 30; Marjorie H. Dobkin, ed., The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent, Ohio, 1979), p. 232. 91 Leo Pochhammer, Beitrag zur Frage des Universitatsstudiums der Frauen (Kiel, 1893), p. 15; Dr. Ritter, Frauen und Arzte (Berlin, 1893), p. 131; views of August Dorner, Georg Runze, Heinrich Dernburg, Otto von Gierke, Karl von Bardeleben, Dr. Czerny, Hans Delbriick, and Gustav Cohn in Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, pp. 4-5, 11, 21, 24, 35, 96-97, 187, 195; clippings related to Seydewitz's remarks to the Saxon legislature in 1896 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. IV; his remarks in 1900 cited in Judith Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau in akademischen Berufen (Leipzig, 1915), p. 29.

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a letter to The Times in 1897, asserted, "A Women's University means an uncertain and probably a low standard, more limited experience, and a danger of rash experiment."92 As was noted above, many of the reports about conditions in Zurich stressed that neither coeducational medical classes nor the lack of supervised dormitories for women had led to immoral behavior among students. Mathilde Weber used this fact to place the blame for any potential troubles at German universities on the male students, making the clever comment, "We think too well of the German students to want to consider them as less chivalrous than those in Zurich." Another woman insisted that professors could easily refrain from jokes and stories that might be offensive to their women students.93 Numerous men and women suggested that the presence of women students, who did not take part in the drinking and duelling that many male students did, would serve to reform the habits of the latter. The physician Anna Kuhnow reported that men in Zurich worked harder at their studies after the admission of women, and the philologist Margarete Heine suggested that women's study habits and cozy lodgings had shown the men an alternative lifestyle for students.94 In this manner, feminists tried to turn matriculation for women from a threat to higher education into a means of bringing about reforms desired by many Germans inside and outside of the universities.95 Questions about the extent of the threat to male privileges or to German society as a whole posed by the admission of women to the universities and professions, or about women's ability to succeed in these areas, could not, of course, be resolved through de92

Tiburtius, "Frauenuniversitaten," pp. 575-85; Dr. Tiburtius and Dr. Zacke, BiIdung der Aerztinnen in eigenen Anstalten oder auf der Universitat? (Berlin, 1900), esp. pp. 5-15; Binder, Weibliche Arzte, p. 70; Kuhnow, Gedanken uber Frauenbildung, p. 10; Beale's letter cited in Vera Mary Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (London, 1960), p. 109. See also Burstyn, Victorian Education, pp. 161-63. 93 Mathilde Weber, Arztinnen fur Frauenkrankheiten, p. 27; Binder, Weibliche Arzte, p. 28. 94 Theobald Ziegler, Die soziale Frage eine stttliche Frage (Stuttgart, 1891), p. 127; Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 22 (1896): 403; Tiburtius, "Frauenuniversitaten," p. 585; Kuhnow, Gedanken uber Frauenbildung, p. 8; Heine, Studierende Frauen, p. 70. 95 For the interest in reforming student life, see Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1982), esp. pp. 277-88. I detect such a reformist impulse behind a satire of women students published in 1899: Max Brinkmann, Des Corps Schlamponia: Eine Studentin-Geschichte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1899; reprint Gottingen, 1982). Its caricatures are much less vicious than those of the early 1870s, and they tend to make typical student activities appear silly. 202

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bates of the sort that went on during the 1890s. Yet the feminists' arguments gradually had an impact, shifting the focus of the discussion from whether to how women should obtain higher education. As Helene Stocker noted, during discussion of feminists' petitions in the Prussian House of Deputies in 1898 no speaker "dared to deny the necessity of female physicians or of academically trained women teachers." Many of the contributions to Kirchhoff's collection also reflected this shift.96 As the following chapter will show, concrete achievements by women during this decade also contributed significantly to changing the attitudes of men in a position to introduce the reforms feminists were demanding. 96

Stocker, Miidchengymnasium, p. 3; Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau, passim.

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Propaganda of the Deed debate over German women's need for and ability to profit from higher education continued during the 1890s, a few German women demonstrated through a form of "propaganda of the deed" that they were fully qualified to participate in the academic world. Their scholarly and professional activities contributed greatly to changing the attitudes of men in positions of power, a necessary preliminary to the major reforms in women's education that would come after the turn of the century. One aspect of this propaganda involved the continuation—at an accelerated pace—of the practice of pursuing higher education abroad. As of 1893, at least twenty-eight German women had followed the example of Henriette Tiburtius-Hirschfeld and obtained dental degrees in the United States.1 The number of graduates of Swiss universities also began to rise markedly. In 1889 and 1890, Anna Kuhnow, Elisabeth Winterhalter, and Agnes Bluhm earned medical degrees from the University of Zurich; when they settled down to practice in Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Berlin, respectively, they doubled the number of women physicians active in Germany.2 Between 1893 and 1899, at least seventeen more German women completed their medical education in Zurich or Bern, with most returning to their homeland to practice.3 WHILE THE

1 See the list of female dentists in Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 71, which, I believe, omits several names. 2 See "Elisabeth Winterhalter," in Elga Kern, ed., Fuhrende Frauen Europas, n.s. (Munich, 1930), pp. 30-36; Use Szagunn, "Agnes Bluhm—Arztin und Forscherin," Die Arztin 16 (1940): 4-6; Agnes Bluhm, "Dank an meiner Studienzeit," Die Arztin 17 (1941): 527-35; "Anna Kuhnow," in Sophie Pataky, ed., Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1898), 1: 464-65. The third woman physician already active, after Lehmus and Tiburtius, was the English-born Hope Bridges Adams Walther, who received her degree from the University of Bern. She is better known by her name after a second marriage, Lehmann-Adams. 3 Other women with Swiss medical training before 1900 included Else von Rosenzweig, Clara Willdenow (who remained in Switzerland), Lydia Rabinowitsch, Molly Herbig (who married and did not practice), Clara Weiss, Karoline Breitinger, Sieglinde Stier, Anna Fischer-Dueckelmann, Anna Morsch, Caroline Schorer, Agnes Hacker, Salomi Neunreiter, Pauline Ploetz, Jenny Bornstein, Anna OetikerRosenhain, Elise Troschel, and Martha Wygodzinski. These certified physicians are

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Graduates in other fields were not as numerous, and some did not come back to Germany. Luise Miiller wrote a prize-winning dissertation in botany in 1891 but then married her advisor and remained in Zurich. The next year, Ricarda Huch completed her doctorate in history, but she also stayed in Switzerland to teach for several years. Anna Mackenroth, who in 1894 became the first German woman to earn a degree in law, chose to live in a country where she could practice her profession.4 Among prominent graduates who eventually returned home were Kathe Schirmacher, who received a doctorate in French in 1895, and Anita Augspurg, who obtained her law degree in 1897.5 One indication that women with foreign degrees were gaining a modest amount of recognition by the mid-1890s is the fact that several began giving semiacademic courses, and not just in single-sex "lectures for ladies." Several women presented their programs at the Humboldt Academy in Berlin, which had offered lectures to mixed audiences since 1878. In 1894, the physician Agnes Bluhm gave the first such course. She was followed by Clare SchubertFeder lecturing on art history, the Swiss jurist Emilie Kempin on law, and a Polish woman named Sofia Daszynska on economics.6 Yet foreign degrees still aroused opposition, particularly from male physicians. As late as 1900, women with Swiss degrees had to face nuisance lawsuits accusing them of falsely claiming or implying that they had full German certification to practice medicine.7 Such experiences certainly demonstrated the validity of Helene Lange's observation that German "men would not recognize any other Bildung as profound and sufficient enough, except not listed in Elisabeth Boedeker, ed., 25 Jahre Frauenstudium in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Hannover, 1935-1939), which does list theses in other fields at Swiss universities before 1908. 4 "Luise Miiller Dodel," in Pataky, ed., Lexikon, 1: 61; Ricarda Huch, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11: Autobiographische Schriften ([Cologne], n.d.), pp. 195-228; on Mackenroth, Schweizerischer Verband der Akademikerinnen, Das Frauenstudium an den Schweizer Hochschulen (Zurich, 1928), p. 48. 5 Hanna Kriiger, Die unbequeme Frau: Kathe Schirmacher im Kampffiir die Freiheit der Frau una die Freiheit der Nation, 1865-1930 (Berlin, 1936); Lida Gustava Heymann, with Anita Augspurg, Erlebtes—Erschautes, ed. Margrit Twellmann (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), pp. 17-19. 6 Max Hirsch, Wissenschaftliche Centralverein Humboldt Akademie: Skizze ihrer Tatigkeit und Entwicklung 1878-1896 (Berlin, 1896), pp. 29-32. 7 Franziska Tiburtius, Erinnerungen einer Achtzigjahrtgen, 2d ed., enl. (Berlin, 1925), p. 185; Szagunn, "Agnes Bluhm," p. 5; Die Frau 8 (1900-1901): 374; Gertraude Schnelle, "Probleme der Entwicklung des Frauenstudiums in Deutschland" (Ph.D. diss., Karl-Marx-Universitat Leipzig, 1965), p. 81. 205

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one like their own and acquired like their own." 8 In this context, the most crucial propaganda of the deed by German women in the 1890s consisted of the acquisition of such a Bildung, including the classical Abitur and doctorates from German universities. G Y M N A S I U M C O U R S E S FOR W O M E N

Courses aiming to prepare young women for the Abitur examination opened in three different cities—Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Leipzig—within six months of each other in 1893-1894. Each had separate roots in different segments of the women's movement, but all three were established at this time because various government officials had suggested or hinted, in response to the many petitions of the early 1890s, that they saw the need for women to be allowed to take the Abitur and to study medicine. The establishment of a girls' Gymnasium in Vienna in 1892 also served as a stimulus for German women to take action. 9 The course in Berlin was, in essence, the creation of Helene Lange. As noted in Chapter Five, as early as 1889 she had favored the creation of a few classical schools for girls but had founded the Realkurse instead because there appeared to be no prospect of women's admission to the German universities. The encouraging, but far from decisive, expressions of support in 1892 and 1893 for opening the Abitur and medical study to women made Lange more optimistic. 10 She decided, in what Franziska Tiburtius called "a quite singular indication of her intuitive grasp of the needs of the time," to convert the Realkurse into a program leading to the classical Abitur, which was still a prerequisite for medical certification. 11 The courses opened in October 1893, meeting in the afternoon in the unused classrooms of the Charlotte School, the director of which, Karl Goldbeck, was a long-time acquaintance of Lange's. Lange herself served as director of the course but did not teach in it on a regular basis because she did not have the academic credentials required for teaching in the upper grades of a 8

Helene Lange, Higher Education of Women in Europe, trans. L. R. Klemm (New York, 1890), p. 14. 9 On the girls' Gymnasium in Vienna, see Martha Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung, Frauenbtldung und Frauenarbeit in Osterreich (Vienna, 1930), pp. 18-20; and Amalie Mayer et al., eds., Geschichte der osterreichischen Madchenmittelschule (Vienna, 1952), pp. 31-32. 10 See Chapter Five, pp. 158-59, 163-64. 11 Helene Lange, Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1930), p. 204; Tiburtius, Erinnerungen, p. 205. 206

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Gymnasium. For the first few years, all the teachers were men, who were limited to the four "private hours" per week that they were allowed to give outside of their regular jobs.12 The Gymnasium course was officially managed by an association headed by the Free Conservative politician Prince Heinrich zu Schonaich-Carolath. Much of the membership came from liberal circles in Berlin society and included associates of Empress Victoria such as Hermann and Anna von Helmholtz and Karl and Henriette Schrader. Many prominent professors were also dues-paying members, including Hans Delbruck, Rudolf Diels, Wilhelm DiIthey, Rudolf von Gneist, Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Paulsen, Otto Pfleiderer, Gustav Schmoller, and Theobald Ziegler.13 Because the Abitur course would have much smaller enrollments than the Realkurse, tuition and association dues did not suffice to cover the costs. Men and women as diverse as the coal magnate Count Guido Henckell von Donnersmarck and Franziska Tiburtius gave modest-sized gifts to the girls' Gymnasium in its first year. In 1895, Lange received 7,000 Marks from Hertha von Siemens to support a free place in the course and 20,000 from Lucie Messner, a doctor's widow from Munich, to provide a university scholarship. For operating expenses, however, the crucial contribution came from Elise Wentzel-Heckmann, widow of a Berlin architect, whom Lange's friend and backer Hedwig Heyl persuaded to provide 6,000 Marks a year for five years.14 Lange decided to admit to the course only girls who had already completed the higher girls' school and were thus at least sixteen years old. The course itself would run for four years, so that graduates would have spent a total of thirteen or fourteen years in school, compared to the minimum of twelve years that it took boys to reach the Abitur. Lange accepted this longer period of schooling for several reasons. She did not want to force girls to choose the classical course by age twelve or thirteen, in part because she doubted that many parents would enroll their daughters at that age. Older girls would, she hoped, be more dedicated to the pur12 Lange, Lebensennnerungen, pp. 209-10; Gertrud Baumer, Geschichte der Gymnasialkurse fur Frauen zu Berlin (Berlin, 1906), p. 40. 13 Baumer, Gymnasialkurse fur Frauen zu Berlin, p. 27. 14 Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 559; ibid. 2 (1894-1895): 761; Hedwig Heyl, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1925), p. 104. Hertha von Siemens had inherited over one million Marks from her father, Werner von Siemens, in 1892 and would herself later study chemistry: see Georg Siemens, Carl Friedrich von Siemens (Munich, 1960), pp. 23-24, 253.

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suit of the Abitur because they would have formed more precise career goals. In addition, Lange believed that it would be better to begin the intensive study of Greek, Latin, mathematics, and science after the age when girls "need special consideration for physiological reasons."15 Robert Bosse, the Prussian minister of education from 1892 to 1899, agreed in 1895 to allow girls from Lange's course, and any others with adequate preparation, to take the Abitur examination at boys' Gymnasien as Extraneer, or outsiders. The first six, who had been enrolled in the Realkurse before the conversion to a classical course, were ready to attempt it in only two and a half years, at Easter 1896. They were preceded, however, by two young women who had prepared privately. The first to pass the Abitur was Hildegard Ziegler, who came from a very education-oriented family: both her grandfathers were Gymnasium directors, her father was a pastor and teacher, one grandmother and her mother had been certified teachers, and an aunt taught at the Luisenstiftung in Berlin. Born in 1871, she had passed the teachers' examination in 1892 and then, on the advice of both Lange and Auguste Schmidt, gone to Zurich to study. Because she was in Switzerland, the Prussian Ministry of Education assigned her to take the Abitur at the Gymnasium in Sigmaringen, in the southern territory of Hohenzollern, which belonged to Prussia. All the boys in the school greeted her at the railroad station, and some helped by telling her what kind of review for the examination went on in the school. She passed on 8 August 1895.16 The second Prussian Abiturientin was Margarete Heine, daughter of a Prussian tax official. In 1891, aged nineteen, she had begun private tutoring in the ancient languages and mathematics as preparation for possible university study. She passed the examination in March 1896. Both Ziegler and Heine indicated in their requests to Bosse that they hoped to teach in Gymnasium courses for girls, which both would later do, in history and classics, respectively. At Easter 1896, all six candidates from Lange's Gymnasium 15

Helene Lange, Kampfzeiten: Aufsiitze und Reden aus vier Jahrzehnten, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1928), 1: 170-72; Baumer, Gymnasialkurse fur Frauen zu Berlin, p. 28. 16 Hildegard Ziegler to Bosse, 20.IV.95; Margarete Heine to Bosse, 24.IV.95; Bosse to Ziegler, 15.V.95; Bosse to Heine, 17.V.95; Bosse to Lange, 30.IX.95; Provinzialschulkollegium Koblenz to Bosse, 20.VII.96—all in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, Vol. I; Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler, Weite Welt im engen Spiegel: Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1953), pp. 10, 18, 23-30. 208

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course passed the Abitur. These included Hildegard Ziegler's younger sister Kathe and the sisters Margarete and Else von der Leyen, whose father was a Wirklicher Geheim-Oberregierungsrat in the Ministry of Commerce. The next group of three candidates took the examination in the fall of 1897; all passed, including Margarete Breymann, a niece of Henriette Schrader.17 From this time until the course closed in 1906, a steady stream of young women obtained the Abitur—only 4 out of 111 failed to pass on the first attempt. The course experienced two significant changes during this period. In 1899, because expanding enrollment was bringing in less well-prepared girls, an extra semester was added and the entrance age was lowered to fifteen. Three years later, after boys with a Realgymnasium Abitur were allowed to become certified physicians, Greek was dropped from the curriculum and the course returned to a four-year program. The last group of Gymnasium and the first of Realgymnasium pupils graduated in 1906, when the private course closed because the city of Berlin was establishing a public Abitur program for girls.18 The Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium was the creation of Hedwig Kettler's Women's Reform Association, which in 1891 changed its name to the Association for Women's Educational Reform. Kettler and her supporters had rejected Lange's "Yellow Brochure" and the Realkurse of 1889 for accepting continued inequality between girls' and boys' education, and they reiterated this negative judgment with regard to the four-year classical course. In particular, they opposed the notion that girls going through puberty should not be subjected to rigorous educational demands. Although some early statements from this organization suggested a desire to found a full nine-year Gymnasium, what was established was a six-year course beginning at age twelve, modeled on the experimental Reformgymnasium for boys that had opened in Frankfurt in 1892.19 There were rumors that the course would be established in Weimar, Kettler's home town, but the positive reception that the 17 A complete list of graduates is in the appendix to Baumer, Gymnasmlkurse fur Frauen zu Berlin. " Ibid., pp. 66, 50, 57-59. 19 Hedwig Kettler, Das erste deutsche Madchengymnasium, Bibliothek der Frauenfrage, no. 9 (Weimar, 1893); Das Madchengymnasium in Karlsruhe begriindet vom Verein 'Frauenbildungs-Reform' (Weimar, 1894), esp. pp. 18-27, 49-52; Sigmund Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium in seinen ersten 25 Jahren, 1893-1918 (Karlsruhe, 1918), passim. On the Reformgymnasium in Frankfurt, see James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1983), p. 236.

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legislature and government in Baden gave to petitions for opening the Abitur and the universities to women led to the choice of Karlsruhe, where classes opened in October 1893.20 Richard Evans has written that the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium produced Abiturientinnen "in large numbers for the first time"; but, in fact, the school had a much more troubled history than Lange's course and did not graduate its first pupils until 1899. It made an auspicious beginning, with almost thirty pupils in attendance, ranging in age from twelve to thirty-two. Enrollment fell to nineteen by Christmas, however, in part because the director, a Professor Haag from Bern, employed radically experimental methods for teaching Latin. Haag himself soon resigned, to be replaced by a local Realgymnasium teacher who managed the Girls' Gymnasium in addition to his regular job. By the end of the first school year, the class had shrunk to twelve girls, all under twenty. The new beginning class contained no girls from Karlsruhe and dissolved after two years. In 1896 and 1897, there were not enough pupils to start a new class, despite a reduction in tuition from 250 to 150 Marks per year.21 The Association for Women's Educational Reform, a much larger organization than the group supporting Lange's course, had spent 17,000 Marks on the Girls' Gymnasium in its first two years. As enrollments dwindled, local members of the association tended to blame Kettler, who had moved from Weimar to Hannover, for not providing firm enough leadership. They chose to form a new organization, the Association for Women's Education and University Studies. In 1897, after members of the association pledged continued support for the Girls' Gymnasium for three years, the city of Karlsruhe contributed 2,000 Marks. The following year, one of the association's members, Anna von Doemming, a dentist from Wiesbaden, conducted negotiations with city officials that led to the complete takeover of the Girls' Gymnasium in 1898. Doemming also helped persuade Luise Lenz-Heymann to donate 50,000 Marks, the interest from which would support boarding facilities for pupils from outside of Karlsruhe.22 20 Richard Evans mistakenly says that the Girls' Gymnasium opened in 1894: The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894r-1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976), p. 20. 21 Ibid., p. 38; Rahel Goitein Straus, Wir lebten in Deutschland: Erinnerungen einer deutschen JMin, 1880-1933 (Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 66-71; Dr. Armbruster, "Das erste und zweite Schuljahr im Karlsruher Madchengymnasium," ZfwB 23 (1895): 345-53; idem, "Die Neuorganisation des Karlsruher Madchengymnasiums," ZfwB 26 (1898): 285-93; Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium, pp. 13-17. 22 Hugo Willich, "Hedwig Kettler," in Niedersachsische Lebensbtlder, vol. 4, ed.

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The takeover by the city saved the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium but did not immediately produce significant numbers of graduates. Only four members of the first class—Rahel Goitein, Johanna Kappes, Auguste Mainzer, and Lina Meub—remained to take the Abitur in 1899. No one graduated in 1900, and only four young women did so in 1901. Twelve Abiturientinnen in 1904 and sixteen the following year, however, demonstrated that the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium, which remained loyal to the classical curriculum, had survived its troubles and gained a firm footing.23 The third early classical course for girls was established in Leipzig, the home of the German Women's Association. It had a firm financial basis from the beginning in the large donations that Luise Lenz-Heymann had given to this organization. As of 1895, the German Women's Association had capital of 165,000 Marks to cover some operating expenses of the course and to provide scholarships to needy girls. In accord with proposals first made by Auguste Schmidt in 1885, the Leipzig course adopted the same structure as Lange's, admitting only pupils who had completed the higher girls' school. In contrast to the other schools, though, it allowed part-time study by young women, including teachers, who were not interested in pursuing the Abitur.24 Another unique feature of the Leipzig Gymnasium course was that it had as its director the first German woman with a doctorate from a domestic university, Kathe Windscheid. For several years, Windscheid remained the only woman teacher in the Leipzig course.25 The Saxon minister of education granted permission for women to take the Abitur only as the first group completed the Leipzig course in 1898. Five graduated in that year, and by Easter 1905 O. H. May (Hildesheim, 1960), pp. 162-64; Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium, pp. 16-20. 23 Reichenberger, Des Karlsruher Madchengymnasium, pp. 43-45; Straus, Wir lebten in Deutschland, pp. 83-84. Of these Abiturientinnen, Goitein (Straus) and Kappes became physicians, Meub the first fully certified female pharmacist in Germany. Mainzer did poorly on her examination and passed only on condition that she not attempt to study at a university in Baden. As in Prussia, the first Abiturientin in Baden, Emmy Luroth, did not come from the courses. The daughter of a mathematics professor at Freiburg, she had prepared privately and passed the examination early in 1899: Die Frau 6 (1898-1899): 505. 24 B. Hubert, "Gymnasialkurse fur Frauen in Leipzig," ZfivB 23 (1895): 458-64; Die Frau 3 (1895-1896): 67; Luise Otto-Peters, Das erste Vierteljahrhundert des Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenvereins (Leipzig, 1890), p. 70; Bernhard Rost, Entwicklung und Stand des hoheren Madchenschulwesens im Konigreich Sachsen (Leipzig, 1907), p. 420. 25 Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 524-25. For the situation in which Windscheid studied and earned a degree, see pp. 224, 226. 211

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thirty-seven Abiturientinnen had come from Windscheid's course. As in Berlin, the Leipzig program dropped Greek and began preparing girls for the Realgymnasium Abitur as soon as this diploma qualified its holder for medical studies.26 Not all efforts to found Abitur courses for girls succeeded. In Munich, a private group created in 1894 resolved to establish an eight-year girls' Gymnasium but failed to obtain either the necessary funding or the approval of the Ministry of Education. Upperclass women from Bremen also attempted to begin a four-year course and went so far as to recruit Ricarda Huch and Marianne Plehn, who earned a doctorate in zoology at Zurich in 1895, to give some preliminary courses in 1896-1897. The full Gymnasium course was advertised as opening in fall 1897, but the project fizzled because it attracted too few interested girls.27 Greater success crowned the efforts of Baroness Gertrud von Uxkull to create a six-year course in Stuttgart. It began with just three pupils in 1899, but by 1906 the full course enrolled sixty-eight girls. This school, which received the name Queen Charlotte Gymnasium in 1909, obtained support from both the city of Stuttgart and the state government of Wurttemberg. It also received an unsolicited private gift of 70,000 Marks for the construction of its own school building.28 Having failed to establish an eight-year course, the private association in Munich settled in 1900 for the shortest Abitur course of all, a three-year program designed to follow graduation from a higher girls' school. The first director was Adolf Sickenberger, a retired director of a boys' Realgymnasium. At the insistence of the Bavarian Ministry of Education, the course was extended to four years in 1903. In various forms, this private course lasted until 1917, when the construction of a municipal Gymnasium for girls made it unnecessary.29 The city of Hamburg witnessed a conflict between two groups 26

Rost, Entwicklung, pp. 396, 425; Hermann Jantzen, Die Gymnasialbildung der Madchen: Ein Uberblick ilber ihre Entwicklung in Deutschland (Konigsberg, 1906), pp. 14-15. 27 C. von Braunmiihl, Das achtjahrigen Madchengymnasium (Munich, 1897), esp. p. 3; Jantzen, Gymnasialbildung der Madchen, pp. 7-8; Huch, Werke, 11: 231-37; A. Kippenberg, "Das Madchengymnasium in Bremen," ZfwB 24 (1896): 595-96. 28 Gertrud von Uxkull, "Das Madchengymnasium in Stuttgart," ZfwB 27 (1899): 472-76; Julius Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Wurttemberg (Berlin, 1916), pp. 82-84. 29 M. Celsa Brod, Festschrift zur Funfzigjahrfeier des Bayerischen Landesvereins fur das hohere Madchenschulwesen (n.p., 1926), pp. 6, 106-107. 212

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interested in the higher education of women. In 1901, the local branch of the Association for Women's Education and University Studies opened a five-year course. This remained a private endeavor for three years, then began receiving a government subsidy of 5,000 Marks per year. The first class of ten young women, including the future psychoanalyst Karen Danielsen Horney, graduated in 1906. The competing school, also established in 1901, did not fare so well. Organized by the Hamburg Women's Welfare Association with the support of radical feminists such as Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann, this private Reformgymnasium took the revolutionary step of trying to introduce secondary coeducation. It survived only four years, however, and never produced any Abiturientinnen.30 Of greatest importance for future developments was the effort to establish the second Prussian Gymnasium course for girls. This involved not a private group or a feminist organization but the city government of Breslau. One reason for this official interest was that Clara Bender, daughter of the mayor, had had to leave home at age sixteen in 1896 to pursue her Abitur at Lange's course in Berlin. The city had approved funding, prepared facilities in one of the municipal schools, and received twenty-six applications for the first class when Education Minister Bosse refused to permit establishment of the six-year Reformgymnasium course that was planned. Protests from the city government and interpellations in the House of Deputies led Bosse to bring the issue before the Prussian Ministry of State, which backed him up in rejecting the longer course. He treated the issue as one that would create a precedent and appears to have feared that a proliferation of Gymnasium courses beginning at age twelve or thirteen would cripple the higher girls' schools and lead women to become "competitors" rather than "helpmates" of men. Although he saw the need for future female physicians to attend the universities, Bosse characterized women teachers with the same training as men as "a corps of Amazons."31 30 Jantzen, Gymnasialbildung der Madchen, p. 11; Frauenbildung 3 (1902): 555; Die Frau 13 (1905-1906): 501; Ludwig Bornemann, "Die elementare Grundlage des Hamburger Reformschulplans," Die Lehrerin 18 (1901-1902): 274-84; Heymann, Erlebtes—Erschautes, pp. 57-58. 31 Jantzen, Gymnasialbildung der Madchen, p. 8; application to take the Abitur by Maria Clara Bender, 27.XII.97, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, Vol. I; Magistrat of Breslau to Bosse, 20.1.98, and Bosse's reply of 7.IV.98, in Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. VII; protocol for 25.IV.98 in Staatsminis-

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The city of Breslau had to settle for a four-year course, and other cities also failed to gain approval for six-year courses. In Konigsberg, a four-year program supported by the Women's Welfare Association opened later in 1898, but the Association for Women's Education and University Studies could create a longer program only by establishing it as a "family school" in which one group of five girls worked their way through a six-year curriculum. A similar circle began in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg in 1900, with Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler as director.32 In Hannover and Frankfurt, groups interested in a six-year school settled for five-year programs designed to follow graduation from a nine-year higher girls' school. In the former city, Hedwig Kettler and the remnant of the Association for Women's Educational Reform established a course in 1899, which by 1902 was receiving subsidies from the city and in 1907 was taken over entirely. In Frankfurt, the local branch of the Association for Women's Education and University Studies, led by the physician Elisabeth Winterhalter, founded a similar five-year program in 1901. This course also gained gradually increasing subventions from the city until it was taken over in 1908.33 The schools in Konigsberg, Hannover, and Frankfurt all followed Lange's lead and dropped Greek as soon as Realgymnasium graduates could study medicine. The strongest opposition to Bosse's stance regarding longer Abitur courses came from Cologne, where a well organized and financed association, originally founded in 1898 and staunchly devoted to the traditional classical education, fought first for a full nine-year Gymnasium, then for a six-year course. The moving spirit behind this association was Mathilde von Mevissen, who, after the death of her father, industrialist and politician Gustav von Mevissen, in 1899 provided 105,000 Marks worth of securities from her inheritance as capital for such a course. She won backing not only from leading circles in Cologne but also from many Gymterium, Rep. 90a, Abt. B, III2b, No. 6, Vol. 134; Bosse's speech to the House of Deputies, 30.IV.98, cited in Agnes von Zahn-Hamack, Die Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1928), pp. 179-80. See also Karl Schneider, Ein halbes Jahrhundert im Dienste von Kirche una Schule: Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1900), pp. 455-56. 32 Jantzen, Gymnasialbildung der Madchen, p. 10; Elsbeth Krukenberg, Die Frauenbewegung (Tubingen, 1905), p. 86; Die Lehrerin 19 (1902-1903): 1018; WegscheiderZiegler, Weite Welt, p. 37. 33 Willich, "Hedwig Kettler," pp. 164-68; L. Wulker, Festschrift der Sophienschule in Hannover (Hannover, 1925), pp. 4-5; "Elisabeth Winterhalter," in Kern, ed., Fiihrende Frauen, p. 34; Maria Rudolph, Die Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Otto Schlander (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979), pp. 117-22. 214

PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED

nasium directors and university professors—including Theodor Mommsen, Ulrich von Wilamowitz, and Otto Pfleiderer—inter­ ested in defending the traditional curriculum. Both Bosse and his successor, Konrad von Studt, refused to approve the proposed course, however, even when the Cologne group argued in 1901 that "running through a nine-year course in a four-year 'cram' is harmful to the health of girls with average talent." 34 Although Lange had not intended that her four-year program be the defini­ tive model for girls preparing for the Abitur, the Prussian govern­ ment had concluded from its success that longer courses were not necessary. The Abitur courses for girls founded in the years after 1893 were, it appears, run at large deficits in borrowed rooms with part-time male teachers. Only gradually did other women with university training follow in Kathe Windscheid's footsteps. Hildegard Ziegler taught in Lange's course after completing her doctorate in history but left when she married in 1899 because Lange did not want to offend some of her influential supporters by allowing a married woman to continue working. Marie Gernet, who came from Karls­ ruhe, began teaching mathematics in that city's Girls' Gymnasium in 1897. Gabriele von Wartensleben, the first woman with a nonmedical degree from the University of Vienna, was supposed to become the director of the Frankfurt Abitur course but had to step aside because of illness. Germany's second Abiturientin, Margarete Heine, became a teacher of classics when the Cologne Girls' Gymnasium finally opened in 1903.35 These various courses produced enough graduates to demon­ strate that, with adequate training, motivated young women could have a high rate of success on the Abitur. By Easter 1905, at least 214 had passed either the Gymnasium or the Realgymnasium ex34

1903-1928: Festschrift zur Feier des 25jahrigen Bestehens der gymnasialen Studienanstalt in KoIn (Cologne, 1928), pp. 9-14; Krukenberg, Frauenbewegung, p. 78; on Mevissen's inheritance, Amy Hackett, "The Politics of Feminism in Wilhelmine Ger­ many" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), p. 399; Ludwig Voss, Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschule: AUgemeine Schulentwicklung in Deutschland und Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschulen Kolns (Opladen, 1952), pp. 320-23, quotation on p. 322. See also the defense of this proposed school by Oskar Jaeger, a very influential Gymnasium director from Cologne, dated 8.ΙΠ.00, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, Vol. I. 35 Wegscheider-Ziegler, Weite Welt, pp. 34-35; Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium, p. 22; Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung in Osterreich, p. 194; "Elis­ abeth Winterhalter," in Kern, ed., Fiihrende Frauen, p. 34; 1903-1928, p. 11. 215

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animation.36 Yet the number of graduates was not so high as to offer incontestable proof of the need to reform the girls' schools so as to serve better the needs of possible Abiturientinnen. Several opponents of changes in the traditional education of German girls made much of the fact that Lange's course in the metropolis of Berlin had graduated only seventy-four young women as of 1905.37 Feminists countered such arguments by stressing the limited availability of such courses and the uncertain job prospects for Abiturientinnen until after the turn of the century. The clearest indication of a potentially much greater demand came in 1902, when parents of 210 out of 336 girls attending the municipal higher girls' school in the Berlin suburb of Schoneberg said that they would enroll their daughters in a six-year Abitur course if one became available.38 Two characteristics of the early Abiturientinnen are particularly noteworthy. One is the extremely high percentage of them who pursued medical careers. Fifty-three of the 111 graduates of Lange's course studied medicine. At least twenty-six of the first sixty-one Abiturientinnen from the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium became certified physicians. Even at the Hannover course, with its later start, seven of the first twelve graduates chose to study medicine.39 This strong bias toward the sciences rather than the humanities helps to explain why a large majority of Abitur courses for girls—but not the programs in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Cologne—abandoned Greek so quickly. The second noteworthy characteristic of the first female graduates is their religious background. In Prussia, of the fifty-six young women who had attempted an Abitur examination as of January 1901, thirty-five were Protestant, seventeen were Jewish, and only four were Catholic. At the course in Frankfurt, the pupils in 1906 included twenty-seven Protestants, twenty-three Jews, five Catholics, and one "dissident." These limited statistics certainly suggest that the early Abiturientinnen mirrored, but in an exaggerated form, the relative underrepresentation of Catholics and overrep36 Jantzen, Gymnasialbildung der Madchen, pp. 14-15. It is not clear if Jantzen's statistics included women who prepared privately for the Abitur examination. 37 Two examples are Emil Willms, Denkschnft iiber die Neugestaltung der hoheren Madchenschule (Hannover, 1906), p. 13; and Ludwig Langemann, Bemerkungen zur Madchenschulreform und zur Berliner Konferenz (Kiel, 1906), p. 23. 38 Die Frau 10 (1902-1903): 312. 39 Baumer, Gymnasialkurse fur Frauen zu Berlin, appendix; Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium, pp. 43-45; Die Madchenschule 18 (1905): 10.

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resentation of Jews that existed among the male university students of this era.40 That the three German cities with the largest Jewish populations—Berlin, Frankfurt, and Breslau—were sites of Abitur courses for girls helps to explain the high percentage of Jewish Abiturientinnen, but other factors were also involved. The generally liberal political outlook of Jewish Germans in the Second Reich may well have encouraged approval of greater opportunities for daughters, despite patriarchal family traditions. The close link in this period between pursuit of the Abitur and the study of medicine, the profession most accessible to Jewish Germans, also contributed to the relatively large numbers of young Jewish Abiturientinnen. In contrast, Catholic areas were slower to open Gymnasium courses for girls, and the Catholic girls' schools probably did less to encourage career ambitions than did public or other private schools. As early as March 1898, however, the Catholic Kolnische Volkszeitung expressed concern that Germany's Catholic women were falling behind in the pursuit of higher education.41

ADVANCED COURSES FOR TEACHERS

A second form of propaganda of the deed in this period involved advanced courses for teachers of the type begun at the Victoria Lyceum in 1888. In May and June 1891, ten women who had been participating in the courses in history and German gave trial classes in the upper grades of the Royal Elisabeth School in Berlin. Its director, Stephan Waetzoldt, reported that they demonstrated "greater understanding, broader vision, and more mature and unbiased judgments than are usually typical among women teachers," though they also tended to lecture too much. In September, eight of the ten passed a special examination supervised by Karl Schneider of the Ministry of Education and earned a certificate 40

See Die Madchenschule 19 (1906): 82; and statistics gathered by the minister of education, ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, Vol. II. See also the comments by the ministry official Reinhold Kopke about "the third Jewess" and "the fourth Jewess" coming from Lange's course on the applications of Helene Schlesinger and Gertrud Klausner, 20. and 26. VI.97, in Vol. I. 41 On the religious composition of the student body at this time, see Konrad Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1982), pp. 96100. Citation from the Kolnische Volkszeitung of 15.III.98 in Evans, Feminist Movement, p. 18. 217

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stating that they were especially qualified to teach in the upper grades.42 The Victoria Lyceum began another cycle of courses in German and history and, with official approval and an increased subsidy, started two-year programs in English and French in 1892. The continuing concentration on the humanities, and resultant neglect of mathematics and science, mirrored the priorities given these subjects in the girls' schools and the teachers' seminars. It also reflected Lange's view, as stated in the "Yellow Brochure," that women were needed to teach ethical subjects in the upper grades, while grammar and science could be left to men.43 A second set of advanced courses, initiated by the historian Theobald Ziegler, opened in Strassburg in 1893, but it collapsed because of insufficient enthusiasm on the part of the women whom it was to serve.44 Greater success attended the efforts of Anna Vorwerk, the director of a private school and seminar in Wolfenbuttel who had attempted to establish a middle ground between Helene Lange and the men teachers in 1888. Although sharing Lange's desire to have women play a larger role in the upper grades, Vorwerk emphasized more strongly the value to the women themselves of the chance for advanced education after several years in the classroom. Vorwerk visited the courses in the Victoria Lyceum in June 1889; they left her convinced that teachers must have the opportunity for full-time study, without the continuing teaching duties that many of the women in Berlin had. In October 1890, Vorwerk demonstrated her ability to maintain good relations with the male teachers when she gave a major—and wellreceived—address on the need for two-year advanced courses for women teachers to the annual convention of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education. This organization, which had first discussed such a program in 1875, now created a commission, including Vorwerk and Auguste Sprengel, to work out the details of an advanced course. Discussions with Alice von Cotta and other representatives of the Victoria Lyceum did not produce agreement on the best length for the courses or age for the participants. With assurances from Gossler and Schneider, however, plans went forward. The University of Jena was considered as the possible site for such courses until the university curator expressed his unalter42 Stephan Waetzoldt to Zedlitz, 10.VII.91, and other materials, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. I; Centralblatt. . . 1892, p. 842. 43 Lange, Kampfzeiten, 1: 32. 44 Die Lehrerin 9 (1892-1893): 695; ZfwB 24 (1896): 155.

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able opposition. At this point, the Association of Christian Women Teachers in Gottingen, under the leadership of Sophie Mejer, became involved, and enough professors at the university there agreed to offer courses for a year that the program could begin in April 1893 with twelve full-time participants and forty-one parttime auditors. Even with this enrollment, Vorwerk had to subsidize the program from her private fortune. The Gottingen program continued the concentration on the humanities, adding courses on church history, philosophy, and geography to those taught in Berlin. Schneider inspected the courses in December 1893, and a few weeks later Minister of Education Bosse promised that he would appoint an examining board similar to that at the Victoria Lyceum.45 This promise was not fulfilled, however, because Bosse instead created a general Oberlehrerinnenprufung as part of the new regulations of May 1894. As noted in Chapter Five, the examination required training in two fields that was equivalent to two or three years of university courses. At first, the test was given only in Berlin. Previous participants in the courses at the Victoria Lyceum, who had studied only one field, did not qualify as Oberlehrerinnen under the new rules, so these courses were altered to meet the new demands. Women in the Gottingen program suffered the extra strain of traveling long distances and facing unfamiliar examiners.46 The establishment of the Oberlehrerinnenprufung and the government's recommendation that women be appointed as Gehilfinnen in schools headed by men47 stimulated the foundation of several more programs of advanced courses. Breslau led the way in 1894, followed by Konigsberg the next year and Bonn in 1899. In all cases, local women teachers were the moving force behind these 45 Martha Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk: Ein Lebensbild (Wolfenbuttel, 1910), pp. 246-73 passim; Kathe Windscheid, "Die wissenschaftliche Pruning der Lehrerinnen," in Handbuch des hoheren Mddchenschulwesens, ed. Jakob Wychgram (Leipzig, 1897), p. 395. 46 Windscheid, "Die wissenschaftliche Pruning," pp. 392-95; Centralblatt . . . 1894, pp. 446-518, esp. p. 486; Gertrud Baumer, "Geschichte und Stand der Frauenbildung in Deutschland," in Handbuch der Frauenbewegung, ed. Helene Lange and Gertrud Baumer, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1901-1906), 1: 119-22; Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk, pp. 275-77. 47 Schools were not required to appoint a woman to this position of Gehilfin to the director, and it appears that many did not do so. Many male teachers responded very negatively to the implication that they could not provide moral guidance to their pupils.

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courses. With the support of all Catholic bishops in Germany, similar courses for Catholic women teachers opened in Miinster in 1899. Only in Bonn did science courses exist from the beginning of the program.48 Few states imitated the Prussian Ministry of Education in its support for upper-level women teachers. An Oberlehrerinnenprufung was established in 1898 in the Reich territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which was strongly influenced by Prussian educational policies. Only Hamburg, which created a similar test in 1898 and advanced courses two years later, and Mecklenburg, where rules for such an exmaination were issued in 1905, followed suit.49 In this matter, it certainly appears that feminists had greater success with the Prussian government than with officials in most smaller states. For women teachers, these advanced courses could be both an exhilarating and a terrifying experience. Marie Martin, who entered the Gottingen courses at age thirty-nine in 1895 and would later be an important advisor of Empress Augusta Victoria, viewed the new examination as "a possible salvation from an all-consuming yearning" for a clear goal toward which to direct her own education. After a few weeks in the courses, though, she and most of her colleagues experienced "a deep despondency, despairing of our own capabilities and of ever reaching the goal."50 These feelings gradually faded as the women became more accustomed to the style and level of work involved. Although Lange, Vorwerk, and Sprengel had called in the late 1880s for separate academies rather than admission of women teachers to the existing universities—a position the Women Teachers' Association reiterated as late as 1896—many women who worked with professors in the advanced courses came to want to audit regular university lectures and seminars. In this matter, Robert Bosse again proved accommodating. In the fall of 1894, Jenny Hildesheimer, who had been in the initial group of women at the 48 Elisabeth Scholz, "Bericht iiber die Oberlehrerinnenkurse in Breslau," Die Lehrerin 12 (1895-1896): 78-80; Elise Cholevius, "Die Ordnung der wissenschaftlichen Priifung der Lehrerinnen und die Griindung von wissenschaftlichen Fortbildungskursen fiir Lehrerinnen in Konigsberg," ZfwB 24 (1896): 149-55; Lina Hilger, "Etwas vom Oberlehrerinnenstudium in Bonn," Die Mddchenschule 15 (1902): 105-15; Die Lehrerin 15 (1898-1899): 407. 49 Elise Graumann et al., eds., Die Fortbildung der Lehrerin (Leipzig and Berlin, 1906), p. 13; Die Frau 7 (1899-1900): 442. 50 Maria Martin, "Meine Studienzeit in Gottingen," ZfwB 26 (1898): 422-29, quotations on pp. 422, 425.

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Victoria Lyceum's courses, was one of the first two German women granted permission to audit courses at the University of Berlin.51 In response to a request from the Women's Welfare Association of Breslau, Bosse indicated in May 1895 that he would "be inclined" to let women preparing for the Oberlehrerinnenprufung audit at any Prussian university where the authorities and professors would welcome them. Women teachers began auditing in Breslau in 1895, Gottingen in 1896, and Konigsberg in 1897. Only at the Catholic University of Munster were women not permitted to attend lectures with male students.52 Participants in the advanced courses faced a number of difficulties. Not all local school boards or directors of private schools would grant leaves of absence, so that some women teachers had to sacrifice jobs in order to pursue higher education. Some authorities that did grant leaves subtracted the cost of a replacement from the salary paid the absent teacher. Yet some localities supported women who entered the advanced courses: for example, the cities of Aachen and Frankfurt sent several women to Bonn when the program opened there.53 Various women's organizations, as well as the Prussian government, provided stipends to aid women with the costs of advanced study. At the Victoria Lyceum, some money even came from members of its board of directors.54 After passing the Oberlehrerinnenpriifung, women could not always find positions at a level and salary commensurate with their raised expectations. Statistics gathered by the Ministry of Education in 1905-1906 revealed that the 207 public higher girls' schools 51

Windscheid, "Die wissenschaftliche Priifung," p. 399; list of six female auditors at the University of Berlin, dated 6.XII.94, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. IV. The only other German woman in this group, Elise Hermann from Gorlitz, was also a teacher, but I do not know if she had participated in the courses at the Victoria Lyceum. 52 Centralblatt. . . 1895, pp. 450-51; statement from the university senate at Breslau, 26.VI.95, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. Ill; Martin, "Meine Studienzeit," p. 428; Die Lehrerin 13 (1896-1897): 890; Graumann et al., eds., Fortbildung der Lehrerin, p. 11. 53 Graumann et al., eds., Fortbildung der Lehrerin, p. 9; Maria Kley, Die Studienund Anstellungsverhaltnisse der Oberlehrerinnen (Bonn, 1907), pp. 2, 8; Gertrud Baumer, "Das Madchenschulwesen," in Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich, ed. Wilhelm Lexis, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1904), 3: 295; Hilger, "Oberlehrerinnenstudium in Bonn," p. 108. 54 Graumann et al., eds., Fortbildung der Lehrerin, pp. 9-10; Die Lehrerin 12 (18951896): 793, and 13 (1896-1897): 82; letters from the curatorium of the Victoria Lyceum to Bosse, 8.IV. and 14.IV.97, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 14, Gen. ee, No. 17, Vol. II. 221

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in Prussia had a total of 223 Oberlehrerinnen but that 120 of these had been promoted to this position without having taken the examination. Only 60 schools had two or more budgeted positions for upper-level women teachers; 71 had no such slots. In the upper grades and the seminars, men teachers outnumbered women 1,160 to 221. As many women pointed out, Oberlehrer in the girls' schools earned, on average, more than twice as much as Oberlehrerinnen, and some male beginners earned more than women with thirty years of experience.55 By the end of 1906, 408 women had passed the Prussian examination, so some must have found work in private schools, returned to jobs in public schools that were not designated as Oberlehrerin positions, or moved to other states. The Victoria Lyceum had trained 142 of these women teachers, followed by Munster (95), Gottingen (63), Bonn (52), Konigsberg (31), and Breslau (25). On the examination, which since 1900 had included options in the sciences, only 6 women had chosen physics and chemistry (a single field), 19 biology and zoology, and 47 mathematics. In contrast, 239 women took a field in German, 154 in history, 131 in English, and 124 in French.56 Women teachers were, it is clear, turning overwhelmingly to the humanistic disciplines for which the girls' schools and teachers' seminars had best prepared them. These statistics stand in sharp contrast to those for the first Abiturientinnen, who were concentrated so heavily in medicine. Contemporaries offered differing evaluations of the advanced courses for women teachers. As noted above, Marie Martin viewed them as a tremendous opportunity. Karl Schneider, who played a major role in certifying graduates of the courses, came to see the examination as an excessive strain on the health of a high percentage of the women who took it. Of a conservative religious sentiment himself, Schneider also found quite disturbing the critical approach to the Bible that many women appeared to have absorbed from their professors.57 Lange's disciple and companion, Gertrud Baumer, commented in a government-sponsored publication in 1904 that the advanced courses had met the expectations placed on them. Writing her 55 Statistical report, undated but from 1906, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. IV; petitions from the Association of Catholic Women Teachers, 15.1.06, and from the Association of Academically Trained Women Teachers, 16.1.06, in No. 5B, Vol. I; Kley, Studien- und Anstellungsverhaltnisse, p. 10. 56 Kley, Studien- und Anstellungsverhaltnisse, pp. 1, 5, 10. 57 Schneider, Lebensennnerungen, pp. 457-58.

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memoirs years later, however, Baumer expressed a different opinion: the Victoria Lyceum, where she had entered the advanced courses in 1898, was "in program, goal, level, and intellectual atmosphere an already antiquated institution."58 By that time, ambitious and talented women such as Baumer could be satisfied with nothing less than full admission to the universities. PENETRATION OF THE UNIVERSITIES

In the decade between the opening of advanced courses at the Victoria Lyceum and Baumer's entrance there in 1898, the situation for women at German universities had changed significantly. Although full matriculation on an equal basis with men was not yet possible anywhere in Germany, women were auditing courses in all faculties at the University of Berlin and at many other universities. A major factor in bringing about this change for the better, as Margaret Rossiter has demonstrated so well, was a sizable group of American women who came to Germany armed with advanced degrees and persuaded professors and officials in several states to allow them at least temporary status as students. Yet Rossiter erred in suggesting that German women "were not directly involved in the struggles of the 1890s," for not only had the feminist organizations mounted large-scale petition campaigns between 1888 and 1892, but many German women, including the first Abiturientinnen, also participated in the propaganda of the deed at the universities in the 1890s.59 Although the evidence is not entirely clear, the University of Leipzig in Saxony appears, as in the 1870s, to have led the way in admitting women students as auditors.60 Abby Leach, a professor at Vassar College, studied classics at Leipzig for at least part of the academic year of 1886-1887, and she may have been joined for a time by Mary Whiton Calkins. German-born but American-educated Ida Augusta Keller studied biology from 1887 to 1889. Jane Belle Sherzer, later the president of Oxford College in Ohio, indi58 Gertrud Baumer, "Das Madchenschulwesen," p. 295; idem, Lebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende (Tubingen, 1933), pp. 147-48. 59 Margaret Rossiter, "Doctorates for American Women, 1868-1907," History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982): 159-83, and Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore and London, 1982). The quotation appears in both works, on pp. 172 and 43, respectively. 60 These auditors before 1896 are not mentioned in Renate Drucker, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Leipzig," in Von Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. Hellmut Kretzschmar (Berlin, 1956), pp. 278-90.

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cated that she attended the University of Leipzig from 1889 to 1891, while Adele Luxenburg claimed to have taken art history and geography there between 1889 and 1893. Also enrolled in geography with Professor Friedrich Ratzel was Ellen Churchill Semple, a Vassar graduate who audited economics and statistics courses as well during her stay in 1891-1892.61 Other American women students in this period included Isabelle Bronk, Ellen Clune, Georgiana Morrill, and Alice Walton, who already held a doctorate in classics from Cornell and spent 1892-1893 at Leipzig as the holder of the European Fellowship offered by the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA).62 At least one German woman was among these pioneers: Kathe Windscheid. The daughter of a law professor at Leipzig, Windscheid had passed the teachers' examination in 1886 at the age of twenty-seven and had begun teaching modern languages at a girls' school in her home town. Beginning in 1890, she was allowed to audit courses, including advanced seminars, in Germanic and romance languages. A few other German women may have worked at Leipzig before 1896, but their names appear to be lost.63 AU of these women at Leipzig must have pursued their work without official approval, because the Saxon Ministry of Education informed the authorities in Berlin in 1892 that female auditors were not permitted at Leipzig. The same type of informal admission appears to have been practiced at the University of Jena in Saxony-Weimar, where Mary Alice Willcox, later a zoology professor at Wellesley, heard some lectures in 1889 and Jane Belle Sherzer visited in 1891.64 Such surreptitious study was also the experi61

"Abby Leach" and "Mary Whiton Calkins" in Notable American Women, 2: 380, 1: 278; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-1915 (New York, 1914), pp. 155, 448; letters by J.B.S. (Jane Belle Sherzer), 23.11.94, in The Nation 58 (1894): 154, and by Adele Luxenberg, 28.IX.94, ibid. 59 (1894): 247-48; "Ellen Churchill Semple," in Notable American Women, 3: 260-62. The entry for Sherzer in Woman's Who's Who, p. 742, does not mention study at Leipzig. 62 "Isabelle Bronk," "Ellen Clune (Buttenweiser)," and "Georgiana Morrill," in Woman's Who's Who, pp. 129, 152, 567; Margaret Maltby, History of the Fellowships Awarded by the American Association of University Women, 1888-1929 (Washington, D. C , 1929), p. 14. One source indicates that almost twenty American and English women were auditing at Leipzig in 1892: H. Kersten, Die Frau una das Unwersitatsstudium (Stuttgart, 1892), p. 15. 63 Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 524-25; letter by Adele Luxenberg cited in note 61. August Bebel said in the Reichstag on 11.HI.91 that two daughters of a famous professor of medicine were studying that field at Leipzig: Reichstag, Verhandlungen, 8th leg., 1st sess., p. 2003. 64 Report from the Saxon Ministry of Education, transmitted by the Prussian For-

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ence of the physicist Sarah Frances Whiting, who spent time at the University of Berlin in 1888-1889, and of Julia Barlow Piatt, who studied zoology at Freiburg in 1890-1891. Christine Ladd-Franklin, who accompanied her husband to Gottingen and Berlin in 18911892, persuaded individual professors at both universities, including Hermann von Helmholtz, to let her do research on vision and color theory in their laboratories.65 The American woman who may have had the most impact in Germany was a mathematician named Ruth Gentry. After receiving her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1890, Gentry had spent a year doing graduate work at Bryn Mawr College before winning the ACA European Fellowship for 1891-1892. She appears to have applied first to the University of Heidelberg, where, according to the existing regulations, she was turned down on 20 October 1891. Just nine days later, however, influenced by her application and that of Marie Gernet from Karlsruhe, five members of the mathematics-sciences faculty proposed that women should be allowed to study at Heidelberg with any professors who would have them. The university senate rejected this idea but was overridden by Baden's Ministry of Education, which, having recently agreed to let women take the Abitur, on 23 November 1891 gave them permission to audit courses in the mathematics-sciences faculty.66 Ruth Gentry herself turned to the University of Berlin. In a letter to Minister of Education Count Robert von Zedlitz-Trutzschler, dated 26 January 1892, she indicated that she had already received provisional approval from two professors and the university rector but had been barred by the university senate. Zedlitz did not allow her to enroll for a degree but did permit her to attend lectures. eign Ministry, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. II; on Willcox, see the letter from the American ambassador Phelps, 12.XII.89, ibid., Vol. I; "Jane Belle Sherzer," Woman's Who's Who, p. 742. Jena would prove to be one of the universities most resistant to women students: see Horst Drechsler, "Die Universitat Jena beim Ubergang zum Imperialismus," in Geschichte der Universitat Jena 1548/58-1958, 2 vols. (Jena, 1958), 1: 465-66. 65 "Sarah Frances Whiting" and "Christine Ladd-Franklin," Notable American Women, 3: 594 and 2: 254-56. On J. B. Piatt, see Laetitia Boehm, "Von den Anfangen des akademischen Frauenstudiums in Deutschland, Zugleich ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen," Historisches Jahrbuch 77 (1958): 32On. 66 Richard Gentry, The Gentry Family in America, 1676-1909 (New York, 1909), p. 132; Hans Krabusch, "Die Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Heidelberg," Ruperto-Carola 19 (1956): 137-38. 225

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More important, on 28 February 1892 he requested that all Prussian university faculties submit opinions on the question of whether the time had come to change the rules barring women students. This was the first time that the Prussian government raised this issue with the professoriate, and it is not surprising that most answers were negative. Yet four medical faculties—at Bonn, Breslau, Konigsberg, and Marburg—expressed a willingness to admit women who had passed the Abitur.67 Even before these responses arrived, Karl Schneider had told the House of Deputies that he saw the need for women to take the Abitur and study medicine. These developments following Ruth Gentry's applications had important consequences in both Baden and Prussia. The American Ida Hyde, a zoologist from Bryn Mawr College, had the unusual experience in 1893 of being invited by Professor Alexander Goette of the University of Strassburg in Alsace-Lorraine to work in his laboratory on research that coincided with his own. Supported by the ACA fellowship for 1893-1894, Hyde accepted. Her desire to earn a doctorate was not approved by the faculty at Strassburg, however, and she applied in 1894 to Heidelberg, where Professor Otto Butschli, one of the original supporters of the proposal to admit women in 1891, agreed to direct her doctorate. After two years of full-time study as an auditor, Hyde obtained a degree in 1896.68 Despite Hyde's own claims, she was not the first woman to obtain a doctorate at Heidelberg. After four years of auditing at Leipzig, Kathe Windscheid, supported by Professor Hermann Osthoff, who had been impressed by women students during a visit to the United States for the Columbian Exposition in 1893, passed an oral examination on her thesis and received a doctorate from Heidelberg in 1894. In the mathematics-sciences faculty, Hyde was preceded by Marie Gernet, who obtained her degree in 1895 and later taught mathematics at the Girls' Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. 69 At the 67 Rueh Gentry to Zedlitz, 26.1.92, and Zedlitz to all university curators, 28.11.92, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. I; responses from university faculties in Vol. II. 68 Ida Hyde, "Before Women Were Human Beings: Adventures of an American Fellow in German Universities of the '9Os," Journal of the American Association of University Women 31 (1938): 226-36. Hyde makes several errors, such as speaking of the "Reichstag Ministerium of Education" and claiming that she matriculated at Heidelberg. See also Marie Schwarz, "Die Anfange des Frauenstudiums in Deutschland," Die Frau 43 (1936): 272-73. » Die Frau 1 (1894-1895): 524-25; The Nation 57 (1893): 483-84; Krabusch, "Vor-

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other university in Baden, Freiburg, the first doctorates were earned in 1895 by the American zoologist Elizabeth Bickford and a Dutch woman named Constance Gelderblom.70 In Prussia, the decisive breakthrough occurred at Gottingen, where the mathematician Felix Klein strongly supported admission of women students. Friedrich Althoff, the powerful official in charge of university affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Education, commissioned Klein in 1893 to take advantage of a visit to the United States for the Columbian Exposition to seek out women who might be interested in pursuing a doctorate at Gottingen. Although Althoff's motivation for this action is not certain, it appears that he wanted to make a limited experiment with foreign women students before there were any Prussian Abiturientinnen. By October 1893, the Americans Margaret Maltby and Mary Frances Winston and the Englishwoman Grace Emily Chisholm were applying to the ministry for permission—which was granted immediately—to audit at Gottingen. AU three would succeed in earning doctoral degrees, Maltby in physics in 1896, Chisholm and Winston in mathematics in 1895 and 1897, respectively.71 They were followed soon by, among others, the Englishwoman Isabel Maddison, who had passed the Tripos examination in mathematics at Girton College in 1892 and spent two years in graduate work at Bryn Mawr before going to Gottingen. By the winter semester of 1894-1895, fourteen women were auditing courses in the philosophical faculty there, including seven in mathematics.72 As mentioned above, Minister of Education Bosse granted permission to audit at Berlin to several women in 1894. As the number of auditors grew, the percentage of German women remained small—seven of thirty-seven in the winter semester of 1895-1896, geschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 137, 139n. Krabusch does not mention Windscheid's degree. 70 Ernst Theodor Nauck, Das Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1953), p. 62. 71 Arnold Sachse, Friedrich Althoff una sein Werk (Berlin, 1928), p. 226; applications of 21.X.93, and Bosse's approval of 26.X.93, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. II. Chisholm was twenty-five years old and had studied for four years at Girton College; Maltby, thirty-three, had attended Oberlin College and done graduate work at M.I.T. before starting to teach at Wellesley in 1890; and Winston, twenty-four, had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and done further work at Bryn Mawr and the University of Chicago. 72 Woman's Who's Who, p. 533; Antke Luhn, "Geschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Medizinischen Fakultat der Universitat Gottingen" (med. diss., University of Gottingen, 1972), p. 26. 227

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eighteen of fifty-six in the summer of 1896. Those who wanted to study at Berlin faced a particular difficulty when the historian Heinrich von Treitschke was dean of the philosophical faculty in 1894^1895. Helene Stocker, who later became one of the leading radical feminists in Germany, was refused permission to audit by Treitschke, who claimed, "For half a millennium the German universities have been designed for men, and I will not help to destroy them." Treitschke was more blunt when Hildegard Ziegler tried to matriculate on the basis of her Abitur, responding, "What? A student who can't get drunk?"73 At other Prussian universities, the first auditors in the mid-1890s were often teachers preparing for the Oberlehrerinnenprufung. This was true even at the universities of Greifswald and Halle, where there were no advanced courses for women teachers. Hildegard Ziegler pursued the study of history at Halle after being rejected at Berlin.74 Outside of Baden, Saxony, and Prussia, there were few female auditors by the mid-1890s. The University of Tubingen in Wurttemberg had just one, Countess Marie von Linden, whose uncle had been a minister in the state government and helped her gain admission to the study of zoology in 1892.75 In Bavaria, the authorities began granting individual women permission to audit at the University of Munich in 1896. The pioneer woman student was Ethel Gertrud Skeat from England, who had already attended Newnham College, Cambridge, and obtained a first on the Tripos examination in natural sciences. She was soon followed by the American sisters Alice and Edith Hamilton, who had already spent a term in Leipzig. Alice, with a medical degree from the University of Michigan, studied bacteriology and pathology, while Edith, supported by the European fellowship given by Bryn Mawr, pursued the classical studies that would later make her famous.76 73 Die Frau 1 (1893-1894): 754; ibid. 2 (1894-1895): 316; Marie Heller, "Acht Jahre Frauenstudium an der Berliner Universitat," Frauenbildung 1 (1902): 67-68; Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Helene Stocker Papers, Box I, Autobiography, folder 2; Wegscheider-Ziegler, Weite Welt, p. 31. 74 On Greifswald, Die Frau 3 (1895-1896), p. 125; on Halle, comments by Theodor Lindner in Arthur Kirchhoff, ed., Die akademische Frau (Berlin, 1897), p. 188; Wegscheider-Ziegler, Weite Welt, pp. 31-32. 75 Linden's case is thoroughly documented in Elke Rupp, Der Beginn des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Tubingen (Tubingen, 1978), pp. 32-43; and Johanna Kretschmer, "Marie von Linden—die erste Studentin der Universitat Tubingen," Attempto 33/34 (1969): 78-88. 76 Boehm, "Von den Anfangen des akademischen Frauenstudiums in Deutsch-

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During the mid-1890s, two crucial issues regarding women at the German universities remained unresolved: whether the new Abiturientinnen would, like their male counterparts, be able to matriculate as regular students, not dependent on a professor's permission to take a course; and whether they would be allowed to take state examinations for certification as physicians and secondary teachers. The Gymnasium courses for girls, especially Lange's short course in Berlin, had been founded with the expectation that matriculation would soon be possible. Bosse, it appears, planned to satisfy these expectations. In a letter to Chancellor Leo von Caprivi in January 1894, he indicated that if women could be certified as physicians under the existing commercial code there could be no reason to deny them the chance to be trained in their home country. In June, Reich Interior Minister Karl von Boetticher responded that, although the framers of the code certainly did not intend for it to include women, there was nothing in the law that forbade properly qualified women from being certified. In May 1895, at the same time that Bosse began to allow women teachers preparing for the Oberlehrerinnenpriifung to audit university courses and granted permission to Hildegard Ziegler and Margarete Heine to take the Abitur, a ministry official, probably Friedrich Schmidt, drew up a decree allowing women with the Abitur to matriculate in the medical faculties of the Prussian universities. The decree also stipulated that women wanting to study pharmacy or dentistry, which did not require the Abitur, could enroll in the philosophical faculties.77 This decree, however, was never issued. Dr. Ernst von Bergmann, the director of the surgical clinic at the University of Berlin, somehow learned of the impending reform and stormed into Bosse's office, threatening to resign if he was to be forced to accept women in his classes. Bosse backed down, and full matriculation for women at Prussia universities would have to wait another thirteen years. When Bosse ruled in July 1896 that female auditors would no longer have to obtain permission from the Ministry of Education but only from the rector of the university in question, he reserved to each professor the right to refuse all auditors, even land," 312-13, 316-17; Alice Hamilton, "Edith and Alice Hamilton, Students in Germany," Atlantic Monthly 215 (March 1965): 129-32. 77 Bosse to Caprivi, 24.1.94, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. II; Boetticher to Caprivi, 2.VI.94, and draft decree dated only May 1895, ibid., Vol. IV. 229

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Abiturientinnen, a provision designed to mollify diehard opponents such as Bergmann.78 What had motivated Bosse, who held such a conservative atti­ tude with regard to the girls' schools, to favor opening medical study to women? It is clear that many officials in the Ministry of Education had accepted the desirability of having female physi­ cians to treat women, and succeeding years would show that they were increasingly embarrassed by Germany's backwardness on this issue. Important as well was a sense that anyone, male or fe­ male, who passed the Abitur deserved the privilege of matriculat­ ing in the university. For Bosse himself, one should not neglect the personal factor: he had several unmarried daughters in need of careers, one of whom, a member of a Protestant nursing order, would take a lower-level pharmacy examination in 1897.79 When Hildegard Ziegler applied in October 1897 to take the ex­ amination pro facultate docendi, a similar response occurred. The ar­ chives contain a draft approval, since Ziegler did not want to teach in a boys' secondary school. Yet objections within the ministry, especially Schneider's insistence that this examination was an Amtspriifung carrying with it a claim to a teaching position, led to the ultimate refusal of her application.80 The first Prussian Abiturientinnen did not fare any better in the other German states. In 1897, Margarete Heine was refused per­ mission to matriculate by the senate at Heidelberg, despite the support of Baden's minister of education. In the same year, Kathe Kehr, with an Abitur from her native state of Hesse-Darmstadt, was refused admission to the University of Giessen. The first Abi­ turientinnen in Saxony in 1898 also failed to gain the right to ma­ triculate at Leipzig, although they were promised the opportunity to take the secondary teachers' examination on the basis of audited courses.81 78

The most authoritative account of this incident is in Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes una Erstrebtes, 1860-1950 (Wiesbaden, 1952), p. 52; the most detailed is an article by Hellmut von Gerlach in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 30.XI.00, a copy of which is in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. VIII. For the decree on auditing, see Centralblatt . . . 1896, p. 567. 79 The influence of Bosse's family situation on his views is suggested by Gerlach in the article cited in note 78. On Eva Bosse, see Die Frau 4 (1896-1897): 443. 80 Ziegler to Bosse, 6.X.97, various internal memoranda, and the final negative response to Ziegler, 29.ΧΙ.97, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, Vol. I. 81 Nauck, Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 17; Krabusch, 230

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The denial of matriculation, and the resulting uncertainty about certification as physicians, made pursuit of the Abitur appear to be a waste of effort. Some young women abandoned Lange's Gymnasium course in Berlin and headed for Switzerland to pursue medical degrees, as German women had done since Lehmus and Tiburtius in the 1870s.82 Those who did begin medical studies as auditors, including three of the first six graduates of Lange's course, faced many problems in getting professors' permission, although the University of Halle proved fairly receptive to them. At Gottingen, Margarete Breymann was able to take the required two years of science courses but then could not enter the clinical program. As late as 1907, at least ten medical professors at the University of Berlin still barred women from their classes.83 Despite the refusal to grant Abiturientinnen the right to matriculate, the number of universities permitting women auditors continued to grow in the later 1890s. At Erlangen in Bavaria, several female language teachers began attending lectures in 1897, to be followed in a few years by Emmy Noether, who later became a world-famous mathematician. Teachers also led the way as successors of Marie von Linden at Tubingen; of the twenty women who had audited as of April 1904, eight were teachers, five were professors' daughters, three were teachers' daughters, and one was a professor's wife. The University of Strassburg admitted the first women in 1899, Giessen in 1900, and Jena in 1902, although only in the philosophical faculty.84 As noted above, the Catholic University of Munster was one of the last holdouts, refusing to allow even women in the advanced teachers' courses to attend lectures with male students.85 As the number of auditors grew, Berlin far outdistanced Leipzig as the favorite choice of women students. Whereas the latter "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," p. 138; ZfwB 25 (1897): 308; Drucker, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 283-85. 82 See Lange to Bosse, 10.IX.96, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. V. 83 Luhn, "Geschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 32-34, 43; Julius Schwalbe, "Das medizinische Frauenstudium in Deutschland," Deutsche Medizimsche Wochenschrift 33 (1907): 267-68. 84 ZfwB 25 (1897): 285; James Brewer and Martha Smith, eds., Emmy Noether (New York and Basel, 1981), pp. 9-10; Rupp, Beginn des Frauenstudiums, pp. 52-57, 61; ZfwB 27 (1899): 462; Hermann Haupt, Chronik der Universitat Giessen, 1607 bis 1907 (Giessen, 1907), p. 43; Drechsler, "Die Universitat Jena," p. 466. 85 The first auditor at Munster whom I have discovered was Anna Siemsen in 1906: August Siemsen, Anna Siemsen: Leben und Werk (Hamburg, 1951), p. 26. 231

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reached a high of 102 female auditors in the winter semester of 1904-1905, Berlin had already attracted 611 women two years before. Of these women, 422 were German, 175 from the greater Berlin area. Only 35 of these Germans, however, had the Abitur.86 Swiss universities continued to produce more German women with doctorates or medical certification than did the domestic universities, but here as well gradual progress was evident. Hildegard Ziegler obtained the first doctorate from Halle in 1897. The same year, the Rumanian Leonida Colescu earned the first degree from Munich, where she was followed three years later by two Australian women and in 1901 by Margarete Heine. In 1900, the chemist Clara Immerwahr earned the first degree from the University of Breslau. The next year, Marie Gleiss, a medical student, obtained the first degree from Strassburg, and the American psychology student Beatrice Edgell was the pioneer at Wurzburg in Bavaria. In 1904, another American, Dixie Lee Bryant, received the first doctorate from Erlangen; the first degree was granted at Giessen; and Marie Charlotte Pancritius, at age forty-seven, earned a degree at the University of Konigsberg with a thesis in ancient history.87 The most unusual pioneer was at the Prussian University of Marburg, where in 1905 a Japanese woman named Tada Urata earned her doctorate in medicine. She was followed in 1907 by the first German woman to obtain a domestic law degree, AHx Westerkamp. At Jena, Mathilde Apelt, a Gymnasium director's daughter who had been in 1900 the first young woman from Saxony-Weimar to pass the Abitur, obtained a degree in philosophy in 1906.88 What was the university experience like for these women? It can 86

Liselotte Buchheim, "AIs der ersten Medizinerinnen in Leipzig promoviert wurden," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universitat Leipzig, MathematischNaturwissenschaftliche Reihe 6 (1956-1957): 367; Heller, "Acht Jahre Frauenstudium," pp. 67-71. 87 For a general list of doctorates, see Boedeker, ed., 25 Jahre Frauenstudium, 1: lixlxxix, which omits several. Individual references are in Die Frau 4 (1896-1897): 761; ibid. 8 (1900-1901): 122, 760; ibid. 10 (1902-1903): 500; Boehm, "Von den Anfangen des Frauenstudiums," p. 322; Hans Liermann, Die Friedrich Alexander Universitat Erlangen 1910-1920 (Neustadt, 1977), p. 29; Haupt, Chronik der Universitat Giessen, p. 45. Boehm's article, which focuses on Munich, does not mention Leonida Colescu as an auditor or a degree recipient, but she does appear in Boedeker's list. 88 Anna Marie Heiler, "In Marburg diirfte die meisten Kollegen geneigt sein . . . Aus den Anfangen des Frauenstudiums," alma mater philippina (Winter Semester 1964-1965): 22; ZfwB 28 (1900): 242; Die Frau 13 (1905-1906): 695. Boedeker omits Alix Westerkamp from her list of doctorates. 232

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certainly be said that they were outsiders, not only because of their sex but in many cases because of their nationality and age as well. Of the 223 women auditing at Prussian universities in 1896-1897, 89 were foreigners and 87 were over thirty years old, well above the age of the average male students.89 They were excluded from the fraternities and other social gatherings of most male students, which led many contemporaries to comment that they worked harder and took better care of their health than did men. Autobiographical accounts tend to report a rather lonely existence, though at Berlin after 1895 enough women were studying to provide a fairly large circle of acquaintances. A particularly noteworthy group of women gathered in the courses of the Kathedersozialisten Adolf Wagner and Gustav Schmoller, including the feminists Helene Stocker and Elisabeth Gnauck-Kuhne, the Polish economist Sofia Daszynska, and the future American social workers Emily Balch and Mary Kingsbury (Simkovitch).90 At least from the perspective of the late twentieth century, some aspects of the pioneers' experience possess elements of comedy. Advising American women on how to gain a professor's permission to audit his course, Jane Belle Sherzer wrote, "She may even add that she has crossed the sea for the sole purpose of hearing him, or some such phrase, which is very apt to make him look flattered and give his consent without more ado."91 This is exactly what happened to Florence Dyer from Boston, to whom the pathologist Johannes Orth at Gottingen had given written permission to audit his courses without realizing he was corresponding with a woman. When she showed up in the fall of 1895, he felt obliged to admit her, even though Gottingen's medical faculty had not yet accepted female auditors. Ida Hyde had a similar experience at Heidelberg, where a professor who had promised to examine her in physiology when she was ready, "if that time should ever come," eventually had to keep his word "as a gentleman."92 At the University of Munich, Edith Hamilton had "formidable difficulties" gaining admission to classics courses because Catholic 89 Statistics for 1896-1897 compiled by Friedrich Schmidt in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, AIthoff, AI, No. 101. 90 See especially Mercedes Randall, Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (New York, 1964), pp. 90-97; and Mary Kingsbury Simkovitch, Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (New York, 1938), pp. 46-52. 91 Letter by J.B.S. in The Nation 58 (1894): 116. 92 Luhn, "Geschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 27-29; Hyde, "Before Women Were Human Beings," pp. 230-31.

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men preparing for the priesthood might "be contaminated" by sitting next to her. A solution was found by having her sit on the lecture platform next to the professor.93 Relations between male and female students were not always so distant. A mathematician who had been at Gottingen when Maltby, Winston, and Chisholm arrived later recalled that an "extremely natural tone" developed among the students. The novelist Hans Carossa remembered the hostile attitude among his fellow medical students at Leipzig toward their first female colleague, Olga Katharina Freytag, but noted that as she demonstrated her capabilities in class the dominant attitude became one of respect.94 Professors' attitudes toward their women students varied from the strong support given by Felix Klein, through the grudging toleration of many, to the outright hostility of Heinrich von Treitschke and Ernst von Bergmann. Administrators could also add to the women's difficulties. At Heidelberg in 1900, the dean of the medical faculty actively discouraged Rahel Goitein from trying to become a physician, even though certification had already been opened to women. At Halle a few years earlier, the rector called in Hildegard and Katharine Ziegler to warn them that attendance at a socialist meeting was improper behavior for students.95 The Ziegler sisters' behavior was unusual, for, in general, the early women students appear to have been acutely aware that their performance and conduct would influence the future of university study for women in Germany. This awareness was particularly strong among the American women. As Emily Balch, who also went to socialist meetings, wrote home from Berlin, "I should be awfully sorry to do anything to make women personae ingratae in the University now they are just being let in."96 Addressing the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1896, Margaret Maltby urged: At present it seems wise that only those women who have an earnest purpose, who intend either to work for a degree or to carry on an investigation in some particular subject, should 93

Hamilton, "Edith and Alice Hamilton," p. 131. Wilhelm Lorey in Frauenbildung 8 (1909): 176; Hans Carossa, Der Tag des jungen Arztes (Wiesbaden, 1955), pp. 28-30. 95 Straus, Wir lebten in Deutschland, p. 88; Wegscheider-Ziegler, Weite Welt, p. 33. 96 "Alice Salomon," in Kern, ed., Fiihrende Frauen, p. 20; Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 97. 94

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attempt to visit a German university. . . . Many German women, and men, too, feel strongly the injustice of an attempt on the part of foreign women to avail themselves of certain university courses merely for the purpose of general culture. . . . There are many aspects of the case to be considered other than the advantage or pleasure to the individual woman. Let her admission come about in a way to command the respect of professors and students.97 At this meeting, the ACA created a special screening committee to provide a "seal of approval" for such serious students wanting to attend European universities.98 Two events early in 1899 illustrated both the extent of and the limits to the gains German women had made through the propaganda of the deed of the previous decade. One involved the first doctorate granted by the University of Berlin, to a physics student named Else Neumann. The occasion inspired the following poem in the humor magazine Kladderadatsch: Her name is Neumann, she's a woman For her the doctorate is just ahead. My, what things don't spin around Inside this pretty little head! Whether she can love and kiss Is the only other fact I seek. If she can, then I'll forgive her AU her Latin and her Greek.99 Such sentiments were not out of character for a journal that often lampooned male students as well, but a similar hostility to women surfaced even at the formal ceremonies for the bestowal of Neumann's degree. At that event the dean of the philosophical faculty received thunderous applause when he commented, "Woman should above all be the high priestess of the domestic hearth," but 97 Margaret Maltby, Some Points of Comparison between German and American Universities, Publications of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, 2d ser., no. 66 (n.p., 1896), p. 7. 98 Marion Talbot and Lois Rosenberry, The History of the American Association of University Women, 1881-1931 (Boston and New York, 1931), p. 150. 99 My own translation of the poem as reprinted in Dorothea Gotze, "Der publizistische Kampf um die hohere Frauenbildung in Deutschland von den Anfangen bis zur Zulassung der Frau zum Hochschulstudium" (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1957), p. 253.

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very much weaker applause when he continued, "Scientific preoccupations are nonetheless absolutely no hindrance to this."100 The second revealing incident occurred at the University of Halle, where the medical faculty had been the most receptive of any in Germany to female students. As many as seven had studied there in the fall of 1897, and by early 1899 at least four Abiturientinnen—Else von der Leyen, Irma Klausner, Ethel Blume, and Marie Gleiss—had completed their basic science courses and were beginning the clinical part of their training. Their attendance at a demonstration where a man with syphilis was exhibited before the class led to a major protest from male students.101 The statement issued by these men read in part: The experiment (with women students) is to be seen as having totally miscarried. Cynicism has entered into the former abode of honorable effort along with the women, and scenes that are as offensive to the professors and students as to the patients are part of the daily agenda. Here women's emancipation becomes a calamity and comes into conflict with morality, and therefore here its path must be barred. Fellow students! In light of these facts, who can still dare to oppose our legitimate demands? We demand the exclusion of women from clinical instruction, because experience has shown us that joint clinical instruction for men and women is no more compatible with an interest in serious medical studies than it is with the principles of propriety and morality.102 This protest failed, however, to achieve the exclusion of women students from Halle, which within a few years would grant several doctorates in medicine to women and also would be the site where a number of female physicians educated in Switzerland would take the state examination required for certification in Germany. The attitudes expressed in Berlin and Halle in 1899 demonstrated that propaganda of the deed had not yet changed the attitudes of many German men toward higher education for women. 100 Die Frau 6 (1898-1899): 379, 249. Else Neumann (1872-1902) attended Lange's Gymnasium course in the mid-1890s, but did not take the Abitur, then studied at Gottingen and Berlin. She died just three years after receiving her degree. 101 See letters from the medical faculty at Halle to the Ministry of Education, 15.XI.97, 25.1.99, and 26.111.99, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vols. VI and VII. 102 Students' protest as published in the Volks-Zeitung, 21.III.99, a clipping of which can be found ibid., Vol. VII.

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PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED

Yet Neumann's doctorate at the most prestigious German university and the failure of the male students' protest at Halle suggested that female students were not about to disappear. What was needed was to normalize the conditions under which they prepared for and studied at the universities. For the next decade, these issues would be the focus of debate and deliberation at the national and state levels.

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The Decisive Reforms in Female Education

of limited new educational and career opportunities to women during the 1890s left many issues related to female education unresolved. Between 1899 and the beginning of the First World War, however, virtually all German states would introduce comprehensive restructurings of girls' schooling and allow women to matriculate in their universities. These reforms did not give German girls complete equality with their brothers in secondary curricula or in career privileges, but they did go far toward meeting the demands raised by the various women's organizations. In this process of expanding government regulation of female education, Prussia continued to lead in certain areas while lagging behind the southern states in others. Although there were clear links among the many reforms undertaken in the various states during this period, this chapter will proceed on a topic-by-topic basis to illustrate how the various states addressed the issues. THE OPENING

OPENING MEDICAL CERTIFICATION

The first issue to be resolved was full medical certification for Abiturientinnen. The unwillingness of Prussian Minister of Education Robert Bosse to override the opposition of professors like Ernst von Bergmann and open matriculation to women had produced a paradoxical situation: women had been admitted to the Abitur in large measure so that they could become physicians, but now they could not fulfill another basic requirement for certification: regular enrollment in a German university. Ministry officials reconsidered the problem during the summer of 1896 and prepared a report to the emperor that urged that Abiturientinnen be allowed to matriculate in all faculties. This report stressed the need for female physicians to treat women and insisted that the male physicians' fear of competition could not be the decisive factor in this matter. To support this stance, the ministry sought and received reassurance 238

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

from Swiss authorities that women had done well in medical studies and that coeducational classes had not caused any problems.1 Yet even at this stage, the report was not dispatched. What appears to have happened is that Bosse concluded that to open certification for Abiturientinnen on the basis of audited courses was preferable to a fight over matriculation. But when he made this proposal in the spring of 1897 to Karl von Boetticher, the Reich secretary of the interior, the latter rejected it, suggesting that such preferential treatment for women would not be in the best interests of the female physicians themselves. Bosse's response, that women would still be required to pass the same examinations as men, was sufficiently convincing to Arthur von Posadowsky, who replaced Boetticher early in the summer, that he suggested that such a reform be put before the Bundesrat. Bosse readily agreed, and on 1 February 1898 Posadowsky sent a circular outlining the proposed changes to all the state governments.2 News of Posadowsky's proposal aroused widespread resistance within the medical profession, including the sharp protest by the Physicians' Congress discussed in Chapter Six. The Bavarian universities of Munich and Erlangen also voiced strong opposition to allowing women even to audit medical courses. At Tubingen, the medical faculty argued that women should be able to matriculate on equal terms with men but that they should study medicine only at larger universities where separate courses for them could be established.3 Yet the proposal also found significant support. Already in June 1897, the medical faculty at the University of Freiburg had approved the matriculation of Abiturientinnen, although it had hesitated to become a lone pioneer in this matter. The presence of five women students in the medical faculty at Halle appears to have caused professors there to drop their earlier opposition. In No1 Draft report to the emperor from August 1896, various letters from professors who had taught in Switzerland, and report from the ambassador to Switzerland, 16.XII.96, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. V. 2 Bosse to Hohenlohe (Boetticher), 17.IV.97, and Boetticher to Bosse, 24.V.97, ibid.; Bosse to Hohenlohe (Posadowsky), 26.VIII.97, Posadowsky to Bosse, 23.XI.97, Bosse to Hohenlohe, 8.1.98, and Posadowsky to Bosse, 1.11.98, all in Vol. VI. 3 Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976), p. 18; Laetitia Boehm, "Von den Anfangen des akademischen Frauenstudiums in Deutschland, Zugleich ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen," Historisches Jahrbuch 77 (1958): 310; Elke Rupp, Der Beginn des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Tubingen (Tubingen, 1978), pp. 45-46.

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vember 1897 and June 1898 they urged Bosse to allow these women to take the preliminary examination (Vorpriifung or tentamen physikum) on the basis of audited courses even before it was known whether or not the Bundesrat would approve this procedure. Bosse received support—and pressure—from another quarter: Else von der Leyen's father, the high-ranking official in the Commerce Ministry, asked personally if his daughter, who was then studying at Halle, could take the preliminary examination while the question of final certification was left open.4 In October 1898, a national commission reviewing the regulations for certifying physicians followed Prussian leadership and approved a reform that would allow Abiturientinnen who could not matriculate to take the examination on the basis of audited courses. In January 1899, Posadowsky reported this decision to the Bundesrat, which, with Prussian support again being decisive, granted final approval on 20 April 1899.5 It is clear from the various public and private statements by leading officials that the main reason the government came to support female physicians was Mathilde Weber's argument that they were needed to treat women. In a speech to the Reichstag in 1898, Posadowsky had even said that women would be more suitable for treating women and children than men were; and in his report to the Bundesrat he stressed how strongly public opinion backed this view.6 Important as well, however, must have been a growing sense of embarrassment over how backward Germany was beginning to appear in this matter. Austria had opened certification to women educated abroad in 1896 and in the following year began to admit women to regular medical studies at home. In Russia, after a fifteen-year period without any medical training for women, new courses opened in St. Petersburg in 1897; the following year, female physicians gained equal rights with men in government service and pensions.7 Clippings and reports in the ar4

Ernst Theodor Nauck, Das Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1953), p. 18; Halle medical faculty to Bosse, 15.XI.97 and 18.VI.98, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vols. VI and VII; Bosse's note on conversation with von der Leyen also in Vol. VII. 5 Posadowsky to the Bundesrat, 31.1.99, and report of the Trade and Commerce Committee, 20.IV.99, in Verhandlungen der Bundesrat: Drucksachen, 2 vols. (1899), 1: nos. 20 and 66; Protokolletiberdie Verhandlungen des Bundesrats des Deutschen Reiches, Jahrgang 1899, p. 126. 6 Reichstag, Verhandlungen, 9: 5, pp. 561-62 (21.1.98). 7 For Austrian developments, see Marie Jantsch, "Der Aufstieg der osterreichen Arztin zur Gleichberechtigung," in Frauenstudium und akademische Frauenarbeit in Os240

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

chives of the Prussian Ministry of Education reveal that these foreign developments were followed closely by German officials. Else von der Leyen, Ethel Blume, and Irma Klausner—all of whom had been in the first group of Abiturientinnen from Lange's Gymnasium course—passed the preliminary medical examination at Halle only days after the Bundesrat acted.8 Before they could complete their clinical training, however, they were bypassed in the rush for certification by women who had been studying in Switzerland. Such women quickly petitioned the Bundesrat and the Prussian Ministry of Education for recognition of their foreign diplomas, semesters of study, and/or certifications. In 1900 the Bundesrat agreed that the time Abiturientinnen had spent enrolled in Swiss universities could be counted as part of the required semesters of study before certification. After Realgymnasium graduates won the right to study medicine in Germany in 1901, at least nine women gained acceptance of their Swiss Maturitat as an adequate secondary school diploma. Foreign certifications were never accepted, so that the earliest female physicians had to take the German examinations if they wanted to escape their second-class status. One who did so was Elisabeth Winterhalter, who in her late forties passed the tentamen physikum in 1903 and the final certification the following year.9 The honor of being the first certified female physician went to Ida Democh-Maurmeer, who had been studying in Switzerland when the new regulations allowed her to return home and pass both the state examination and her doctoral defense within a few terreich, ed. Martha Forkl and Elisabeth Koffmahn (Vienna and Stuttgart, 1968), pp. 24-29; K. Sablik, "Zum Beginn des Frauenstudiums an der Wiener medizinischen Fakultat," Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 118 (1968): 817-19; and Reinhold Aigner, "Die Grazer Arztinnen aus der Zeit der Monarchie," Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins fur Steiermark 70 (1979): 45-70. On Russia see especially Ruth Arlene Fluck Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1905" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975), pp. 253-54; and Jeanette E. Tuve, The First Russian Women Physicians (Newtonville, Mass., 1984), pp. 110-12. 8 Dean Weber of the Halle medical faculty to Bosse, 27.IV.99, and response of 1.V.99, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. VII. 9 Individual requests for recognition of foreign diplomas discussed in Studt to Hohenlohe, 18.X.99, petition of twenty-two women to have their semesters of foreign study counted toward the certification requirements, III.00, and petition of twelve women to have their foreign certifications accepted, also IH.00, all found ibid.. Vol. VIII; list of women whose foreign diplomas were accepted, from late 1901, ibid., Vol. IX; Bundesrat actions reported in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 26 (1900): 556; "Elisabeth Winterhalter," in Elga Kern, ed., Ftihrende Frauen Europas, n.s. (Munich, 1930), p. 35. 241

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days of each other at Halle in March 1901. She was followed by Elise Troschel, who married and had children in the course of her studies in Zurich, Berlin, Halle, and Greifswald, earned a Swiss degree in 1898, and enrolled briefly at Konigsberg before passing her preliminary and final examinations within a week, and by Mathilde Wagner, a graduate of Lange's Realkurse who took her doctorate in Freiburg. Von der Ley en and Klausner finished their work later in 1901 and became the first two women to have received their entire medical training in Germany. 10

OPENING MATRICULATION

The admission of women to medical certification on the basis of audited courses was not a permanent solution to the demands of feminists and Abiturientinnen for the same rights enjoyed by men at the universities. As the various Gymnasium courses produced their first graduates, other state governments proved to be more accommodating toward women than had the authorities in Prussia and Saxony. Baden, where the first four young women from the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium passed the Abitur in 1899, lived u p to its liberal reputation by being the first state to open matriculation. Minister of Education Wilhelm Nokk had supported full rights for Abiturientinnen as early as 1897, when he had urged the University of Heidelberg to allow Margarete Heine to matriculate. On 9 December 1899, he referred specifically to the Karlsruhe graduates in a memorandum to the university senates at Heidelberg and Freiburg that indicated his plan to propose the matriculation of women to the grand duke unless the senates could put forward legitimate "serious objections." Neither could, although the Freiburg senate still did not think it wise to proceed without the other states. This consideration did not deter Nokk, and on 28 February 1900 women were admitted to full rights in Baden's universities. The decree said that matriculation of women was only "on an experimental and trial basis," but no retreat from equality ever occurred. In April 1900 Nokk refused a request from the Freiburg senate for 10 Ursula Romann, "Vor 40 Jahren: Erinnerungen an dem Berufsweg der ersten in Deutschland approbierten Arztin, Frau Dr. Ida Democh-Maurmeer," Die Arztin 16 (1940): 154-55; Hilde Seeger, "Weiblicher Sonderling im Horsaal: Zum Gedenken an Frau Dr. med. Elise Troschel, die erste Arztin mit Staatsexamen einer deutschen Universirat," Deutsches Arzteblatt 66 (1969): 1894-95; Die Frau 8 (1900-1901): 506, 684-86.

242

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

permission to ban women from some courses or to set up separate classes for them.11 Four women matriculated at each of the universities in Baden in 1900. At Freiburg, Johanna Kappes from the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium was joined by Margarete Breymann from Lange's course and two women with Hessian diplomas, Kathe Kehr and Marie Gleiss. At Heidelberg, Rahel Goitein from Karlsruhe studied medicine with Irma Klausner and Else von der Leyen; Georgina Sexauer enrolled in the philosophical faculty. By 1905, thirty-four Abiturientinnen were matriculated at Freiburg, forty-nine at Heidelberg.12 Somewhat surprisingly, given the resistance of the universities of Munich and Erlangen to allowing women to study medicine, Bavaria became the second German state to authorize the matriculation of women. Here again, the graduation of the first class from the local Gymnasium course provided a crucial stimulus. Despite what has been called "vehement opposition" from four of the five faculties at Munich, the Ministry of Education decreed on 21 September 1903 that women with a Gymnasium or Realgymnasium Abitur could become regular students at any of Bavaria's universities. Munich proved to be by far the most popular of the three, enrolling ninety women students in the winter semester of 1906-1907, compared to thirteen at Wurzburg and just four at Erlangen.13 Next in line was Wurttemberg, where in 1904 the Gymnasium course in Stuttgart produced its first four graduates, three of whom petitioned for the right to matriculate at Tubingen. As in Baden and Bavaria, the minister of education, Otto von Sarwey, had to overcome the resistance of professors, especially in the medical faculty, who opposed matriculation because it would prevent individual professors from excluding women from their 11

Nauck, Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau, pp. 18-21, 53-55; Hans Krabusch, "Die Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Heidelberg," Ruperto-Carola 19 (1956): 138-39. 12 Nauck, Frauenstudium an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau, pp. 22-23; Frauenbildung 4 (1905): 306. I have not discovered where Georgina Sexauer (or Saxauer) passed the Abitur, but she did pass the examination pro facultate docendi in Baden in 1906: Die Frau 13 (1905-1906): 502. 13 Johanna Gaab, "Eine verwaltungsrechtliche Untersuchung iiber das hohere Madchenschulwesen in Bayern" (Ph.D. diss., Technische Hochschule Munich, 1930), p. 42; Boehm, "Von den Anfangen," p. 313; list of numbers of women matriculated at universities in 1906-1907 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. IX. 243

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classes. In response to Sarwey's inquiry as to why Wurttemberg should not imitate its neighbors' recent actions, the faculty at first persuaded the university's rector and chancellor to protect the professors' traditional privileges regarding auditors. After new petitions from the Association for Women's Education and University Studies, however, the Ministry of Education overruled the Tubingen faculty and allowed the Abiturientinnen to audit any courses they wished. In the face of this official pressure, the senate reversed itself and accepted matriculation, which was approved by the king on 16 May 1904.14 The admission of women as regular students in the southern universities had important repercussions on Prussia and Saxony, making it more difficult for professors and government officials to justify continued resistance to the demands of Abiturientinnen who petitioned for matriculation. The governments also faced the embarrassment of having women from their states choose to enroll in the universities where they were more welcome. In 1905, twentyone of thirty-four women who matriculated at Freiburg were from Prussia, compared to just four from Baden. At Heidelberg, Prussia supplied twenty-one of forty-nine women students, Baden only twelve. Northern universities, in contrast, witnessed an increase in auditors, in part because the southern states refused to allow German women without the Abitur to audit medical courses now that matriculation was possible.15 Another issue impinged directly on the question of matriculation at the northern universities: a rapid growth in the number of female auditors from abroad, especially Russian women studying medicine. When twenty-two Russians signed up for medical courses at Leipzig in the winter semester of 1900-1901, the faculty resolved to accept as auditors only women with a German Abitur. At the University of Berlin in 1901, nineteen of twenty-four women auditing medical courses were Russian, while at Halle thirty Russians outnumbered six German Abiturientinnen.16 14

Julius Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Wurttemberg (Berlin, 1916), pp. 82-83; Rupp, Beginn des Frauenstudiums, pp. 60-69. 15 Frauenbildung 4 (1905): 306; Julius Schwalbe, "Das medizinische Frauenstudium in Deutschland," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 33 (1907): 267-68. 16 Renate Drucker, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums an der Universitat Leipzig," in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. Hellmut Kretzschmar (Berlin, 1956), p. 286; figures for Berlin in petition of Elise Taube et al., 8.VII.01, and for Halle in report from the Anatomical Institute, 17.XI.01, both in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. IX. 244

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

Uneasiness about, or hostility to, these Russian women rested in part on legitimate educational concerns, specifically the adequacy of the Russian girls' Gymnasium as a preparation for German university studies. This type of school, which could offer but did not require Latin and had an optional final year that provided teacher training, appears to have confused German officials somewhat, because its name implied that it resembled German Gymnasien as much as the Russian boys' schools did. In 1902, Prussia and Saxony agreed not to admit as auditors Russian women who had only the basic diploma and lacked either a teaching certificate or a supplementary examination in Latin.17 Opposition to Russian women also derived from fear of radicalism and from anti-Semitism. The medical faculty at Leipzig pointed out that the "undesired Russians" were "almost entirely Jewish women" who could not gain admission to the medical courses in St. Petersburg because of restrictive quotas. Male students at Leipzig objected to the "personal appearance" as well as the "inadequate preparation" of these Jewish women. Until the beginning of World War I, Germany would witness successive outbursts of hostility toward "foreign students," a euphemism for Jewish Russians, although after the first years of the century a specific animus against women students does not appear to have been as prominent.18 Abiturientinnen, despite the large number of Jewish Germans among them, did not hesitate to join in the protests against the Russians. In 1900, when foreign women auditing medical courses at Berlin asked for establishment of a separate anatomy and dissection class for women, four Abiturientinnen, including at least two Jewish women, opposed this move toward separate and pos17

The file cited in note 16 contains a great deal of material related to the nature of the Russian girls' Gymnasium, which is described in Sophie Satina, Education of Women in Pre-Revolutionary Russia, trans. Alexandra Poustchine (New York, 1966), pp. 43-50, 59. On the agreement between Prussia and Saxony, see Frauenbtldung 1 (1902): 146. 18 Drucker, "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," pp. 286-87. On the controversies over Russian students at German universities before 1914, see Jack Wertheimer, "The 'Auslanderfrage' at Institutions of Higher Learning: A Controvery over Russian-Jewish Students in Imperial Germany," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 27 (1982): 187-215; Claudie Weill, "La 'question des etrangers': les itudiants russes en Allemagne, 1900-1914," Le mouvement social 120 Quly-September 1982): 78-94; and Konrad Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1982), pp. 64-67. Compare Pietro Scandola, ed., Hochschulgeschichte Berns, 1528-1984 (Bern, 1984), pp. 497-505. 245

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sibly unequal university education. A year later, some of these women, backed by several others, appealed to Posadowsky for help in getting more courses opened to women, arguing that pro­ fessors refused to let any women in because they feared being swamped with foreign auditors: "The foreigners overwhelm us with their numbers," the German women wrote. In February 1902, twenty-eight Abiturientinnen auditing at Berlin and fifteen from other Prussian universities appealed for the right to matriculate and for restrictions on the "disproportionately large number of women without adequate preparation" entering the universities. The German women explicitly asked if the Prussian authorities wanted all of them to depart for universities in Baden.19 This last appeal inspired some action. A few weeks later, Bosse's successor, Konrad von Studt, asked the university faculties if there was any reason to change the policies regarding women students. Before he received any responses, however, Studt assured the Ministry of State that he did not plan to open matriculation to women. The professors' statements in May and June 1902 were extremely varied, with the University of Berlin proving to be the strongest bastion of opposition to matriculation for women. Yet seven each of the legal and philosophical faculties in Prussia fa­ vored giving Abiturientinnen the same privileges as their male equivalents. Only five of the nine medical faculties approved of matriculation, with Halle's professors voting six to one against it. Despite this significant swing in opinion since Zedlitz's similar survey in 1892, Studt told the House of Deputies in March 1903 that there was still no prospect of regular study for women at Prussian universities.20 As Bavaria and Wurttemberg followed Baden's lead, however, officials in both Prussia and Saxony altered their positions. Fearful that Studt might change his mind, rectors from every Prussian university except Breslau suggested in a memorandum of March 1904 that opening matriculation to women would result in a sharp increase in Abiturientinnen—ideas of girls' limited mental capacities seem, at least temporarily, to have disappeared—and thereby in 19

Elise Taube, Johanna Maass, Toni Blumenfeld, and Lilli Wedell to Studt, 13.VII.00, and Elise Taube et al. to Posadowsky, 8.VII.01, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. VIII; petitions of 3.Π.02 in Vol. IX. 20 Studt's request to the university faculties, 19.IV.02, and all responses, ibid., Vol. X; protocol of Ministry of State meeting of 16.V.02 in Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. Ill; Prussia, Haus der Abgeordneten, Stenographische Benchte, 19th leg., 5th sess., cols. 3085-89. 246

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

the destruction of the "essence of the universities." The rectors proposed creation of a women's university, where teaching positions would be "open to the best scholarly talents among the women," as was the case at American colleges such as Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr.21 By this time, however, a separate university appealed neither to the women nor to government officials. In late 1904, at least eighty-six Abiturientinnen studying at Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Halle, and Konigsberg petitioned again for the right to matriculate. More important, Friedrich Althoff, the powerful official who oversaw university affairs in Prussia from 1887 to 1908, had decided that the time had come to grant women their rights at the universities. In January 1905 he prepared a decree, which Studt submitted to the Ministry of State, authorizing full matriculation for Abiturientinnen, except in cases where "for special reasons" professors could seek ministerial approval to bar women from their classes. Althoff advanced two reasons for this change of course: the fear that Prussian women would all leave for southern universities, and the hope that matriculation for qualified women would make it easier to restrict auditors, especially the "not unobjectionable elements" among the foreigners.22 Studt failed to convince the Ministry of State of the wisdom of this new policy. The opposition was led by Finance Minister Georg von Rheinbaben, who worried that opening matriculation would turn university study for women from an exceptional into a normal practice and thus lead to the proliferation of girls' Gymnasien and the destruction of the higher girls' schools. Supported by several other ministers, Rheinbaben also challenged Studt's belief that women students could, in the long run, be barred from careers in the civil service, and he considered female state officials to be totally unacceptable. The Ministry of State concluded that nothing should be done about matriculation until Studt could present a 21 Rectors' memorandum of 6.III.04 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. XI. 22 Petitions dated from 17.XI.04 to 12.1.05, Studt to Bulow, 14.1.05, and Studt to the Ministry of State, 5.IV.05, all ibid., Vol. X. On Althoff, see Arnold Sachse, Friedrich Althoff una sein Werk (Berlin, 1928), and Bernhard vom Brocke, "Hochschulund Wissenschaftspolitik in Preussen und im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1882-1907: Das 'System Althoff/ " in Bildungspolitik in Preussen zur Zeit des Kaiserreiches, ed. Peter Baumgart (Stuttgart, 1980). For further details about Althoff's role at this juncture, see my article, "The Reform of Female Education in Prussia, 1899-1908," German Studies Review 8 (1985): 26-33.

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complete plan for reform of the girls' schools and for the privileges to be granted to Abiturientinnen.23 This decision resulted in a delay of over three years in the opening of matriculation at Prussian universities. Studt did not even bring the issue before the Ministry of State again until January 1907, when Rheinbaben and several other ministers, including the future chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, still objected because they feared that opening matriculation would lead inexorably to opening careers in the civil service. Studt could not convince his colleagues that events in the southern states had shown that rights for women in the universities did not necessarily lead to rights in government service.24 His resignation in June 1907 may have been prompted in part by the resistance of the other ministers to reforms that Studt believed were within the prerogative of his own ministry.25 Studt's successor, Ludwig Holle, did not submit a package of reforms in female education to the Ministry of State until early in 1908. In February, the other ministers finally accepted matriculation for women, with an explicit proviso that permission to study did not imply permission to take civil service examinations. Yet, because they demanded another revision in the proposed curricula and structures of the girls' schools, a decree authorizing matriculation did not appear until August, and it did not take effect at Prussian universities until Easter 1909.26 The Saxon Ministry of Education did not experience such frustrating delays when, for the first time in five years, it asked the university senate at Leipzig about matriculation in December 1905. The philosophical faculty voted twenty-eight to eighteen in favor of equal rights for all holders of the Abitur, and the law faculty 23 Rheinbaben to Studt, 5.II.05, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. X; protocol for 13.IV.05 in Staatsministerium, Rep. 90a, Abt. B, III2b, No. 6, Vol. 150. 24 Studt to the Ministry of State, 31.1.07, and Max von Beseler to Studt, 28.11.07, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. XI; Rheinbaben to Studt, 5.II. and 3.III.07, Bethmann Hollweg to Studt 13.111.07, and Clemens von Delbruck to Studt, 15.VI.07, in Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vols. VI, VlII. For further details of these exchanges, see Albisetti, "Reform of Female Education," pp. 35-37. 25 Emmy Beckmann, Die Entwicklung der hbheren Madchenbildung in Deutschland von 1870-1914 dargestellt in Dokumenten (Berlin, 1936), p. 125, cites a press report indicating Studt's intention to resign if his reforms of female education were not accepted. 26 Holle to the Ministry of State, 16.1.08, and copy of the protocol for 14.11.08, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. VIII.

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went so far as to state that it was "not appropriate" to bar women simply on account of their sex. Such support from the professors led the Ministry of Education to go ahead in March 1906 with a decree opening matriculation.27 The remaining states with universities fell into line quickly. Saxony-Weimar allowed matriculation at Jena in 1907, Hesse opened Giessen to women in 1908, Alsace-Lorraine followed Prussia's lead in giving rights to women at Strassburg the next year, and even economically and politically backward Mecklenburg opened the University of Rostock in 1909.28 Technical institutes also opened their doors to women students in this period, although without much controversy and with less important consequences. German feminists had not been remotely as interested in enabling women to study engineering and architecture as in gaining access to the medical and philosophical faculties of the universities. Officials in Baden waited three years after the opening of matriculation to admit women to the technical institute in Karlsruhe, whereas in Bavaria the delay was only two months. In Prussia, rectors of the technical institutes informed AIthoff in May 1905 that they would not object to the admission of women on the same basis as men, but the long postponement of matriculation in the universities also affected these institutions. The decree opening the technical institutes came only in April 1909, in time for a few women to matriculate for the summer semester of that year. Even in the winter semester of 1913-1914, however, only sixty-eight women were enrolled in all of Germany's technical institutes, and a majority of them were pursuing general studies, chemistry, or pharmacy, not architecture or a branch of engineering.29 Richard Evans has written that "when women were eventually admitted to German universities, it was for a combination of reasons which had little to do with the pressure exerted by women's organizations."30 There is little evidence to support this assertion. 27 Drucker, "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," p. 287. Drucker does not indicate whether other ministers played a role in this decision in Saxony. 28 Boehm, "Von den Anfangen," p. 314. 29 Reinhard Riese, Die Hochschule auf dem Wege zum wissenschaftlichen Grossbetrieb: Die Universitiit Heidelberg una das badische Hochschulwesen, 1860-1914 (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 39; Boehm, "Von den Anfangen," p. 313n.; Barbara Duden and Hans Ebert, "Die Anfange des Frauenstudiums an der Technische Hochschule Berlin," in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft: Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Technischen Universitiit Berlin 1879-1979, ed. Reinhard Riirup, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1979), 1: 405, 412. 30 Evans, Feminist Movement, p. 18.

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From the first petitions in the late 1880s onward, such organizations had concentrated their agitation on the need for female physicians and upper-level teachers, and they supported Abitur courses and advanced programs for teachers in order to address this need. Government officials gradually came to accept the validity of the women's concerns and moved at varying rates of speed to satisfy their demands. In one area, as the next section will show, officials granted to women teachers rights at the universities that were not available to men.

N E W O P P O R T U N I T I E S FOR W O M E N I N T E A C H I N G

The opportunity to take the Abitur and to attend universities provided German women with another issue on which to demand equal rights with men: the chance to obtain certification as secondary teachers through the examination profacultate docendi. As noted in Chapter Seven, Hildegard Ziegler attempted to gain admission to this examination when she completed her studies in 1897, but the Prussian Ministry of Education refused her request. Shortly after the Bundesrat acted to allow certification of female physicians on the basis of audited courses, the board of directors of Lange's Gymnasium course petitioned the Prussian Ministry of Education to treat the teachers' examination in the same fashion. Although this appeal had no direct effect, Stephan Waetzoldt, Karl Schneider's replacement as the official in charge of the girls' schools, admitted as early as September 1901 that the Oberlehrerinnenprufung based on the advanced courses for women teachers would not be an adequate qualification for the girls' schools of the future. 31 Some states opened their examinations for secondary school teachers slightly before Prussia did. Saxon officials promised this right to the first graduates of Windscheid's Abitur course, though without allowing them to matriculate, but none had yet taken the examination as of early 1904. At that time, Bavaria granted similar permission—on an experimental basis and with a clear understanding that passing would bring no claim to a teaching position—to Prussia's second Abiturientin, Margarete Heine. In May 1903, Heine had been allowed by Prussian officials to begin her pedagogical training at a seminar for male secondary teachers attached to the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Cologne, but she 31 Petition o( 6.XII.99 in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. VII; Waetzoldt to Studt, IX.01, in Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. I.

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THE DECISIVE

REFORMS

had not been admitted to the examination pro facilitate docendi. Baden, Saxony-Weimar, and Alsace-Lorraine also opened their examinations in 1904, in Baden on the basis of matriculation and in the other states on the basis of audited courses.32 In Prussia, the decisive case proved to be that of a young woman named Thekla Freytag, the daughter of a high-ranking judicial official in Berlin. Freytag had attended Lange's Gymnasium course from 1894 to 1898 and then studied science and mathematics at the University of Berlin. In July 1903, in her second letter asking permission to take the teachers' examination, she informed Studt that officials from the new Girls' Gymnasium in Cologne had approached her about a teaching position in the yet-to-be-created upper grades of that school. After being turned down, she stressed in her third application in early 1904 that other states had already granted this right to women. Studt thereupon asked the other state governments for precise information on this matter. More important, perhaps, Freytag's father addressed a strong plea for his daughter's rights to Studt on 7 March, and two days later the minister of education called a meeting of his subordinates to discuss the issue. As early as 19 March, Freytag received permission to take the examination pro facultate docendi—but with Studt's explicit statement that she would not thereby gain any claim to a position in the public schools. She passed the academic portion of the examination in May 1905 and was assigned to the pedagogical seminar attached to the Friedrich-Werdersche Oberrealschule in Berlin.33 A handful of other women received similar permission from Studt over the next year. If the Ministry of State had not blocked matriculation in April 1905, Studt would have opened the examination pro facultate docendi to all Abiturientinnen on an equal basis with men, but with the same restriction that governed Freytag 32

Reports from the Saxon and Bavarian ministries of education, 22.11. and 12.III.04, Provinzialschulkollegium Kassel to Studt, 1.V.03, and response of 23.V.03, all in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, adhib. A, Vol. I; Die Frau 11 (1903-1904): 500. Since the early 1890s, male secondary schoolteachers, after completing their university studies, had to spend one year in a small pedagogical seminar attached to a secondary school and then one year as a probationary teacher. 33 Thekla Freytag to Studt, 16.11.03, 15.VII.03, 26.1.04, responses of 14.VII.03 and 19.III.04, Studt to the Prussian Foreign Ministry, 3.II.04, Senatsprasident Freytag to Studt, 7.III.04, Studt's internal memorandum of 9.III.04, and Berlin Prufungskommission to Studt, 19.V.05, all in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, adhib. A, Vol. I. 251

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with regard to employment in public schools. With matriculation delayed indefinitely, he decreed on 14 December 1905 that women could qualify for the examination on the basis of audited courses.34 The first women to enter the Prussian seminars for male second­ ary teachers were an extremely select group. The first thirteen in­ cluded not only Heine and Freytag but also Carola Barth, daughter of the liberal politician and editor Theodor Barth, Elsa Matz, who later became a Reichstag deputy for the German People's party during the Weimar Republic, and three noblewomen—EIise von Keudell, Christiana von Wedel, and the divorced Countess Gabriele von Wartensleben. At least two other noblewomen would soon follow: Baroness Anne-Marie von Liliencron and Baroness Elisabeth von Westenholz, who would later write a biography of Helene Lange and a history of the Women Teachers' Association.35 The limited number of Abiturientinnen in the first decade of the century and their strong orientation toward medical careers left relatively few women as candidates for the examination pro facili­ tate docendi. With more cities and states moving to found Abitur courses for girls, this meant a prospective shortage of women qualified to teach in these institutions. In combination with a growing shortage of male secondary teachers after 1900,36 this sit­ uation led officials to search for a possible source of more women students interested in upper-level teaching. As mentioned above, Stephan Waetzoldt suggested as early as September 1901 that the Prussian Oberlehrerinnenpriifung was not a permanent solution to the problem of supplying advanced training for women teachers. In the same memorandum, he put forward an alternative: to allow women with seminar training to matricu34 Note by Paul Meyer of 22.ΠΙ.05 in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. Ill; decree of 14.XII.05 in Centralblatt. . . 1906, p. 224. Even Mecklenburg followed Prussia's lead in allowing Abiturientinnen to take the examination pro facilitate do­ cendi: Die Frau 12 (1904-1905): 437. 35 List of the first women admitted to the men's seminars in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 134, adhib. A, Vol. I; authorizations for Liliencron and Westenholz, 24. and 29.IV.11, in Vol. II. Wartensleben and another of the original thirteen, Elisabeth Rocholl, chose to take their examinations in Baden: Die Frau 12 (1904-1905): 501. 36 On the swings in the supply of male secondary schoolteachers, see HansGeorg Herrlitz and Hartmut Titze, "Uberfiillung als bildungspolitische Strategie: Zur administrativen Steuerung der Lehrerarbeitslosigkeit im Preussen, 1870-1914," Die deutsche Schule 63 (1976): 348-70. Men teachers received a significant pay raise in 1909, in part to try to attract more candidates to the profession.

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THE DECISIVE REFORMS

late in the philosophical faculties without an Abitur.37 This would mean treating graduation from a higher girls' school and three years—or, in his proposal, four years—in a seminar as equivalent to graduation from a Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, or Oberrealschule, at least for study in one university faculty. Such a "fourth way" to the universities would, like the Oberlehrerinnenprufung, give women teachers an opportunity denied to men who had attended the pedagogical seminars for elementary teachers. The first states to introduce such special rights for women were ones that had never developed an Oberlehrerinnenprufung like Prussia's. Saxony opened matriculation to women teachers in 1906 at the same time that it granted this right to Abiturientinnen. Wtirttemberg also established this fourth way to the universities in 1906. Bavaria treated the sexes equally when it admitted certified elementary teachers to its universities in 1908.38 In Prussia, the long delay in opening matriculation to any women prevented serious consideration of the fourth way until after 1908. Several constituencies did, however, express strong support for the idea. One was the Prussian Association for Public Higher Girls' Schools, the organization of the male school directors, who saw in the fourth way a means to prevent a rapid proliferation of Abitur courses and thus keep more talented girls in the existing schools and seminars. Similar concerns appear to have led the Association of Catholic Women Teachers in 1909 to declare its support for admitting seminar graduates to the universities.39 The Prussian Ministry of Education did not act until April 1909, when a single decree announced the phasing out of the Oberlehrerinnenprufung as of 1913 and the admission of women with seminar training and two years of teaching experience to matriculation and the examination pro facultate docendi. In a sense, this decree only recreated the relationship between seminar graduates and Abiturientinnen that had existed before 1908: whereas earlier the teachers could audit only in the philosophical faculties while the Gymna37

Waetzoldt's memorandum as cited in note 31. Drucker, "Vorgeschichte des Frauenstudiums," p. 287; Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens, pp. 32-33; Helmut Beilner, Die Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrerin, aufgezeigt an der Arbeit des bayerischen Lehrerinnenvereins (1898-1933) (Munich, 1971), p. 101. 39 Resolutions of the 1906 and 1908 conferences of the Preussischer Verein fur offentliche hohere Madchenschulen as presented to Holle, IX.08, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. IX; Denkschrift des Vereinfatholischdeutscher Lehrerinnen zur Neuordnung des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Preussen (Danzig, 1909), a copy of which is ibid., No. 5B, Vol. III. 38

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sium graduates could, with permission of the professors, audit any courses, now the same distinction applied to regular study. 40 Yet the fourth way would arouse vehement opposition of a sort that auditing by women teachers never had. University professors, for the most part, responded to the fourth way with outrage. Many objected to the fact that, after the numer­ ous consultations over the desirability of matriculation for Abiturientinnen, the Ministry of Education had not solicited their opin­ ions on this issue. In addition, professors disapproved of the favoritism shown to women and asked what justification there could now be for excluding men with seminar training. That active women teachers who had been through the unreformed girls' schools and seminars would supply the bulk of fourth way stu­ dents angered many faculty members, especially mathematicians and scientists who viewed such preparation as wholly inadequate for study of their fields. Underlying such opposition, of course, was a realization that the fourth way would bring many more women to the universities than had been anticipated.41 The other main source of hostility to the fourth way was the feminist movement, especially Helene Lange. Although Lange's "Yellow Brochure" and its accompanying petition in 1887 had called for such an opportunity for women teachers to continue their educations, and although the advanced courses had enjoyed her support, she now questioned whether the fourth way was de­ signed to "discredit study by women" through the admission of inadequately prepared students. She also criticized this measure as a step to preserve more of the existing seminars and to discour­ age the foundation of more Abitur courses, which in Prussia now had the unwieldy name of Studienanstalten. One measure of the anger many feminists felt about the fourth way is the fact that the German Women's Association refused to give any of its stipends to women who entered the universities by this route. 42 Yet the fourth way did provide an important opportunity for women who had attended seminars at a time when there were few •ω Wever to the provincial governments, 3.IV.09, and Minister of Education von Trott zu SoIz to the curator at the University of Bonn, 13.VIII.09, ibid., No. 5, Vol. X. 41 Memoranda from the universities of Berlin (29.VII.09), Bonn (24.VI.), Gottingen (16.VIL), Greifswald (31.VII.), Halle (27.VIL), Kiel (14.VII.), and Breslau (22.XI.), all in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. XII. 42 Clipping regarding the stipends, undated but filed with materials for 1909, ibid., Vol. XII; Helene Lange, Kampfzeiten: Aufsatze una Reden aus vier ]ahrzehnten, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1928), 1: 342-49.

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THE DECISIVE REFORMS

or no Abitur courses. In Wiirttemberg, Vera Vollmer, then a teacher at the seminar of the Katharinenstift in Stuttgart, was among the first women to take advantage of the fourth way; in 1919, she would become the first woman to obtain a position in that state's Ministry of Education. In Prussia, one of the earliest teachers to matriculate via the fourth way was Hedwig Dransfeld, who in the 1920s would be a Reichstag deputy for the Catholic Center party. As of 1912, 787 seminar graduates were enrolled in the philosophical faculties of Prussian universities, compared to 772 Abiturientinnen.43 Yet, despite these new opportunities for academic accomplishment, no woman reached the highest pinnacle of the educational structure in Imperial Germany, a university chair.44 In Prussia, only two cases received serious attention as possible precedents, both at the University of Bonn. In 1900, Adeline Rittershaus-Bjarnason, a scholar in old Scandinavian literature, applied to the curator at Bonn about becoming a Privatdozent. After being directed to the ministry in Berlin and from there back to the university, Rittershaus succeeded in having the question of a female instructor brought before the philosophical faculty. It rejected the idea by a vote of sixteen to fourteen without going into the specifics of her qualifications. Rittershaus later became a Privatdozent at the University of Zurich.45 By 1906 the faculty at Bonn had changed its mind and supported the Habilitation of Countess Marie von Linden, a zoologist who already worked in a laboratory there. On this occasion, the Ministry of Education consulted all the universities about the general issue of female professors, receiving a wide variety of responses. It decided in the end to reject Bonn's request, but Linden received a raise, the title of "Professor," and the directorship of a parasitology laboratory.46 43 Hildegard Guide, "Vera Vollmer: Wegweiserin der Madchenbildung, 18741953," in Lebensbilder aus Schwaben und Franken, vol. 14 (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 433-68; Marianne Punder, "Hedwig Dransfeld," in Westfalische Lebensbilder, vol. 12, ed. Robert Stopperich (Miinster, 1979), pp. 145-61; Judith Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau in akademischen Berufen (Leipzig, 1915), p. 32. 44 Dr. Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner became an instructor at the Handelshochschule (Commerce Academy) in Mannheim in 1908, but this was not a true university. 45 Adeline Rittershaus-Bjarnason, "Kann eine Frau in Deutschland Privatdozenrin werden?" Frauen-Korrespondenz, 11 and 14.11.02, copies of which are in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, adhib. II. 46 Studt to university curators, 19.VII.07, all responses, and Holle's final answer to Bonn, 29.V.08, ibid., adhib. III.

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EIGHT REFORM OF THE G I R L S ' S C H O O L S

Access to medical certification, matriculation, and the examination pro facilitate docendi affected only a tiny minority of German women, even of those from the middle and upper classes. A much broader impact would come from the reform of the higher girls' schools and the fuller recognition given to Abitur courses in this period. By the first years of the twentieth century, virtually all interested parties agreed that both steps were necessary, but there was substantial disagreement about the degree to which the interests of the minority of girls expected to take the Abitur should be served in institutions intended for the majority who would leave school by age sixteen. As discussed in Chapter Six, the Association for Girls' Secondary Education in 1903 insisted that Abitur courses should not "hold up, disturb, or influence in any way" the basic girls' schools, whereas the Women Teachers' Association and the Association for Women's Education and University Studies both favored separate six-year preparatory programs after seven years of the girls' school. 47 Also still under dispute were the role of women in educating German girls and the future of private schools in an era of increasing state regulation. Many smaller states, and even Saxony, waited for Prussia to take the lead. 48 The southern states, however, which had never introduced even a recommended curriculum for the higher girls' schools, initiated reforms before the Prussian decrees of August 1908. In Baden, the first mandatory curriculum for the higher girls' schools was introduced in 1905, bringing a ten-year course with more rigorous mathematics and language instruction. 49 In Wurttemberg, Emil Heintzeler, the director of the Katharinenstift, first proposed a common curriculum for all girls' schools in 1897, but the local branch of the Association for Girls' Secondary Education did not agree to ask the government for such a regulation until 1901. Two years later, the Ministry of Education issued the first official curriculum for Wurttemberg's girls' schools, which approached that of the Realschulen through the inclusion of algebra and geometry and of more hours for French and English than most schools had offered until then. As part of the reform, the girls' 17

See above, p. 180. Bernhard Rost, Entwtcklung und Stand des hbheren Madchenschulwesens im Konigreich Sachsen (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 112-13. 49 Emil Willms, Denkschnft uber die Neugestaltung der hoheren Madchenschule (Hannover, 1906), pp. 8-9. 48

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THE DECISIVE REFORMS

schools were put under the same administrators as boys' secondary schools.50 Deliberations in Bavaria lasted much longer. In November 1899, the Ministry of Education commissioned Josef Heigenmooser, director of a seminar for women teachers, to gather information about all girls' schools with goals higher than those of the elementary schools. After receiving a variety of petitions calling for reform, the ministry in 1904 solicited opinions about a uniform curriculum and in 1905 held a conference to discuss the issues. Yet in 1906, it reported to the legislature that it could not exercise coercion with regard to a more rigorous curriculum and could not force parents to send their daughters to secular schools. Another commission was created in 1907, but its report to the legislature in 1908 still did not satisfy teachers who wanted the girls' schools to be able to grant the same privileges as the boys' Realschulen. A plan considered in 1910 called for two varieties of girls' schools, a relatively traditional higher school and a Realschule, but the curriculum finally issued in April 1911 offered a compromise between the two. In mathematics and science it fell short of the Realschule curriculum, and it did not require the teaching of a second foreign language.51 Deliberations in Prussia lasted almost as long as in Bavaria. The proposals and discussions devoted more attention to the proper form of Abitur courses for girls, which the southern states had left aside while considering reform of the basic girls' schools. In Baden and Wurttemberg, this neglect had been possible because of government decisions to allow some girls to attend boys' secondary schools, an experiment not introduced in Prussia.52 Serious consideration of reforming Prussia's girls' schools did not begin until 1899, when Studt replaced Bosse as minister of education and Waetzoldt replaced Schneider as the official in charge of overseeing the girls' schools. Waetzoldt, whose views on the Oberlehrerinnenprtifung and the fourth way have already been mentioned, had previously served as a teacher in a girls' school in 50 Emil Heintzeler, Das Konigin-Kathanna-Stift in Stuttgart: Seine Geschichte von 1818 bis 1918 (Stuttgart, 1918), p. 74; Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Mddchenschulwesens, pp. 29-34. 51 Beilner, Emanzipation der bayerischen Lehrerin, pp. 96-98; Frauenbildung 4 (1905): 254; ibid. 7 (1908): 417-24; Mtinchener Neueste Nachrichten, 8.V.06; M. Celsa Brod, Festschrift zur Funfzigjahrfeier des Bayrischen Landesvereins fiir das hbhere Madchenschulwesen (n.p., 1926), p. 7; Gaab, "Madchenschulwesen in Bayern," p. 123. 52 See the discussion of coeducation in Chapter Nine.

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Hamburg, as director of the Royal Elisabeth School in Berlin from 1886 to 1894, and as a school inspector in both Magdeburg and the province of Silesia. Gossler had sent him to study English women's colleges in 1888, and he had also visited girls' schools in Belgium and Switzerland and headed the German educational exhibit at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.53 Waetzoldt enjoyed the respect of most participants in the debates over female education, in part, no doubt, because his death in 1904 came before any final decisions had been taken. Not content to rely on his own experiences, Waetzoldt in 1900 brought Jakob Wychgram from his position as director of the municipal higher girls' school in Leipzig to head the Royal Augusta School in Berlin. Wychgram had published a detailed study of the French girls' schools in 1886 and had more recently edited a handbook of girls' secondary education. He would later comment that his experiences as an examiner of the graduates of Lange's Gymnasium course had changed his mind about the possibilities for higher education for women.54 Until reform plans could be formulated, Studt and Waetzoldt continued Bosse's policies, particularly with regard to the Abitur courses. In November 1899 and again in January 1901, Studt rejected appeals for a six-year course from Cologne's Association for a Girls' Gymnasium, reasoning that it would be a mistake to disrupt the existing schools and "alienate girls from their true calling" just to serve the interests of a small minority of pupils. He advised the Cologne group to imitate Lange's four-year course for graduates of higher girls' schools.55 In January 1901, however, Waetzoldt was already suggesting to Studt steps to be taken in preparation for "the conference being contemplated by Your Excellency" to deal with female education. Of crucial importance for the evolution of Waetzoldt's thinking was his inspection in November 1900 of the new four-year Abitur course in Breslau. He learned that both teachers and pupils were 53 See the eulogy of Waetzoldt in Jakob Wychgram, Vortrage und Aufsatze zum Madchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 251-71; and Friedrich Bachmann, Geschichte der Koniglichen Ehsabethschule zu Berlin (Berlin, 1897), pp. 78-82. 54 Jakob Wychgram, Des weibhche Untemchtswesen in Frankreich (Leipzig, 1886); idem, ed., Handbuch des hoheren Madchenschulwesens (Leipzig, 1897); Hildegard Bogerts, Bildung und berufliches Selbstverstandnis lehrenden Frauen in der Zeit von 1885 bis 1920 (Frankfurt and Bern, 1977), p. 116. 55 Ludwig Voss, Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschule: Allgemeine Schulentwicklung in Deutschland und Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschulen Kolns (Opladen, 1952), pp. 321-22.

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THE DECISIVE REFORMS

having great difficulty in making a smooth transition from the relaxed pace of the girls' schools to the more intensive drive for the Abitur. When in 1901 Waetzoldt asked a number of educators for their views on reform of the girls' schools and Abitur courses, he stressed the need for an "organic connection" between the two. His own proposals to Studt in September attempted to compromise between the views of the men teachers and the feminists by introducing optional Latin in the last two or three grades of a tenyear girls' school. This would serve to keep prospective Abiturientinnen in the regular schools while giving them a better preparation for their later work.56 Waetzoldt also wanted to serve the needs of the majority of pupils from the girls' schools. For these girls who would not pursue the Abitur, he developed proposals for the type of general continuation courses advocated by the Women Teachers' Association in 1903. Fearful that creation of separate programs for female elementary and secondary teachers would produce a social division between these groups and lead "daughters from educated families" to abandon elementary teaching, he proposed that prospective secondary teachers simply spend a fourth year in the seminars. As already mentioned, he believed such a program should qualify women teachers for the universities.57 In the short run, however, Waetzoldt did not carry his views within the Ministry of Education. In March 1902, Studt informed the House of Deputies that he was considering approval for the establishment of six-year Abitur courses of the type he and Bosse had previously rejected. Not wanting to overturn single-handedly the Ministry of State's decision of 1898, he brought this plan before the other ministers, the majority of whom ultimately assented to experiments with a "7 plus 6" structure for the Abitur course. The main reason the other ministers could accept this plan was that it would not impose a more difficult curriculum on the majority of girls. Within a few months, the existing preparatory courses in Breslau, Hannover, Konigsberg, and Frankfurt converted to this 56

Waetzoldt to Studt, 31.1.01 and IX.01, plus various letters soliciting experts' views, all in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. 1; Else Luders, Stand der deutschen Frauenbewegung itn Beginn des Jahres 1902 (Zurich, 1902), p. 36. For similar problems with the Abitur course in Frankfurt, see Maria Rudolph, Die Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Otto Schlander (Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979), p. 118. 57 See especially Auguste Sprengel, Erinnerungen aus meinem Schulleben (Berlin, 1932), p. 43. 259

EIGHT

six-year option. New courses opened in Cologne, Schoneberg, and Charlottenburg, with the last two cities joining Breslau in having municipally operated programs.58 It appears that the Ministry of Education intended to delay any final restructuring of girls' education until at least the first classes had graduated from these new programs. Yet continuing agitation by the various interested groups, as well as the advent of matriculation in Bavaria and Wiirttemberg, prompted an early reopening of the general question under Waetzoldt's successor, Paul Meyer, who was appointed in August 1904. Meyer, like Karl Schneider, was a Protestant pastor with experience in the administration of the elementary schools. His previous position had been as director of the state-run seminar for women teachers and governesses at Droyssig. With regard to the higher girls' schools, Meyer shared the attitudes of the male directors who ran the Association for Girls' Secondary Education. At a meeting on 9 December 1904, Meyer and other ministry officials discussed a "10 plus 3" structure of the type favored by this organization, with Latin taught only in the three-year preparatory course.59 News of this retreat from both Waetzoldt's original stance and the experiments begun in 1902 brought about intervention by Empress Augusta Victoria. She was led to act by Marie Martin, her important if controversial advisor on girls' education. Born in 1856, Martin had obtained her teaching certificate at the age of thirtyone. She later studied German and history in the advanced courses at Gottingen, passing the Oberlehrerinnenprufung in 1897. Martin first came to the empress's attention through a speech she delivered at the Evangelical-Social Congress in 1902, and in April of that year she received an appointment at the state-run seminar at Burgsteinfurt. She moved to the state girls' school in Trier in January 1903, then to the Royal Augusta School in October of that year. Her sudden exit from Trier stemmed in part from her aggressive Protestantism in that predominantly Catholic area, in part from her distribution of copies of her handbook of girls' education to teenagers without their parents' permission. According to a critical report about her written by Paul Meyer, this work "spoke of 58 Prussia, Haus der Abgeordneten, Stenographische Berichte, 19th leg., 4th sess., cols. 3119, 3398-3,400; copy of Ministry of State protocol for 16.V.02 in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. III. 59 Schwartzkopff to other ministry officials, with very detailed plans for restructuring the girls' schools, 28.XI.04, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. I; Meyer to Althoff, 24.XII.04, in Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. I.

260

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

sexual matters in an injudicious manner," with an "unhealthy" amount of repetition.60 Martin shared most of Waetzoldt's views, wanting to educate young women to take a more active part in the cultural life and social problems of modern society, but within a traditional Christian framework. She shared Lange's desire to have women assume the major responsibility for teaching girls but rejected any Abitur course that would take girls out of the regular school before age sixteen. Believing that Meyer had dropped Waetzoldt's plans, Martin submitted to the empress a sharp critique of what she considered to be a reactionary development. In this memorandum, she also complained about the second-class position at the Augusta School of even Oberlehrerinnen like herself.61 In a private conversation with the theologian Adolf von Harnack on 4 January 1905, the empress demonstrated how strong an impression Martin's views had made on her. Noting the large percentage of girls from the upper classes who never married, the empress argued that the schools must do more to prepare all girls for possible careers. Fearful that men teachers would resist any changes, she asserted that women must have a significant voice in planning all reforms. Echoing Martin, she also insisted that there should be a clear distinction between Oberlehrerinnen and their less educated colleagues, even claiming that men and women in the upper grades should receive equal pay for equal work. Although Harnack did not accept this last point, he found the empress to have been generally well advised. He steered her toward Friedrich Althoff for help in achieving her goals.62 60 See Martin to Hermann von Lucanus, 4.III.06, and two reports about Martin, from 111.06 and XI.08, in ZStA-II, Zivilkabinett, 2.2.1, No. 22315. The first report was written by Meyer in an attempt to justify the ministry's refusal to follow the empress's suggestion that Martin be appointed director of the Royal Elisabeth School, the second probably so that she would not be named as Wychgram's replacement at the Augusta School. See also Hans Schlemmer, "Marie Martin," in Lebensbilder aus Kurhessen und Waldeck, 1830-1930, vol. 3, ed. Ingeborg Schnack (Marburg, 1942), pp. 297-302. Gertrud Baumer stresses that Hedwig Heyl also helped to interest the empress in reform of the girls' schools: Lebensweg durch eine Zeitenwende (Tubingen, 1933), p. 211. 61 On Martin's appeal to the empress, see Meyer's report from 1906 as cited in note 60. Martin's works included Die Frau als Gehilfin bei sozialen Aufgaben (Gottingen, 1902); Lehrbuch der Madchenerziehung (Leipzig, 1903); Wahre Frauenbildung (Tubingen, 1905); Die hohere Madchenschule in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1905); Die weibliche Bildungsbediirfnisse der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1906); and Aus der Welt der deutschen Frau (Berlin, 1906). « Harnack to Althoff, 5.1.05, in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. I.

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Although Althoff's position as head of the department for the universities and the boys' secondary schools gave him no role in administering the higher girls' schools, he was already interested in the problem of matriculation for Abiturientinnen and during 1904 had held discussions about reforming the girls' schools with Harnack and Friedrich Paulsen, the famous historian of German higher education.63 The empress summoned Althoff to an audience on 10 January 1905, and a few days later he reported to her closest aide that Studt agreed with her views and was willing to include women in the planning of the reforms. Relying on the precedent of the successful conference that reformed the boys' schools in 1900, Studt wanted to have a small committee draft preliminary questions to be circulated for comments before he set a final agenda for the deliberations.64 Although Studt and Althoff failed in their efforts to open matriculation to women at this time, preparations for the conference went on throughout 1905. The empress helped to keep the ministry's attention focused on the role of women teachers. At her behest, Martin sent Studt a list of women who might take part in the deliberations; it explicitly excluded representatives of organizations pursuing "radical goals." In August, one of the empress's aides asked Studt to supply information about the number and position of women teachers in the public girls' schools. A followup letter in November asked what percentage of instruction in the upper grades and seminars was in women's hands and whether Studt intended to increase this proportion. Having learned from Studt that the interest and support of Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow would be necessary to persuade the Ministry of State to accept reform of the girls' schools, the empress had Martin prepare a summary of the issues for him. This report included the assertion, "The education of women must be primarily a task for women."65 During the preparations for the conference, one issue achieved a prominence it had not had in the public debate over the higher 63 Sachse, Althoff, p. 342; Friedrich Paulsen, An Autobiography, trans, and ed. Theodor Lorenz (New York, 1938), p. 462. 64 Althoff to Countess Brockdorff, 14.1.05, in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. I. 65 Martin to Studt, 25.111.05, Knesebeck to Studt, 6.VIII.05, and Behr-Pinnow to Studt, 17.XI.05, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vols. I, II, and III, respectively; Martin's essay "Der Staat und die Frauenbildung," ibid., Vol. I; Martin to Althoff, 15.IX.05, in Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. IV.

262

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

girls' schools: reduction of the influence of the Catholic church. In March 1905 Professor Wilhelm Lexis, a close associate of Althoff, submitted two memoranda that argued that, by raising the curriculum of the girls' schools to a level clearly above that of the Catholic private schools, the government could force the latter either to follow suit—and hire more teachers who had attended the universities—or to lose their clientele. In either case, Lexis suggested, girls would be less imbued with the sort of "purely emotional, extreme Catholicism" that he believed produced a serious division in the nation. Paul Meyer also argued that any restructuring should make "the hiring of academically trained teachers, including men, indispensable" for the Catholic schools. Meyer noted that the advanced courses for teachers at Munster had demonstrated that even members of teaching orders "could be raised to the spirit of free inquiry under the influence and leadership of scientifically minded men."66 A more rigorous curriculum for the higher girls' school was going to require better educated teachers even for the lower grades. Despite Waetzoldt's concern about creating a social division between female elementary and secondary teachers if they were to attend different seminars, a growing number of educators agreed with the Association for Girls' Secondary Education that secondary teachers required a longer course. That women in the elementary schools had begun to advocate seminars more oriented to their own concerns made this issue the least controversial of the reforms ultimately enacted.67 The proper structure for the Abitur courses remained much more controversial. While Meyer continued to advocate a 10 plus 3 for66 Memoranda by Lexis, 3. and 8.III.05, and by Meyer, 15.III.05, ibid., Vols. I, HI, and H, respectively. Sachse sees the desire to weaken Catholic influence in AlsaceLorraine and the Polish areas of Prussia as "the core of Althoff's interest in the reform of girls' schools": Althoff, pp. 344-45. I view this as an exaggeration, however, considering that Althoff had recently been involved in the establishment of a Catholic theological faculty at the University of Strassburg, a conciliatory gesture toward Catholics. Studt in 1905-1906 sponsored an elementary school law that went far toward satisfying Catholic concerns about confessional schools. See John Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870-1939 (Chicago, 1984), pp. 137-59; and Karl Bachem, Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Politik der Deutschen Zentrumspartei, vol. 6 (Cologne, 1929), pp. 278-87. 67 Wychgram, Vortrage, pp. 152, 176; Pauline Herber, "Vorschlage zu einer System der Vor- und Fortbildung der Lehrerin fiir Volksschule, mittlere und hohere Madchenschulen," Frauenbildung 4 (1905): 495-511; Use Gahlings and EUa Moering, Die Volksschullehrerin: Sozialgeschichte und Gegenwartslage (Heidelberg, 1961), p. 57.

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mat, Lange, Wychgram, and many women's organizations insisted that such a course could not provide adequate preparation. Althoff's advisors Paulsen and Harnack, although sharing Meyer's interest in not damaging the girls' schools by siphoning off talented girls after seven years, preferred Waetzoldt's proposal for a 10 plus 4 structure with optional Latin in the last years of the regular school. Karl Reinhardt, Althoff's key assistant on this issue within his department of the ministry, shared this view and outlined "the reasons against the three-year Oberlyzeum" to his boss on 22 January 1906, the day before the conference.68 In selecting delegates to the conference, the ministry did pay heed to the empress's wishes, inviting twenty-two women along with twenty-three men. (Tables 4 and 5 list the participants in the conference. The addition at the last minute of a representative of the Oberlehrer led to the imbalance between men and women.) Both groups included representatives of a wide variety of opinions, including conservative Protestants and Catholics such as Pauline Herber, Marie Landmann, Archbishop Kopp, and the Center party's spokesman on women's education, Franz Dittrich. Gertrud Baumer would later recall the very positive feelings that the female delegates had about finally being treated as equals whose views were taken seriously by government officials.69 Despite the diversity among the delegates, broad agreement emerged on most points. All accepted the need to raise academic standards in the girls' schools and finally to recognize them as secondary institutions, with the necessary concomitant of hiring more teachers with university training. The delegates also agreed on the establishment of a fixed path to the Abitur and the opening of matriculation. Somewhat surprisingly, almost everyone followed Althoff's lead and supported having women directors become the norm for the girls' schools. Despite Lange's insistence that the 10 plus 4 structure was "economically and pedagogically unacceptable," the ministry's proposal won the backing of a clear majority. Improvements in the ten-year school, tentatively renamed the 68 Sachse, Althoff, pp. 347-48; Friedrich Paulsen, "Die neue Organisation des hoheren Madchenschulwesens," in Richthnien der jiingsten Bewegung im hoheren Schulwesen Deutschlands (Berlin, 1909), esp. pp. 137-41; Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack (Berlin, 1936), pp. 245^48; memorandum by Reinhardt, 22.1.06, in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. II. Reinhardt had been the director of the first Reformgymnasium for boys, in Frankfurt, and had supported the creation of a Gymnasium course for girls there. 69 Baumer, Lebensweg, p. 211.

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TABLE 4

Women Participants in the Conference of 1906

Elisabeth Ast Dr. Gertrud Baumer Johanna Gottschalk FrI. von Grunewald Dr. Margarete Heine Margarete Henschke Pauline Herber Klara Hessling Julie von Kastner

Ida Klockow

Maria Krause Elsbeth Krukenberg Frida Kundt Helene Lange Marie Landmann

FrI. Langelutke Marie Martin Paula Miiller Margarete Pohlmann Abbess von Rohr Anna Scheie Auguste Sprengel

retired teacher; taught for thirty-eight years at the Droyssig seminar teacher; a leader in the creation of the Oberlehrerinnen courses in Bonn director of the small, exclusive boarding school in Potsdam, the Augustastiftung a teacher in Munich director of the Victoria Continuation School in Berlin founder of the Association of Catholic Women Teachers director of a private school in Berlin director of a private school in Cassel; member of the executive committee of the Association for Women's Education and University Studies a graduate of the first advanced courses at the Victoria Lyzeum and director of a private school in Charlottenburg director of a private school and seminar in Konigsberg a prominent publicist on women's issues an Oberlehrerin in mathematics at the Royal Augusta School and its seminar director of a private school in Danzig; leader of the Association of Catholic Women Teachers; editor of Madchenbildung auf christlichen Grundlagen director of a private school in Bielefeld a teacher in a municipal higher girls' school in Hannover; leader of the Evangelical Women's League director of a private school in Tilsit head of the Evangelical "Damenstift" at Heiligengrabe near Potsdam a Catholic Oberlehrerin at the state-run school and seminar in Trier

TABLE 5

Men Participants in the Conference of 1906

Wilhelm(?) Bethe Dr. Friedrich Blumberger Herr Braune Herr Briecke Dr. Franz Dittrich

Herr Doblin Dr. Ernst von Dryander Herr Friese Dr. Albert Hackenberg

Dr. Adolf von Harnack Dr. Bernhard Irmer

Cardinal Archbishop Georg von Kopp Dr. Wilhelm Lexis Dr. Joseph Mausbach Heinrich(?) Merg Carl Theodor(?) Michaelis Herr Neumann Dr. Friedrich Paulsen Dr. Karl Rassfeld Dr. Reinhold Seeberg Herr Stein Leon Wespy Jakob Wychgram

member of the provincial school board in Stettin school director from Cologne Oberlehrer from Posen Oberlehrer from Hannover theology professor at the Catholic seminary in Braunsberg; Center party representative in the House of Deputies school director in Hagen; later, in 1909, head of the Luisenstiftung in Posen one of the emperor's court chaplains member of the provincial school board in Magdeburg Protestant pastor and school inspector in the Rhineland; National Liberal representative in the House of Deputies former Realgymnasium teacher and Hilfsarbeiter in the Prussian Ministry of Education; Conservative representative in the House of Deputies

professor of economics at Gottingen and close advisor of Friedrich Althoff professor of theology at the University of Munster a seminar-trained Oberlehrer in Hagen municipal school councilor in Berlin director of the municipal higher girls' school in Danzig director of the municipal higher girls' school in Elberfeld professor of theology at the University of Berlin the Catholic director of a seminar in Breslau director of a municipal higher girls' school and seminar in Hannover director of the Royal Augusta School, Berlin

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

"Lyzeum," allowed Althoff to promise its graduates all of the relevant privileges granted at boys' Realschulen. For those sixteenyear-olds not interested in working toward an Abitur, the conference supported creation of the continuation courses proposed by Waetzoldt and the Women Teachers' Association, the so-called Frauenschule.70

These compromises satisfied none of the groups involved in the debate, except the conservative Evangelical Women's League, which offered wholehearted support to the ministry's entire program. Both the Women Teachers' Association and the Association for Women's Education and University Studies protested vigorously against the fourteen-year path to the Abitur that the conference had recommended.71 The general reaction of men teachers was dominated by their horror at the prospect of many more women directors. A special meeting of directors of Prussian public girls' schools resolved that "a preference in principle for women as teachers and leaders of girls' schools is out of the question." The academically trained men would assent to being put under female supervision only if all civil service positions were opened to women, something they knew was not about to happen. One of the more vocal opponents, Ludwig Langemann of Kiel, declared that "a married man of strong character cannot be comfortable spending his whole life under the leadership of a woman."72 Many men teachers became even more upset when the ministry lived up to its rhetoric and appointed Helene Weihmann, an Oberlehrerin at 70 A protocol of the conference was kept, but not published, and now appears to be lost. The stenographic record of Althoff's comments is in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 18, Vol. I. For accounts of the conference, see Baumer, Lebensweg, pp. 211-15; Helene Lange, Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1930), pp. 245-52; idem, "Die Reform der hoheren Madchenschule in Preussen," Die Frau 13 (1905-1906): 321-28; Sachse, Althoff, pp. 345-52; Paulsen, "Die neue Organisation," pp. 125-48; Reinhold Seeberg, "Zur Frage nach der Reform der weiblichen Bildung," Die Reformation 5 (1906): 82-86; Frida Kundt, "Bericht iiber die Konferenz fur das hohere Madchenschulwesen," Frauenbildung 5 (1906): 207-14. 71 Declaration of the Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund, 11.VI.06, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5B, Vol. II; declaration of the AUg. Deutscher Lehrerinnenverein, 8.V.06, and numerous petitions from branches of the Verein Frauenbildung-Frauenstudium, ibid., Vol. I. 72 Vereinigung von preussischen Direktoren an offentlichen hoheren Madchenschulen to Studt, 23.IV.06, ibid., Vol. I; Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Die Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1928), pp. 202-203; Ludwig Langemann, Die hohere Madchenschule an einer Wendepunkt ihrer Geschichte (Kiel, 1906), pp. 14-15. Langemann would become one of the leading figures in the small antifeminist movement in prewar Germany: see Evans, Feminist Movement, pp. 176-78.

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the seminar of the Augusta School, as the head of the state-run seminar in Augustenburg.73 In the face of these various assaults, the temporary unity that Althoff had achieved within the ministry collapsed. Meyer reverted to his earlier support for the male directors, while Reinhardt became more favorable to the 7 plus 6 structure advocated by the more radical women. After eleven months of further investigations and wrangling, Studt submitted a new proposal to the Ministry of State on 29 December 1906. Much to Meyer's distress, the nine-year girls' school defended by Karl Schneider was revived, with a 9 plus 4 course for girls pursuing an Oberrealschule Abitur, while optional Latin in the ninth year would give those aiming at a Gymnasium or Realgymnasium diploma essentially an 8 plus 5 program. Studt realized that he was reversing his previous stance against short preparatory courses, but he told the other ministers that the improved girls' schools would remove his earlier objections. Although noting that many cities had expressed an interest in founding Abitur courses, Studt stressed to his colleagues that the main concern of the Ministry of Education continued to be providing "the average girl of the educated classes such educational opportunities . . . as will enable her to become a sympathetic companion of an educated man, a healthy mother, and an insightful teacher of her children."74 Just as with matriculation, however, other ministers refused to go along with Studt's proposals. Rheinbaben, supported by Max von Beseler, the minister of justice, saw in the new curriculum for the girls' schools "an undesirable reduction of literature, art history, and domestic skills in favor of a more intensive treatment of grammar and mathematics," which would benefit those girls 73

There was a great deal of controversy preceding this appointment, because Marie Martin, with the support of the empress, put herself forward for both this position and the vacant directorship of the Royal Elisabeth School but was vigorously opposed by Meyer. The position at the Augustenburg seminar was offered first to a Miss Wentscher, who was assistant director of the exclusive Luisenstiftung but had no academic training and no connections to the women's organizations; she turned it down. See Martin to Althoff, 9.II. and 11.111.06, Brockdorff to Althoff, 18.11.06, and Harnack to Althoff, 20.11.06, in ZStA-II, Rep. 92, Althoff, A II, No. 17, Vol. I, and No. 18, Vol. II; Meyer's negative report on Martin, 23.III.06, Brockdorff to Studt, 25.111.06, the empress to Studt, 28.111.06, and Martin to Studt, 21.IV.06, all in Rep. 92, Studt, No. 25. On Wentscher and Weihmann, see Frauenbildung 5 (1906): 347; and Wer ist's?, 4th ed. (Leipzig, 1908), p. 1517. 74 Memorandum by Meyer, 23.XII.06, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. V; Studt to the Ministry of State, 29.XII.06, ibid., Vol. VIII. 268

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

headed for the universities but damage the "aesthetic and emotional cultivation" of the large majority of girls. Both Rheinbaben and Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the minister of the interior, feared that the need to hire more academically trained teachers would threaten the survival of the generally more exclusive private schools, the continued existence of which Bethmann viewed as "a not unjustified demand of many parents."75 The Ministry of State as a whole did not discuss the proposed reforms before Studt's resignation in June 1907. Studt's successor, Ludwig Holle, came from the Ministry of Public Works and was a complete novice in the area of female education. That he accepted the resignation of Althoff, who was in poor health, meant that the officials most committed to reforms had departed. As Harnack wrote to Martin in November 1907, the opportunity for significant change appeared to have been missed.76 During the fall of 1907, however, all groups interested in reforming female education had an opportunity to present their views to Holle. The women's organizations even convened a joint congress in Kassel in October to present a united front. Although some disagreements arose at this meeting over the value of the Frauenschulen, the proper form for the Studienanstalten, and the desirability of coeducation, a large majority of the women in attendance rallied behind Lange's leadership.77 It is not clear whether this renewed lobbying had any direct impact. In January 1908, Holle resubmitted the final version of Studt's proposals to the Ministry of State, noting that the emperor and empress "have informed me several times of their lively interest in this matter and have ordered a speeding up of the decision." As already noted, the other ministers finally agreed to matriculation for Abiturientinnen, but Rheinbaben and several others still considered the planned curriculum for the girls' schools to be too close an imitation of the boys' Realschulen. Although Holle did not believe that this curriculum would hinder the Gemiltsbildung of girls, he agreed to yet another revision.78 75 Memoranda by Rheinbaben (5.II. and 13.VI.07), Beseler (28.11. and 15.V.06), Bethmann Hollweg (13.111.06), and Delbruck (19. and 28.11. and 15.VI.06), ibid., Vols. VI-VIII, and Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. XI. 76 Sachse, Althoff, p. 55; Zahn-Harnack, Harnack, p. 246. 77 Materials regarding audiences with Holle in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. VII; Kongress fiir hohere Frauenbildung, Die hohere Madchenbildung (Kassel, 1907). 78 Holle to the Ministry of State, 16.1.08, and copy of the protocol for 14.11.08, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. VIII.

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Within the ministry, Reinhardt, Meyer, and the other officials quickly agreed to fall back on the position that Studt had successfully defended in the Ministry of State in 1902: that a 7 plus 6 structure for the Abitur courses would require less drastic changes in the higher girls' schools. When Holle presented this plan to the other ministers in July, they had little choice but to approve it, although several still found the number of classroom hours in the girls' school to be excessive. After Holle obtained the emperor's consent to all the planned changes, the entire package was announced in August 1908.79 The Prussian reforms upgraded the curriculum in the higher girls' school, now known as the Lyzeum, but still left it inferior to that of the Realschule and did not bring the privileges Althoff had promised thirty months earlier.80 The state officially recognized and regulated the Studienanstalten, with a 7 plus 6 program for Gymnasium or Realgymnasium courses and an 8 plus 5 course for girls' Oberrealschulen. The new Frauenschulen were to be combined with the revised four-year seminars for women secondary teachers in an institution known as the Oberlyzeum. In general, no area without a Frauenschule would be allowed a Studienanstalt. In an echo of Lexis's memoranda from 1905, the decree specified that no school, public or private, could have more than two-thirds of its teachers be of the same sex. Crowning the reforms was the opening of matriculation, followed a few months later by the decree establishing the fourth way to the universities. It was certainly a supreme irony that Rheinbaben, the minister most opposed to change in the traditional schooling for upperclass girls, should be the person most responsible for the adoption of the six-year preparatory courses favored by the more radical women but opposed by the male teachers. Women's groups were disappointed, however, by the failure to achieve career privileges 79 Reinhardt's memorandum of 24.11., Meyer to Schwartzkopff, 5.111., and Holle to Bulow, 29.V.08, ibid., Vol. VIII; excerpt of Ministry of State protocol for 11.VII.08, ibid., Vol. IX. AU the new regulations are most easily accessible in Hans GUldner, Die hoheren Lehranstalten fur die weibliche Jugend in Preussen (Halle, 1913). 80 Detlef Midler's assertion that these reforms "extended to girls' education the entitlement regulations of the boys' school system" is thus incorrect, as is his suggestion that they "thereby opened occupational prospects to the graduates of girls' secondary schools that had not originally been anticipated even in the most radical arguments of the women's movement during the second half of the nineteenth century": "The Process of Systematisation: The Case of German Secondary Education," in The Rise of the Modern Educational System, ed. Detlef K. Muller, Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon (Cambridge, 1987), p. 44.

270

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

for Lyzeum graduates. They also found cause for complaint in the fact that, although the decree of 18 August 1908 did indicate that women could be directors of public Lyzeen, it contained no hint of Althoff's enthusiasm for having this become the normal state of affairs.81 Both the Women Teachers' Association and the Association of Catholic Women Teachers protested against the new rule on the composition of the faculty, arguing that as long as men held a monopoly in the boys' schools a similar monopoly for women in the girls' schools should not be prohibited.82 Despite these protests, however, the Prussian regulations quickly became a model for most other German states. Authorities in Lippe, Saxony-Coburg, and Mecklenburg issued virtual carbon copies of the new Lyzeum curriculum within a few years, with the last named also introducing a Frauenschule. The government of Anhalt extended the process of imitation to include the teachers' seminar attached to the Antoinette School in Dessau.83 Prussian influence also reached into the Hanseatic cities, where even private schools such as the Lyzeum Janson in Bremen introduced mathematics in accord with the new Prussian curriculum. In Hamburg, the first state-supported girls' schools and the first six-year Gymnasium course were founded in 1910, to be followed two years later by official curricula for the schools and seminars that mirrored the Prussian regulations of 1908. In Lubeck the influence from Berlin took a different form: in 1908, Jakob Wychgram became head of its educational administration.84 81

Lange, Kampfzeiten, 1: 333-34; Neuordnung des Madchenschulwesens in Preussen: Denkschrift der preussischen Zweigvereine des AlIg. Deutschen Lehrerinnenvereins (Berlin, 1908), pp. 5-7; petition of the Katholischer Frauenbund, 22.1.09, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5B, Vol. Ill; Guldner, Die hoheren Lehranstalten, p. 15. Evans errs on the matter of women directors: Feminist Movement, p. 21. 82 Neuordnung des Madchenschulwesens, p. 18; Denkschrift des Vereins katholisch deutscher Lehrerinnen zur Neuordnung des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Preussen (Danzig, 1909), pp. 9-10. The new regulations did allow private schools to have only women teachers if men were "not available": Guldner, Die hoheren Lehranstalten, p. 28. 83 Gerhard Bonwetsch, Hundert Jahre hohere Madchenbildung in Detmold, 1830-1930 (Detmold, 1930), p. 46; Alexandrinum zu Coburg, 1852-1927 (Coburg, 1927), p. 13; Dr. Schnell, "Ein Jahr preussischer Madchenschulpolitik," Preussische Jahrbiicher 140 (1910): 83-96; Johannes Wiitschke, Zur Geschichte der Antoinettenschule bzw. des Antoinettenlyzeums zu Dessau (Dessau, 1936), pp. 10-11. 84 Gustaf Janson, Zur funfundsiebzigjahrigen Jubelfeier des Stadtischen Lyzeums Janson (Bremen, 1934), p. 25; Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, "Die Klosterschule von 1872 bis zum ersten Weltkrieg: Beitrag zur Geschichte der hoheren Madchenbildung in 271

EIGHT

Battles between the male teachers and the women's organizations also raged in Saxony, where the government had delayed any major reforms until Prussia acted. Late in 1909, the Ministry of Education proposed a reform package that would have produced equality between the girls' schools and the Realschulen, with a final examination bestowing limited career privileges on the graduates. It also suggested that faculties should be evenly divided between men and women, with women acceptable as directors but with men "as a rule" taking charge of Studienanstalten. The Saxon legislature forced some revisions in the proposed curriculum but nonetheless passed a law during the summer of 1910 establishing firm guidelines for girls' schools, Studienanstalten, and Frauenschulen.85

The Bavarian regulations of 1911 also established curricula for these three types of schools. In Munich, the existing municipal girls' school added an Abitur program with options allowing either a Gymnasium or a Realgymnasium course, while a new city school and the private school in Nymphenburg run by the English Sisters added Frauenschulen. When Baden issued regulations for Studienanstalten in 1913, it confirmed the choice of a six-year course that the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium had made twenty years earlier. Wurttemberg brought its girls' schools into line with Prussia's in 1914 but chose to recommend that localities set up a "housewives' year" for girls independent of the schools. The authorities in Stuttgart also refrained from imitating Prussian Studienanstalten, defining a program instead for a three-year Oberrealschule to follow graduation from the ten-year girls' schools, an option that no municipality had adopted as of 1923. The six-year private Gymnasium course in Stuttgart continued, however, and produced graduates on into the 1920s.86 The period from 1899 to 1914 witnessed reforms in female education that marked the culmination of debates that had been going on since the 1860s. The outbreak of World War I is thus not the Hamburg," Zeitschnft des Vereins fur Hamburgische Geschichte 58 (1972): 41-45, 9, 30; Die Frau 15 (1907-1908): 244. 85 Die Frau 17 (1909-1910): 203-206, 439, 561; Schnell, "Madchenschulpolitik," pp. 88, 95. 86 Gottfried Dostler, 1822-1922: Hundert Jahre Where Madchenschule (Munich, 1922), p. 39; Theodolinde Winkler, ed., Hundert Jahre im Dienste der hoheren Madchenbildung, 2 vols. (Munich, 1935), 1: 87; Sigmund Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium in semen ersten 25 Jahren, 1893-1918 (Karlsruhe, 1918), p. 35; Heintzeler, Das Konigin-Katharina-Sttft, p. 103; Mattheis Mayer, Geschichte des Wiirttembergschen Realschulwesens (Stuttgart, 1923), pp. 256-57. 272

THE DECISIVE REFORMS

artificial point of division for this aspect of German women's history that it might at first appear to be. Although the war would produce some short-term dislocations, especially in the role of women teachers, the basic decisions taken and patterns established before 1914 remained intact. The concluding chapter will examine the immediate aftermath of the reforms and evaluate them through comparison with developments in other European countries.

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Aftermath, Comparisons, and Conclusions of female education introduced in Prussia and most of the other German states in the first years of the twentieth century involved both the creation of many new opportunities for German girls and women and a significant increase in government regulation of the schools and seminars. The reform decrees, however, left many questions unanswered. Not only did most of the interest groups concerned with female education have objections to at least some portions of the reforms, but future developments would depend both on how state governments enforced the new rules and on how cities, private schools, parents, and girls responded to the new opportunities. As much as the decrees themselves, the aftermath of the reforms reveals the extent to which female education in Germany lagged behind, kept pace with, or led developments in other European countries. THE REFORMS

AFTERMATH

In Prussia, a major question to be resolved after the reform decrees of August 1908 was which higher girls' schools would gain government recognition as secondary institutions and be granted the new name of "Lyzeum." For those on the borderline, the biggest challenge was not adding a tenth class but finding enough academically trained teachers to meet the requirement that half the hours in the upper grades be taught by such instructors. Some schools that could meet this requirement nonetheless had difficulties locating men or women qualified to teach the algebra and geometry now included in the curriculum of the girls' schools. 1 Yet, when it came to granting secondary school status to institutions, the Ministry of Education appears to have been more lenient than many observers had expected. This was particularly 1 Arthur Zechlin, Geschtchte der Liineburger Hoheren Bildungsanstalten fur die weibliche ]ugend (Liineburg, 1925), p. 34; Festschrift zur 75-]ahrfeier des Oberlyzeutns I mit Reform-Real gymnasialer Studienanstalt zu Kiel (Kiel, 1936), p. 27.

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true with regard to its interpretation of a clause in the decree of 1908 that exempted private schools from the requirement that at least one-third of the teachers be men if male teachers were "not available." As of 1911, 217 public girls' schools in Prussia had gained recognition under the new rules, but so had 198 private schools, including 65 operated by Catholic teaching orders, most of which could not have had enough male teachers to satisfy fully the new regulations. Among private schools obtaining secondary status were the Schuback-Schmidt Lyzeum in Dusseldorf, the school operated by the Protestant community in Cologne, and that run by the Jewish community of Frankfurt.2 Still, over two-thirds of the private schools that existed in Prussia as of 1908 had not managed to qualify as secondary institutions as of 1911.3 Some public schools in smaller towns also failed to meet the requirements for recognition. At Clausthal in the Harz, Nienberg in Hannover, and Demmin in Pomerania, municipal schools dating back to the early nineteenth century found it impossible to create sufficient separate classes or to hire enough academically trained teachers.4 Such schools remained under the supervision of the elementary school inspectors, and their teachers did not obtain the salary and pension guarantees that colleagues in recognized Lyzeen gained after 1908. The introduction of more rigorous curricula in most German states aroused some concerns about overburdening girls with school work. Increased demands in mathematics appear to have caused the greatest problems. In Wurttemberg, "at first many pupils, and even more their parents, resisted mathematics, and many means were tried to get around" the new courses. At the Royal 2 Dr. Schnell, "Ein Jahr preussischer Madchenschulpolitik," Preussische Jahrbiicher 140 (1910): 84; Preussischer Zentralverband fur die Interesse der hoheren Frauenbildung, ed., Der gegenwartige Stand des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Preussen (Berlin, 1911), pp. 32, 5; Schuback-Schmidt Lyzeum: Festschrift zum 75jahngen Bestehen der Anstalt (Diisseldorf, 1934), p. 7; Elisabeth Toelpe, Geschichte des Lyzeums der evangelischen Kirchengemeinde KoIn, 1827-1927 (Cologne, 1927), pp. 109-11; Maria Rudolph, Die Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Otto Schlander (Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979), p. 165. 3 Zentralverband, Der gegenwartige Stand, p. 5. 4 Bruno Engelhardt, Festschrift zur Feier des lOOjahrigen Bestehens des Lyzeums Clausthal (Clausthal, 1928), p. 35; Hermann Tickert, Der Landkreis Nienburg (BremenHorn, 1959), pp. 264-65; Ernst Mollenhauer, Festschrift zur 125 Jahrfeier des stadtischen Lyzeums Dorotheenschule in Demmin (Demmin, 1935), p. 15.

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Augusta School in Berlin, pupils in the upper grades often asked, "Why must we girls learn mathematics?"5 After the Prussian Ministry of Education retreated from the strong support for women directors expressed by Althoff at the conference in January 1906, few municipalities changed their traditional practice of putting men in charge of public girls' schools. Although women teachers endeavored to highlight cases where men had been content working for women in private schools or where many men had applied for Oberlehrer positions in the few public institutions headed by women, they did not succeed in altering the general situation. As of 1914, only sixteen Prussian public schools, well under 10 percent of the total, were headed by women.6 Thus many upper- and middle-class girls continued to receive their education in institutions headed by men who did not look favorably on women's capacity for leadership. Not all schools that received recognition as Lyzeen moved to add any of the forms of further education allowed by the new regulations. Many that already possessed seminars simply extended these courses by a year to satisfy the new demand for a four-year program for training teachers for the girls' schools. In some places, including Essen and Luneburg, city governments divided existing seminars into separate programs for elementary and secondary teachers. After the decree of April 1909 opened the "fourth way" to matriculation in the philosophical faculties, public and private schools could choose to establish a four-year seminar, rather than a Studienanstalt, as a means of giving their pupils a chance to enter the universities and to prepare for the examination pro facultate docendi. Among schools adding new seminars, or Oberlyzeen, after 1909 were the Ursuline academy in Frankfurt and the municipal school in Konigsberg.7 As of 1911, there were more than 120 seminars for women teachers in Prussia, about half of them at public schools.8 5 Zentralverband, Der gegenwdrtige Stand, p. 10; Julius Desselberger, Geschichte des hoheren Madchenschulwesens in Wtirttemberg (Berlin, 1916), p. 31; 100 Jahre Staatliche Augusta-Schule (Berlin, 1932), p. 24. 6 Martha Genzmer, Anna Vorwerk: Ein Lebensbild (Wolfenbiittel, 1910), pp. 60-61; Frauenbildung 8 (1909): 152; Helene Lange, Die Frauenbewegung in ihren modernen Problemen, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1914), p. 48. 7 Otto Felsberg, Geschichte des stadtischen Lyzeums zu Brandenburg, 1825-1925 (Brandenburg, 1925), p. 91; Festschrift zum 60jahngen Bestehen der Luisenschule Essen (Essen, 1927), p. 17; Zechlin, Geschichte der Luneburger hoheren Bildungsanstalten, p. 32; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 133; Fritz Gause, Die Geschichte der Stadt Konigsberg in Preussen, 3 vols. (Cologne and Graz, 1965-1971), 2: 719. 8 Zentralverband, Der gegenwdrtige Stand, p. 5, says there were 66 public, 30 lay

276

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

Many schools in Prussia and elsewhere followed official recommendations and opened Frauenschiilen as an alternative form of continuing education for graduates of the higher girls' schools. By 1911, Prussian public schools had established thirty-one such institutions; lay private schools, twenty-seven; and Catholic schools, eighteen. In some areas, including Frankfurt, such Frauenschulen were not founded until a few years later.9 Yet most evidence suggests that the Frauenschulen did not work out well because administrators, parents, and pupils did not know exactly what they wanted from these schools. Saxony's Frauenschulen aimed to provide continued general education without including any practical courses, whereas Prussia's one- or two-year programs mixed academic, pedagogical, and home economics courses in what often proved to be a very disjointed curriculum, especially in areas where the girls in the Frauenschule took some classes in common with those enrolled in a seminar. Frauenschulen from Tilsit to Cologne suffered from very low attendance, and some, such as those in Luneburg and Wiesbaden, failed ever to find a program that would attract a stable clientele and closed down after only a few years. Even in programs that survived, such as that at Essen's municipal school, critics claimed that the curriculum had "too little concentration."10 These problems in the Frauenschulen may well have encouraged the Prussian Ministry of Education to create, in 1911, an examination for certifying kindergarten teachers, which could serve as a specific goal for at least some girls in these schools.11 These Frauenschulen, designed for teenaged girls and attached to private, and 25 Catholic-order seminars, plus 8 run as foundations, for a total of 129. According to C. William Prettyman, "The Higher Girls' Schools of Prussia," Teachers College Record 12 (1911): 17, there were 76 public and 51 private seminars; according to Gertrud Baumer, "Zur Soziologie des Frauenstudiums," Die Frau 19 (1911-1912): 459, there was a total of 124 seminars in Prussia at this time. 9 Zentralverband, Der gegenwartige Stand, p. 5; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 259. Prettyman says there were 29 public and 48 private Frauenschulen: "Higher Girls' Schools of Prussia," p. 17. 10 Schnell, "Madchenschulpolitik," p. 85; Franz Koch, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Tilsiter Mddchenschulwesens (Tilsit, 1911), p. 83; Ludwig Voss, Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschule: Allgemeine Schulentwicklung in Deutschland una Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschulen Kolns (Opladen, 1952), p. 300; Zechlin, Geschichte der Liineburger hoheren Bildungsanstalten, p. 33; Friedrich Heineck, 90 fahre Stiidtische Hohere Madchenschule Wiesbaden (Wiesbaden, 1937), p. 14; Luisenschule Essen, p. 9. 11 Ann Taylor Allen, "Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement, 1848-1911," History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982): 334. See also LiIi Droescher, "Die Kindergartnerinnenausbildung in der Frauenschule," Frauenbildung 10 (1911): 222-29. 277

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higher girls' schools, should not be confused with another group of institutions often referred to as "social Frauenschulen," which in the early years of the century began providing training in social work primarily to young women aiming more directly at a career. Among the more prominent of these new endeavors were the "Social Frauenschule" associated with the Pestalozzi-Froebel House in Berlin after 1908 and the "Hochschule for Women" created in Leipzig in 1911 by the eighty-six-year-old Henriette Goldschmidt. In many ways, this latter institution harked back to the first Hochschule for women in Hamburg over sixty years before.12 Less numerous than the Frauenschulen or seminars, but of greater importance for the new opportunities they provided, were the Studienanstalten taken over or created by city and state governments in this period. The Prussian Ministry of Education added Studienanstalten to each of the schools it operated: a classical Gymnasium at the Royal Augusta School, an Oberrealschule at the Royal Elisabeth School, and Realgymnasien at both the AugustaVictoria School in Trier and the Luisenstiftung in Posen. At the Augusta School, a class of thirty-seven girls enrolled in 1909, of whom seventeen passed the classical Abitur six years later. In Posen, the new Realgymnasium had fifty-eight pupils in its two classes as of 1910.13 In cities such as Hannover, Frankfurt, and Essen, the new regulations encouraged city governments to take over existing private courses leading to the Abitur and convert these to the official curricula. In Cologne, the well-financed Girls' Gymnasium continued as a private endeavor, while the city appended a Realgymnasium to its higher girls' school and the Ursulines added a Studienanstalt and a Frauenschule to their school.14 Among the other cities estab12 Berliner Ortsgruppe des Deutsch-Evangelischen Frauenbundes, ed., Frauenschulen (Leipzig and Berlin, 1909), esp. pp. 20-37; Hildegard Ries, "Geschichte des Gedankens der Frauenhochschulbildung in Deutschland" (Ph.D. diss., University of Munster, 1927), esp. pp. 78-90; Erika Glaenz, Die geschichthche Entwicklung der deutschen Frauenschulen fur Volkspflege im Rahmen des weiblichen Bildungswesens (Wurzburg, 1937). 13 Holle to the provincial school boards in Berlin, Posen, and Koblenz, 21.XII.08, and again to that in Berlin, 16.11.09, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. IX; 100 Jahre Staathche Augusta-Schule, pp. 16-17; Otto Konopka, Geschichte der Koniglichen Luisenstiftung zu Posen (Posen, 1910), p. 63. See also Ludwig Voss, Die Madchenschulreform, mil besonderer Beriicksichhgung der Trierer Madchenbildungsanstalten (Trier, 1909). 14 L. Wiilker, Festschrift der Sophienschule in Hannover (Hannover, 1925), p. 21; Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, p. 122; Luisenschule Essen, pp. 7-10; Voss,

278

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

lishing the first classes of new courses in 1909 were Wiesbaden, Erfurt, Halle, and Dusseldorf. In contrast to the private courses founded in the 1890s, these programs appear to have attracted substantial enrollments from the start. The first class at the Realgymnasium in Halle produced twenty-three Abiturientinnen in 1915, that in Erfurt, sixteen. In Dusseldorf, which opened the first and second grades of its six-year course simultaneously in 1909, sixteen young women graduated in 1914, of whom ten eventually earned doctoral degrees and three others passed certification examinations for academic professions without having written a thesis.15 For older girls and women not interested in starting a six-year course side by side with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, a few private cram courses continued to exist. The most prominent was that headed by Martha Strinz in Berlin, a successor to Helene Lange's course, which had closed in 1906 when the city of Berlin founded a municipal Realgymnasium for girls. After the opening of the fourth way, however, the Prussian Ministry of Education forced Strinz's course to close, arguing that it was not needed now that women teachers could matriculate in the philosophical faculties without an Abitur.u Not all cities chose to spend money on Studienanstalten. "In a middle-sized city like Brandenburg," the faculty of the local higher girls' school concluded, "under current conditions there is scarcely a need for an institution that would prepare exclusively for university study." In Altona, the director and faculty, as well as many parents, wanted to found a Realgymnasium for girls, but city officials refused, with the result that many pupils left the school in their early teens to attend Studienanstalten elsewhere. Even in Kiel, home of a university, the director of the municipal Lyzeum failed to persuade the government to provide subsidies for an Abitur course.17 That neither Kiel nor Altona created a Studienanstalt Geschichte der hoheren Madchenschule, p. 300; Barbara Weber, "Geschichte der Kolner Ursulinenschule von 1639-1875" (inaugural diss., University of Cologne, 1930), p. 90. 15 Heineck, Madchenschule Wiesbaden, p. 14; Gottfried Spanuth, jubiliiumsschrift der Konigin-Luise-Schule zu Erfurt, 1811127-1911 (Erfurt, 1927), p. 21; Eugen Rambeau, Chronik des Stadtischen Lyzeums 1 nebst Studienanstalt zur Feier des 50jahrigen Bestehens der Anstalt (Halle, 1933), pp. 43, 51; Aegidius Huppertz, Hundert Jahre Diisseldorfer Luisenschule (Dusseldorf, 1937), pp. 63-67. 16 Die Frau 16 (1908-1909); 434-35. 17 Felsberg, Geschichte, p. 92; Festschrift zur Feier des 50jdhrigen Bestehens der ersten 279

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meant that Schleswig-Holstein would be the only Prussian province without a public institution where girls could pursue the Abitur. The eastern provinces did not fare much better: East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, and Posen had only one Studienanstalt each.18 The demand for such courses, it is clear, was much stronger in the more urbanized regions. Another noteworthy characteristic of the Studienanstalten in the years before World War I was the predominance among them of Realgymnasien. Of thirty-one established in Prussia as of 1911, twenty-seven had adopted the curriculum of this compromise between classical and modern education; only two chose the Gymnasiun course, and two the Oberrealschule program. The seventyone Studienanstalten in all of Germany in 1913 included fifty-one Realgymnasien, eleven Oberrealschulen, and just nine Gymnasien.19 These figures present a sharp contrast to those for the boys' schools, where even after graduates of the semiclassical and modern institutions gained access to most university studies at the turn of the century the classical Gymnasium continued to be the dominant type of secondary school. Without the weight of the past that encumbered the boys' schools, more Studienanstalten could choose a curriculum that provided a balance between educational traditions and the needs of the time. The creation of even this relatively limited number of Studienanstalten raised concerns about where the necessary teachers would come from, especially because these institutions wanted to have their own full-time faculties, not the part-time teachers that the private courses had been forced to rely on. Under the regulations of 1900, Oberlehrerinnen did not truly qualify for positions in the upper grades of a Studienanstalt, and few of them knew the Latin, mathematics, and sciences these schools offered. Only a small number of women had as yet passed the examination pro facultate docendi, and the combination of relatively low enrollments in the philosophical faculties during the 1890s and the rapid expansion of the boys' Realgymnasien and Oberrealschulen after 1900 meant that few men were available for teaching in the Studienanstalten. This problem, awareness of which appears to have stadttschen hoheren Madchenschule in Altona/Elbe (Altona, 1926), pp. 21-22; Festschrift . . . Kiel, pp. 27-37. 18 Baumer, "Soziologie des Frauenstudiums," p. 57. 19 Prettyman, "Higher Girls' Schools of Prussia," p. 17; Emmy Beckmann, Die Entwicklung der hoheren Madchenbildung in Deutschland von 1870-1914 dargestellt in Dokumenten (Berlin, 1936), p. 84. 280

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

arisen only after the reforms of 1908, stimulated fears that these girls' courses might, because of incompetent or unqualified teachers, end up being as inferior to boys' schools as many feminists had argued women's universities would be in comparison to those for men.20 The reluctance of many cities to establish Studienanstalten and the shortage of teachers for those that were founded combined to produce demands from many quarters that Prussia should allow girls into existing secondary schools for boys. Some precedents for secondary coeducation had emerged in the later nineteenth century, especially in smaller towns in Baden, Wiirttemberg, and Oldenburg. In such localities, upper-class parents preferred mixing the sexes in secondary schools to mingling their children with lower-class children in the elementary schools. In most cases, such coeducational schools were truncated versions of the boys' schools, especially Realschulen, which lasted only to age thirteen or fourteen. They thus did not have common instruction past the age of puberty and seldom offered Latin to girls.21 As was mentioned in Chapter Six,22 around the turn of the century some radical feminists began to call for universal secondary coeducation as a means to achieve educational equality for German girls, but most women teachers and almost all Catholic educators continued to favor separate schools where women could exercise a strong influence on girls. As the various states opened matriculation to women, all faced the question of whether to allow girls preparing for the Abitur into boys' schools as a practical expedient in areas where there were no separate courses for them. Baden and Wiirttemberg, the states with the most experience with coeducation in the lower grades, proved most receptive to this innovation. The former, which possessed the Girls' Gymnasium in Karlsruhe and an Oberrealschule for girls in Mannheim, granted girls permission to enter boys' schools in other towns in 1900. Wiirttemberg, which had only the Gymnasium course in Stuttgart, 20 Frauenbildung 8 (1909): 2; Christiane von Wedel, "Der Oberlehrermangel an den Madchen-Gymnasien," Preussische Jahrbiicher 138 (1909): 87-94; Hedwig Dohm, "Einheitsschule und Koedukation," in Die Frauenfrage in Deutschland, 1865-1915, ed. Elke Frederiksen (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 234. For developments in the boys' schools, see James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1983), pp. 244-45, 288. 21 Wilhelm Rein, Padagogik in systematischer Darstellung, vol. 1 (Langensalza, 1902), p. 451; Imendorffer, "Koedukation in Wurttemberg," Blatter fUr hoheres Schulwesen 29 (1912): 205-206. 22 See above, pp. 172-73.

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also began allowing girls to enroll in boys' schools about this time, although an official decree regulating this practice was not issued until 1909. Hesse, Alsace-Lorraine, Bremen, and several of the tiny states soon followed with their own limited experiments in this matter. In 1907, officials in Saxony granted girls the right to enter boys' schools but soon withdrew this decree, only to have a law passed late in 1909 that reopened the possibility of girls entering boys' institutions in areas that did not have a Studienanstalt.23 The small number of girls who took advantage of these opportunities meant that nothing approaching an ideal coeducational experience was created. In Baden, as of December 1908, girls accounted for 8 percent of the overall enrollments in boys' schools, but just 2.4 percent in Gymnasien, 3.4 percent in Realgymnasien, and 3.5 percent in Oberrealschulen. Most secondary coeducation thus continued to take place in the truncated schools in smaller towns. Similar results occurred in Wurttemberg, where as of January 1911 thirty-one boys' schools leading to the Abitur enrolled just 103 girls, and the overall ratio of boys to girls in "coeducational" schools was twenty-five to one.24 Even before Prussia finally opened matriculation for women in 1908, several groups tried to pressure the Ministry of Education into imitating the southwestern states. In July 1905, the city of Frankfurt, which had been providing increasingly large subsidies to the private Realgymnasium course operated by the Association for Women's Education and University Studies and would take it over completely in 1908, petitioned the ministry to allow girls into boys' schools as a way to avoid the costs of this separate institution. Three months later, the League of German Women's Associations called for experiments with coeducation in smaller towns that would never found Abitur courses for girls. This petition pointed to the likely advantages of such a step: "Coeducation makes boys more tractable and polite and spurs girls on to a keener grasp of the assigned lessons." In 1906, even Jakob Wychgram, director of the Royal Elisabeth School, argued in a public address that coeducation was "worth a try."25 23 Hanna, Countess von Pestalozza, Oer Streit um die Koedukahon in den letzten 30 Jahren in Deutschland (Langensalza, 1921), p. 54; Louis Mittenzwey, Frauenfrage und Schule, mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der Gemeinschaftserziehung—Koedukation—beider Geschlechter (Langensalza, 1909), pp. 62n, 100-101; Schnell, "Madchenschulpolitik," pp. 92-93. 24 Pestalozza, Streit um die Koedukation, p. 54; Imendorffer, "Koedukation in Wurttemberg," p. 207. 25 Rudolph, Frauenbildung in Frankfurt am Main, pp. 121-22; petition from Frank-

282

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

Until this time, the ministry's attitude toward secondary coeducation had been dictated by Stephan Waetzoldt, who in 1901 had told Konrad von Studt that its introduction would be "a revolution in the customs and educational practices of the upper classes." Waetzoldt had inspected American coeducational schools in 1893 and found their lack of attention to differences between the sexes to be "unnatural." He feared that boys educated in mixed schools, especially those dominated by women teachers, would become effeminate, and he blamed the declining birth rate in the United States on the neglect of "feminine" education in such schools.26 Neither of the petitions in 1905 received a positive response. After the conference of January 1906, the ministry delayed any serious consideration of secondary coeducation until final approval of the entire package of reforms in female education in August 1908. In the interim, several officials from other parts of Germany, including Hesse and Alsace-Lorraine, issued statements indicating that experiments with coeducation had proven successful so far. Most important, the head of the educational administration in Baden stated in 1908, "The experiences are in general good, . . . for the lower as well as the upper grades." He added that mixing teenaged girls and boys had not caused any "threat to morality."27 Male teachers in Baden, however, were not so enthusiastic. At their annual convention in 1909, they stressed that, although coeducation had caused few problems, it had also produced few benefits. Boys did not work harder, and the girls tended to keep to themselves instead of developing the more "natural" friendships with boys that had been hoped for. According to these men, the true solution to the problem of better secondary education for girls would be more single-sex schools for them.28 This declaration by Baden's male teachers had a special impact because Prussia was then deciding whether to permit girls to enter boys' schools. After the decrees of August 1908 had revealed that the government hoped to limit the number of Studienanstalten by furt, 24.VII.05, and from the Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, 31.X.05, in ZStA-II, KM, Sekt. 1, Gen. z, No. 227, Vol. I; Jakob Wychgram, Vortrage una Aufsatze zum Madchenschulwesen (Leipzig, 1907), p. 137. 26 Waetzoldt to Studt, IX.01, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5, Vol. I; Stephan Waetzoldt, "Coeducation," Frauenhldung 6 (1907): 13-22. This article appeared originally in another journal in 1896. 27 Paul Ziertmann, "Uber die Zulassung von Madchen zu hoheren Knabenschulen in einiger ausserpreussischen Bundesstaaten," Frauenbildung 8 (1909): 474-75, 477-78, 484. 28 See the report on and critique of this meeting in Helene Lange, "Die badische Philologen und der gemeinsame Unterricht," Die Frau 16 (1908-1909): 670-89. 283

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not allowing any in towns that did not have a Frauenschule, the League of German Women's Associations, the Association for Women's Education and University Studies, and the Prussian branch of the Women Teachers' Association appealed to have girls admitted to boys' schools in smaller towns that had no Studienanstalten. A petition from the Rhenish League of Cities, many members of which were in the process of taking over or creating Studienanstalten, repeated the argument made earlier by Frankfurt, that financial considerations spoke in favor of secondary coeducation.29 The Ministry of Education did ask the provincial school boards in March 1909 if they thought Prussia should imitate Baden in this area. Answers came in along the lines of "strong reservations," "to be rejected unconditionally," and "neither necessary nor advisable." The House of Deputies, with its Conservative and Catholic majority, also failed to respond positively to petitions for coeducation. The only argument that carried some weight was the potential inconvenience for daughters of bureaucrats and officers who might be enrolled in a Studienanstalt in one city and then have their fathers transferred to a town without one. Yet in 1910 the new minister of education, August von Trott zu SoIz, insisted that, although "some hardship is felt here and there, . . . I maintain that no exceptions should be made from the rule which requires the separation of the sexes in secondary institutions."30 Later petitions did not elicit any more positive response, so that before 1914 Prussia, along with heavily Catholic Bavaria, permitted no experiments with coeducation. Many parents were less than eager for their daughters to take advantage of the new educational opportunities that became available to them in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1907, at the age of eighteen, Kate Frankenthal, daughter of the leader of the Jewish community of Kiel, had great difficulty persuading her parents to allow her to begin preparing for the Abitur. For the Berlin native Maria Munk, the main problem was to gain her father's permission to study at a university in another city, where she could not live at home. Rhoda Erdmann's father, a teacher at the 29 Petition of the Women Teachers' Association in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 VI, Sekt. 1, Gen. ee, No. 5B, Vol. Ill; other petitions in Gen. z, No. 227, Vol. I. 30 Responses from the Provincial School Boards of Pomerania, Berlin, and Koblenz in No. 227, Vol. I; debate in the House of Deputies, 6.V.09, reprinted in Frauenbildung 8 (1909): 281-99, 386-92, 432-41; Trott's comments reprinted in the Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1910 (Washington, D.C., 1910), p. 482.

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Cloister School in Hamburg, encouraged his daughter to study literature or history but opposed her interest in the natural sciences. Even in 1918, Else Kienle, who had been the first girl to enroll at the boys' Gymnasium in Esslingen, encountered strong resistance from her father, also a secondary schoolteacher, when she wanted to study medicine, which he considered less appropriate for women than the humanities.31 Young women who were able to study continued to face a number of problems after arriving at the universities. As discussed in Chapter Eight, the Prussian regulations of 1908 allowed individual professors to exclude matriculated women students from their classes under "exceptional circumstances." Ottilie von Hansemann, widow of a wealthy banker, tried to eliminate this restriction by offering the University of Berlin a scholarship fund of 200,000 Marks under the condition that women be allowed into all classes. The Ministry of Education could not be bribed on this matter, however, and after several years Hansemann withdrew the offer.32 Yet the ministry granted permission to bar women to only a few instructors, most of them professors of medicine who had registered their opposition to coeducational classes before the opening of matriculation. In denying a request from the classicist WiIhelm Schulze to exclude women from his courses, the ministry commented in November 1908, "The greater or lesser antipathy of individual professors toward coeducation of the sexes cannot be decisive here." One humanist who did bar women students was the Germanist Gustav Roethe, who had stipulated when accepting a call to the University of Berlin in 1901 that he would never be forced to admit women to his classes. Roethe did not relent until 1914, and even then he told his female students not to come to some lectures on seventeenth-century literature.33 31 Kate Frankenthal, Der dreifache Fluch: Jiidin, Intellektuelle, Sozialistin, ed. Kathleen M. Pearle and Stephan Leibfried (Frankfurt and New York, 1981), pp. 10-14; Maria Munk, "Rise and Fall of German Feminism, the Life History of a Woman Judge," ms. autobiography in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, ch. 2, p. 2; "Rhoda Erdmann," in Elga Kern, ed., Fuhrende Frauen Europas (Munich, 1928), pp. 41-42; Else Kienle LaRue, Woman Surgeon (New York, 1957), pp. 42-43. 32 Judith Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau in akademischen Berufen (Leipzig, 1915), p. 31; Trott zu SoIz to Hansemann, 20.XI.13, in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Vol. XIII. Hansemann's money, along with some of the capital accumulated by the Victoria Lyceum, was used during World War I to build a residence for women students in Berlin: Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Die Frauenbewegung (Berlin, 1928), p. 171. 33 Materials regarding exclusion of women from individual professors' classes,

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Women also experienced difficulties in their dealings with many male students. Margarete Heine reported that during her student years at the turn of the century, most men simply ignored the women, although some held themselves aloof out of mistrust or open hostility and others paid court to the prettier students. Especially in the legal faculties, women could still face the daunting prospect of being the sole representative of their sex in many or all classes, as was the case for Maria Munk at Bonn in 1907 and for Marie-Elisabeth Luders at Berlin in 1909. In 1910, women students who chose to march in the procession for the celebration of the centennial of the University of Berlin were given a decidedly cool reception by the male students. When some even took part in the beer-drinking celebration (Kommers) marking the centennial, Hans Delbruck was moved to comment in the Preussische Jahrbiicher that such women "spoiled the Kommers, annoyed the students, and degraded themselves."34 Yet women students appear to have gained rather quickly a grudging acceptance, if not an enthusiastic welcome, from their male colleagues. The Baltic German Margarethe von Wrangell, in 1904 one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Tubingen, reported that, because there were none of "the eastern nihilist type of women students" among the pioneers, existing prejudices against coeducational study disappeared rapidly. According to Kate Frankenthal, during her years of study (1909-1914) the position of women students changed dramatically, as people ceased to consider them to be "something extravagant and not entirely appropriate." By 1916, a number of observers could attribute a marked improvement in the deportment of male students over the last decade to the "ennobling influence" of female colleagues.35 including Holle to Schulze, 6.XI.08, Roethe to Holle, 16.IX.08, and clipping about Roethe from the Rheinisch-Westfahsche Zeitung of 2.V.14, all in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Adhib. IV. 34 Margarete Heine, Studierende Frauen (Leipzig, 1906), p. 73; Munk, "Rise and Fall," ch. 2, p. 5; Marie-Elisabeth Luders, Fiirchte Dich nicht (Cologne, 1963), p. 49; Luise Berthold, Erlebtes und Erkampftes (Marburg, 1969), p. 18; Hans Delbruck, "Die Berliner Universitats-Jubilaum," Preussische Jahrbiicher 142 (1910): 193-204, quotation on p. 197. 35 Wladimir Andronikow, Margarethe von Wrangell: Das Leben einer Frau, 1876-1932 (Munich, 1936), p. 138; Frankenthal, Der dreifache Fluch, p. 30; Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau, p. 69. Basing her views primarily on publications by male students, Sigrid Bias-Engels concludes that until 1914 men and women simply did not mix at the universities: " 'Rosenknospen ersticken im Wustensande': Das Frauenstudium 286

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

The women students themselves changed in a number of ways. As noted in Chapter Eight, in the first years after the Prussian reforms of 1908, the fourth way brought many older teachers into the universities. Within a few years, however, the many new Studienanstalten began to supply more Abiturientinnen. These young women were not only closer in age to most male students but had grown up expecting to study and usually did not have to struggle to obtain parental approval: parents who had enrolled their daughters in Studienanstalten had in most cases already accepted the idea of higher education for them. As Marianne Weber pointed out in an essay published in 1917, these women students lacked the pioneering spirit of their predecessors and often did not have the same level of commitment to a career.36 These very characteristics, however, made it easier for the new generation of women students to get along with their male colleagues. The traditional fraternities never gave any consideration to admitting women students as members, nor do women appear to have sought to join these organizations. The more liberal Independent Student Association (Freistudentschaft), which was founded only in 1900, did welcome women, but few played an active role in it. For the most part, women students sought support and companionship in their own organizations. Four national associations developed: the German Christian Union of Studying Women (the first branch of which was founded in 1904), the League of German Women Students' Associations (1906), the League of Catholic German Women Students' Associations (1913), and the German League of Academic Women's Associations (1914).37 This division by confession also surfaced in the various associations and foundations that were created in this period to provide financial assistance to women students. By far the largest source of support was still the Lenz-Stiftung of the German Women's Association, which by 1912 had disbursed over 205,000 Marks in fellowships to German women. In 1907, the Hildegardis Assoim Spiegel der studentischen Presse, 1895-1914," in LiIa Schwarzbuch: Zur Diskriminierung von Frauen in der Wissenschaft, ed. Anne Schliiter and Annette Kuhn (DUsseldorf, 1986), p. 51. 36 Marianne Weber, "Von Typenwandel der studierenden Frau," in Frauenfragen una Frauengedanken: Gesammelte Aufsatze (Tubingen, 1919), pp. 179-201. 37 Bias-Engels, " 'Rosenknospen,' " pp. 47-48; Gertrud Fasshauer, "Der Studentinnen-Verein: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der Gruppe," Kolner Vierteljahrshefte fur Sozwlogie 9 (1930): 101. These organizations of women students merit further investigation than they have received. 287

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ciation was created to provide scholarships and to construct residence halls for Catholic women students. Before World War I, Jewish women could also turn for help to an association devoted to assisting them with their studies.38 A controversial characteristic of the new women students was their relationship to the feminist movement. Margarete Heine noted in 1906 that active support for women's rights (Frauenrechtlerei) among students had already experienced a sharp decline. Rahel Goitein, while a medical student at Heidelberg in the first years of the century, refused to join the Association for Women's Education and University Studies despite direct personal pressure from Marianne Weber. By 1907, radical feminists such as Anita Augspurg and Minna Cauer could criticize "ungrateful" students who did not support the women's movement; the latter, especially, complained that the older generation had not fought so hard simply to enable women to pursue studies that served only their personal goals. At that time, and again when Marie Stritt raised similar complaints at a major women's conference in 1912, Helene Lange defended the younger women, who she thought would contribute to the advancement of their sex by their academic and professional successes rather than their political activities. In a private letter written in 1922, however, Lange too lamented that she had "overestimated the first generation of women students."39 The number of matriculated women students in Germany jumped from 375 in the summer of 1908 to 1,132 in the following semester as Prussia, Hesse, and Alsace-Lorraine opened their universities, then rose steadily to reach 4,128 in the summer semester of 1914. This latter total amounted to approximately 7 percent of German students at the beginning of World War I, with foreigners accounting for about one-seventh of these women students.40 38 Gerta Stucklen, Untersuchung iiber die soziale und wirtschaftliche Lage der Studentinnen (Gottingen, 1916), pp. 65-67; Hedwig Dransfeld, "Bedeutung des Frauenstudiums fur die Gegenwart," Hochland 9 (1912): 717-20. 39 Heine, Studierende Frauen, pp. 21-22; Rahel Goitein Straus, Wir lebten in Deutschland: Erinnerungen einer deutschen jiidin, 1880-1933 (Stuttgart, 1961), p. 95; Cauer cited in Helene Lange, "Die 'undankbaren' Studentinnen," Die Frau 15 (1907-1908): 39-42; Deutsche Frauenkongress, Berlin, 21. Februar bis 2. Marz 1912: Samtliche Vortrdge, ed. Gertrud Baumer (Leipzig and Berlin, 1912), pp. 199-213; Dorothea Frandsen, Helene Lange: Ein Leben fur das voile Burgerrecht der Frau (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1980), p. 73. 40 Stucklen, Lage der Studentinnen, p. 31; Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau, p. 39; indication that in the summer of 1913, 500 out of 3,500 matriculated women were

288

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

Thirty percent of the women matriculated in the summer of 1913 had taken the fourth way to the universities, which helps to explain why the philosophical faculties were attracting over 70 percent of the female students. Enrollment in the medical faculties also increased substantially, however, rising from 321 women in the winter semester of 1908-1909 to 582 three years later and 859 in the last winter before the war. The minimal job opportunities for women with degrees in law or Protestant theology held down enrollment in these faculties: only fifty women were studying law and eleven theology in the winter of 1913-1914.41 Women favored certain universities and shunned others. In the winter semester of 1911-1912, when women constituted 4.8 percent of the overall enrollment in German universities, the percentage at Rostock was 0.7 percent, that at Wurzburg 1.2 percent. Other universities where women supplied less than 3 percent of the student body included Munich, Erlangen, Tubingen, Strassburg, Giessen, Kiel, Halle, and—rather surprisingly, given its role in earlier decades—Leipzig. The largest concentration of women could be found at Gottingen (8.9 percent), followed by Berlin (8.6), Heidelberg (7.4), and Munster (7.0), with the latter apparently benefiting from Prussian Catholic teachers who entered the university via the fourth way. Thirty percent of all matriculated women—845 of 2,796—were then attending the University of Berlin.42 A distinguishing trait of women students was their family background. Whereas the proportion of male students whose fathers had a university education had fallen from over 50 percent in 1850 to about 20 percent by 1911, around 40 percent of the women came from such academic backgrounds.43 Neither the economic bourgeoisie nor the lower-middle class of artisans, shopkeepers, white-collar workers, and elementary teachers provided as large a percentage of women students as they did of men. foreigners, Deutsche Tageszeitung, 1. VIII. 13, clipping in ZStA-II, KM, Rep. 76 Va, Sekt. 1, Tit. VIII, No. 8, Adhib. II. 41 Stucklen, Lage der Studentinnen, pp. 37, 33; Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau, pp. 39-41; Gerda Caspary, Die Entwicklungsgrundlagen fur die soziale und psychische Verselbstandtgung der burgerlichen deutschen Frau um die Jahrhundertwende (Heidelberg, 1933), pp. 74-76. 42 Percentages calculated from enrollment figures in Statistisches Jahrbuch fiir das deutsche Reich 33 (1912): 306-307. 43 Gertrud Baumer, "Soziologie des Frauenstudiums," p. 465; Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau, p. 3. For the social origins of male students, see Fritz K. Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), p. 92. 289

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The religious affiliations of women students also differed somewhat from those of their male colleagues. In a society where approximately 62 percent of the population was Protestant, 36 percent Catholic, and just 1 percent Jewish, 72.4 percent of the women matriculated in the winter semester of 1908-1909 were Protestant, only 7.1 percent Catholic, and 17.6 percent Jewish. The influx of teachers via the fourth way, as well as the gradual growth of Abitur courses in Catholic areas, served to raise the number of Catholics, so that by the winter term of 1913-1914 the percentages were 65.5, 21.5, and 12.9, respectively. Comparable figures for all students in 1911 were 66.4 percent Protestant, 27.5 percent Catholic, and 5.6 percent Jewish, so that Catholic women were more underrepresented, Jewish women more overrepresented in the student body than their brothers were. These tendencies were particularly marked at the University of Berlin, where in 1913-1914 only 8.9 percent of the women students were Catholic while 21.7 percent were Jewish.44 The marriage rate of female university graduates continued to be a subject of concern in a way it was not for men. In 1912, a survey of female physicians found that 42 out of 125 respondents were married, 28 of them to physicians. Three years later, another overview of women in the academic professions noted that 57 of the 233 practicing female physicians had wed, 30 of them to men in the same field. In 1917, under the impact of wartime concern with the birth rate and of the rising number of women students and Assistentinnen in the medical faculties—there were at least forty-two of the latter—Ernst Bumm, a professor of gynecology at the University of Berlin, in a major public speech revived some of the arguments against women students that had been used frequently before the opening of matriculation. According to Bumm, just 346 of the 1,078 women who had matriculated in Prussian universities between 1908 and 1912 had married as of 1917. Of these, 181 had dropped out at the time of marriage, 44 had graduated but then abandoned their careers upon marriage, and 121 were still practicing their professions. Although he did not recommend that "women who feel the holy fire in themselves" should be barred from studying, Bumm clearly believed that university study and 44 Herrmann, Die deutscke Frau, p. 43; Shicklen, Lage der Studentinnen, p. 40; information on religious composition of the student body and general population in Konrad Jarausch, Students, Politics, and Society in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1982), p. 97.

290

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

professional careers were deflecting women from their natural Bestimmung.*5

One response to Bumm came in a history of the Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium published on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1918. Although the author noted that just 90 of the 253 living Abiturientinnen from the school had wed, which he called "a frighteningly low number," he also pointed out that many had not yet, or only recently, completed their studies. Among those who graduated before 1911, 61 percent had married. Some of the unmarried graduates had entered secondary teaching and thus faced the continuing ban on married women, although this restriction was relaxed during the war.46 Despite this and other efforts to counter Bumm's arguments, similar complaints about the deleterious effects of women's higher education on the rates of marriage and births persisted into the Weimar Republic and would form an important aspect of Nazi propaganda about returning German women to their hearths.47 German women gained access to careers in law and university teaching, as well as the vote, in the early years of the Weimar Republic. In opening the legal profession, the government, as it had done with the certification of female physicians in 1899, acted against the expressed opinion of male practitioners: in the early 1920s congresses of judges and of private attorneys voted overwhelmingly against admission of women to their fields. As of 1925, no women had yet qualified as judges or government attorneys, but thirty-six did so before 1933. In the same period, the number of female attorneys and notaries in the private sector rose from 54 to 251. In comparison, the occupational census of 1925 found 2,572 female physicians, a number that rose to 4,367 by 1933.48 A few women began lecturing in German universities dur45 Helenefriderike Stelzner, "Der weibliche Arzt: Nach gemeinsam mit Dr. Margarete Breymann gepflogenen statistischen Erhebungen," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 38 (1912): 1243; Herrmann, Die deutsche Frau, pp. 48-49; Ernst Bumm, liber das Frauenstudium (Berlin, 1917), pp. 12-14, 20. 46 Sigmund Reichenberger, Das Karlsruher Madchengymnasium in seinen ersten 25 Jahren, 1893-1918 (Karlsruhe, 1918), p. 59. 47 See Michael Kater, "Krisis des Frauenstudiums in der Weimarer Republik," Vierteljahrsschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 59 (1972): 226-27. On Nazi views of women students, see Jacques Pauwels, Women, Nazis, and Universities (Westport, Conn., 1984), esp. pp. 11-26; but see also my review, "Women Students in the Third Reich," Review of Education 11 (1985): 33-36. 48 Vera Lowitsch, Die Frau als Richter (Berlin, 1933), pp. 66-67; occupational census of 1933 as cited in Anna Lind, "Das Frauenstudium in Osterreich, Deutschland

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ing World War I, but official permission to "habilitate" came only after the war. By 1929, only two women—Margarethe von Wrangell in botany and Mathilde Vaerting in pedagogy—had become full professors, eighteen were associate professors, and twentyseven held positions as lecturers (Privatdozentinnen).*9 COMPARISONS

Writing in 1910, the French university professor Henri Bornecque commented, "It is incontestable that, with regard to the organization of secondary education for young girls, Prussia is currently in the first rank of nations, very much in advance of us and, if that can console us, of its ally and neighbor Austria." That neighbor had, in fact, introduced in 1900 a curriculum for its girls' Lyzeum and an advanced examination for its women teachers modeled in many ways on the Prussian regulations of 1894 and would in 1912 imitate closely several aspects of the Prussian reforms of 1908. Even an American feminist could find something to praise about the state of women's education in Germany at this time: Katharine Anthony considered the rejection of separate women's colleges and the opening of all German universities to women to be "a more liberal policy than the exclusively male universities of the Eastern States of America."50 und der Schweiz" (law diss., University of Vienna, 1961), p. 142. Edmee Charrier gives a much lower total of 2,231 female physicians in Germany in 1929: L'evolution intellectuellefeminine(Paris, 1931), p. 428. Citing Gertrud Baumer's Krisis des Frauenstudiums (Leipzig, 1932), Kater gives a figure of 2,011 for 1930: "Krisis," p. 217. The confusion may arise because some authors count only women with independent practices, others include those who worked in clinics, hospitals, or other public health organizations. 49 Charrier, L'evolution, p. 430. On female professors at German universities, see Charlotte Lorenz, Entwicklung und Lage der weiblichen Lehrkrdfte an den wissenschaftlichen Hochsehulen Deutschlands (Berlin, 1953); Elisabeth Boedeker and Maria MeyerPlath, 50 jahre Habilitation von Frauen in Deutschland (Gottingen, 1974); and Anne Schluter, "Wissenschaft fur die Frauen?—Frauen fur die Wissenschaft! Zur Geschichte der ersten Generation von Frauen in der Wissenschaft," in Frauen in der Geschichte, vol. 4, ed. Use Brehmer, Juliane Jacobi-Dittrich, Elke Kleinau, and Annette Kuhn (Dusseldorf, 1983), pp. 244-61. 50 Henri Bornecque, Questions d'enseignement secondaire des gargons et des filles en Allemagne et en Autriche (Paris, 1910), p. 290; Amalie Mayer et al., eds., Geschichte der osterreichischen Miidchenmittelschule (Vienna, 1952), pp. 41, 47-49; Martha Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung, Frauenbildung und Frauenarbeit in Osterreich (Vienna, 1930), p. 19; Katharine Anthony, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia (New York, 1915), pp. 32-33. Anthony referred to the German secondary schools for girls as "the real scene of reaction." 292

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

These positive responses to at least certain aspects of female education in Germany on the eve of World War I point to some of the areas where comparisons are possible between the advances made there and the developments in other countries. Some desirable comparisons cannot be made: existing data for girls' secondary schools are not adequate for the kind of calculations of enrollments per age group or of the social origins of pupils that Fritz Ringer has made for boys' schools in Germany, France, and England in this period.51 Among the problems that complicate comparisons, available enrollment figures for countries such as France do not include private schools, some statistics count girls in elementary classes whereas others do not, and definitions of what qualified as a girls' secondary school were often imprecise. As of 1901, the 213 public higher girls' schools in Prussia enrolled 53,558 pupils and the 656 private schools 72,932, for a total of 126,490. Incomplete statistics compiled by Gertrud Baumer in 1904 indicate that secondary schools in the other states accounted for at least 60,000 more pupils. By 1911, the number of public schools had risen to 231, with an enrollment of 87,178 girls, while the 212 private schools recognized under the new regulations drew 56,828 pupils. Thus, even with the exclusion of more than 400 private schools that did not qualify as Lyzeen, recognized schools in Prussia drew at least 17,000 more pupils in 1911 than all institutions had a decade earlier. For Germany as a whole at this time, about 220,000 girls must have been enrolled in all grades of recognized secondary schools.52 At first glance, figures for both France and England appear to have been much lower. In France, with a population about twothirds the size of Germany's in 1913, the public lycees and colleges for girls enrolled only 33,000 pupils in that year. Yet this figure included only girls in the truly secondary grades and excluded the indeterminate, but almost certainly larger, number of girls in convent schools.53 In England, the 243 endowed and proprietary schools for girls in 1900 enrolled about 36,000 pupils beyond the elementary grades, but private schools—many of which may have offered little that qualified as secondary instruction—still attracted 51

Ringer, Education and Society, passim. Gertrud Baumer, "Das Madchenschulwesen," in Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich, ed. Wilhelm Lexis, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1904), 2: 423-26; figures for 1911 reported in Yoshi Kasuya, A Comparative Study of the Secondary Education of Girls in England, Germany, and the United States (New York, 1933), p. 55. 53 Charrier, L'evolution, p. 139. 52

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about 97,000 pupils. After the great changes introduced by the Education Act of 1902, 630 grant-aided girls' and coeducational secondary schools in England and Wales were attended by 87,560 girls in 1913-1914, while other recognized secondary schools enrolled an additional 8,928, for a total of 96,578 pupils above the primary grades in a country whose population was about 60 percent that of Germany.54 In Russia, with a population more than twice that of Germany, the public and private girls' Gymnasien and various other secondary schools had about 324,000 pupils in 1914.55 Much more detailed research and precise calculations would be needed to make definitive statements about the percentage of girls in these countries who had access to secondary schools on the eve of World War I, but these initial comparisons suggest the relatively similar—and limited—levels of access in Germany, France, England, and Russia. With regard to the provision of opportunities to prepare for secondary diplomas required for university entrance, the German states and cities took the lead over many other countries. Although the baccalauriat examination had been open to girls since the 1860s, no French public schools offered courses to prepare them for it. In 1902, in fact, the Conseil Sup£rieur, which oversaw the girls' lycies, explicitly rejected a proposal to help girls get ready for the baccalauriat by offering Greek and Latin in the lycees. The following years would see the creation of preparatory courses for the baccalauriat at a number of private girls schools, most of them in Paris,56 but no equivalent to the four Studienanstalten supported by the Prussian state or the many created or taken over by German cities between 1900 and 1914. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German-speaking girls could turn by 1914 to seven private courses leading to the Abitur, but no 54

Edward W. Ellsworth, Liberators of the Female Mind: The Shirreff Sisters, Educational Reform, and the Women's Movement (Westport, Conn., 1979), p. 201; Kasuya, Comparative Study, p. 48. 55 Ben Eklof, "The Adequacy of Basic Schooling in Rural Russia: Teachers and Their Craft, 1880-1914," History of Education Quarterly 26 (1986): 202. A total secondary enrollment of 285,000 girls in 1911 is reported by Sophia Satina, Education of Women in Pre-Revolutionary Russia, trans. Alexandra Poustchine (New York, 1966), pp. 41, 46, 50. 56 Karen Offen, "The Second Sex and the Baccalaureat in France, 1880-1924," French Historical Studies 13, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 252-86; Henri Peretz, "La creation de l'enseignement secondaire libre de jeunes filles a Paris (1905-1920)," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 32 (1985): 237-75; on the Conseil Supirieur, George Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863-1914 (Princeton, 1983), p. 244. 294

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

public schools provided such preparation. In Belgium as well, most girls interested in preparing for the university had to rely on private courses: a municipal program founded in Ghent in 1907 had no imitators until after the war. A few girls' Gymnasien in Russia, led by the private institution run by Sofia Fisher in Moscow, offered a classical education equivalent to the boys' schools, but not until the introduction of a required classical curriculum for girls in 1916 did most schools offer a program equivalent to that in boys' Gymnasien.57 England, of course, had neither a national secondary diploma nor state-controlled schools for girls, so comparisons are not possible in this area. In the matter of secondary coeducation, Imperial Germany's experience fell between that of countries where almost no experiments occurred in this area and that of a number of nations where more girls and boys learned together. Although some radical feminists in France called for universal coeducation as early as 1878, no serious efforts to mix the sexes developed even after most differences in the curricula of girls' and boys' schools were eliminated in 1924. In Russia, a handful of private coeducational schools were opened in the first years of the century, and feminists strongly supported secondary coeducation at their first national congress in 1908, but they failed to influence government policy. In Belgium as well, no girls interested in preparing for the universities were allowed into boys' secondary schools until the early 1920s. In the Austrian Empire, a few girls in provincial towns did enroll in boys' schools in order to prepare for the Abitur, but the government put a stop to this practice after 1910. Only then did serious debate about the desirability of coeducation begin.58 The Scandinavian countries took the lead in secondary coeducation in the later nineteenth century and often served as examples for Germans interested in this innovation. In the forefront as 57 Martha Forkl and Elisabeth Koffmahn, eds., Frauenstudium una akademische Frauenarbeit in Osterreich (Vienna and Stuttgart, 1968), p. 75; Bernadette LacombleMasereel, Les premieres itudiantes a I'MniversiU de Liege (1881-1919) (Liege, 1980), p. 108; Andr£e Despy-Meyer, Lesfemmes et lenseignement suparieur: L'Universite' Libre de Bruxelles de 1880 a 1914 (Brussels, 1980), pp. x-xi; Ruth Arlene Fluck Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1905" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975), pp. 127, 180, 247. 58 Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984), p. 207; Often, "Second Sex," pp. 266-67, 282; Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," p. 278; Linda H. Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900-1917 (Stanford, 1983), pp. 91-92; Lacomble-Masereel, Les premieres atudiantes, p. 107; Mayer et al., eds., Usterreichische Mddchenmittelschule, pp. 60-63.

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well—rather surprisingly—was Italy, where girls interested in preparing for university studies had been allowed into boys' classical and technical schools since the 1870s.59 In England, a small number of "third grade" schools, roughly equivalent to the truncated Realschulen in Baden and Wurttemberg, adopted coeducation after passage of the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. In the 1890s, several newly founded, progressive boarding schools, including Bedales, also eliminated segregation of the sexes. Many of the new schools founded or upgraded to secondary status by the Local Education Authorities after 1902 chose coeducation—for financial as much as for pedagogical reasons. None of the leading public, endowed, or proprietary schools for boys or girls, however, abandoned their previous traditions. The Headmistresses' Association vigorously opposed coeducation for the same reasons cited by many women teachers in Germany.60 The status of women teachers in other countries tended, for the most part, to follow the patterns already established by the 1870s and 1880s. In England, girls' secondary education remained in the hands of women teachers and headmistresses, except in many of the new coeducational schools established after 1902. Lycees for girls in France also continued to be controlled by women, although male teachers dominated in many of the private courses that readied girls for the baccalauraat. As was mentioned above, Austrian women teachers first gained the right to teach subjects other than music, drawing, and sewing in the middle and upper grades of girls' Lyzeen at the turn of the century. As in Germany, the lack of women trained to teach science, mathematics, and the classical languages meant that men teachers predominated in the various Abitur courses created in Austria. Qualified Russian women finally gained access to teaching in the upper grades of girls' schools in 1903. A shortage of male teachers even led to Russian women being allowed to teach modern languages in boys' schools on an ad hoc basis at the turn of the century. This practice received for59

Phyllis Stock, Better Than Rubies: A History of Women's Education (New York, 1978), p. 168. See also the positive view of Italian coeducation by the prominent Gymnasium director Gustav Uhlig in Das humanistische Gymnasium 19 (1908): 21015. 60 Sheila Fletcher, "Coeducation and the Victorian Grammar School," History of Education 11 (1982): 87-98; Mary I. C. Borer, Willingly to School: A History of Women's Education (Guildford, England, 1976), pp. 293-94; Nonita Glenday and Mary Price, Reluctant Revolutionaries: A Century of Headmistresses, 1874-1974 (London, 1974), pp. 69-70. 296

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

mal approval for the lower grades in 1903, for the upper grades in 1906." As discussed in Chapter Four, Germany trailed many other western European countries in admitting women to its universities. Yet, as Katharine Anthony's comment indicates, the complete opening of all German institutions of higher education by 1909 can be seen as preferable to the continuation of some discriminatory practices elsewhere. In England, of course, Oxford and Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1920 and 1921, respectively, and the latter withheld full membership in the university until 1948. French women gained access to the various types of higher education in a piecemeal fashion: although university faculties had begun opening in the 1860s, the grandes icoles remained male preserves for much longer. The first woman did not enter the Ecole Normale Sup£rieure, for example, until 1910, and not until 1923 could girls enter the special classes attached to some boys' lyc£es in Paris, which prepared them for the entrance examinations at the grandes ucoles. In Belgium, the Catholic University of Louvain barred women until 1920. In the Austrian Empire, women could matriculate in the philosophical faculties as of 1897 and in the medical faculties as of 1900, thus several years ahead of all German states except Baden. Law faculties in Austria, however, as well as the various technical institutes, remained closed until 1919. Even in Switzerland, the conservative University of Basel did not award its first doctorate in the mathematical-scientific section of the philosophical faculty until 1907, in the philological-historical section until 1908, in both cases later than most German universities.62 Russian women never could matriculate at men's universities before 1914. After the Revolution of 1905, they gained the right to attend courses as auditors, but this was rescinded three years later. Yet the Women's Medical Institute, the Bestushev courses in St. Petersburg, and the numerous other advanced courses for women founded early in the twentieth century became by 1911 "universities, in fact if not in name," because they were given the right to award full university degrees to their students. Some 6i p e r e t Z r "L a creation," pp. 256-57; Braun et al., eds., Frauenbewegung, p. 122; Forkl and Koffmahn, eds., Frauenstudium in Osterreich, p. 75; Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," pp. 292-93. 62 Weisz, Modern Universities in France, p. 245; Charrier, L'evolution, p. 123; DespyMeyer, Les femmes, p. viii; Forkl and Koffmahn, eds., Frauenstudium in Osterreich, pp. 15-16; Edgar Bonjour, Die Universitat Basel von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart, 2d ed. (Basel, 1971), p. 452. 297

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higher courses for women by that time even included law faculties.63 Any attempt to compare the enrollments of women in universities in various countries in 1914 is complicated by a number of factors. Not only are accurate statistics sometimes, as in the case of England, impossible to find, but difficulties also arise over whether to include teachers' colleges, technical institutes, theological seminaries, and institutions such as the French grandes acoles.6* Differences in the average duration of study also skew the comparisons. Another special problem is the large number of foreign students in some countries, which can distort perceptions of how open to higher education for women these countries were. The best example of such distortions involves the Swiss universities. As noted in Chapter Four, Swiss natives earned only two of the first twenty-eight medical degrees granted to women at the University of Zurich. In 1903-1904, women composed as much as 35 percent of the student body at the University of Bern, but only 50 of the 492 women—and just 2 of 377 in the medical faculty— came from Switzerland. The overwhelming majority of the foreigners were Russians, including many Jews, who could not study at home and were finding it more difficult to gain admission to German universities. At Bern, Swiss natives did not outnumber foreign women, or account for more than 5 percent of the student body, until the war years.65 Natives also supplied a minority of women students in Belgium, where overall female enrollment before the war reached only 3 percent, thus less than half that in Germany. Just 220 of the 582 women who matriculated at the University of Liege between 1898 and 1913 were Belgians. Of the 615 women who studied at the University of Brussels before the war, only 254 were natives. As in Switzerland, a large majority of the foreign women came from Russia.66 Even in France, other nations supplied a substantial portion of 63

Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," pp. 299, 304. The English universities did not provide a breakdown by sex in their reports on enrollment in 1911: see Roy Lowe, "The Expansion of Higher Education in England," in The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860-1930, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch (Stuttgart, 1983), p. 46. Ringer makes no estimate of the number of women students in England before 1914 in his Education and Society. 65 Pietro Scandola, ed., Hochschulegeschichte Berns, 1528-1984 (Bern, 1984), pp. 500-504. 66 Lacomble-Masereel, Les premieres atudiantes, pp. 8, 71; Despy-Meyer, Les femmes, p. xix. 64

298

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, C O N C L U S I O N S

the women students. At the University of Paris, natives did not outnumber foreigners until 1913-1914, and then only by a very slim margin: 1,120 to 1,077. In the medical faculty, foreign women remained in the majority until the war. Provincial faculties, espe­ cially in the arts and sciences, were somewhat less attractive to foreigners. Yet, although the 4,254 women students in 1914 com­ posed 10.1 percent of the enrollment in the university faculties, French women students totaled only 2,547, or 6.1 percent, about the same percentage achieved by native women at the German universities. When one considers that neither candidates for sec­ ondary school positions preparing at the Ecole Normale Sup£rieure nor theology students are included in the figures for the French universities, whereas their German equivalents are counted among the male university students, German women ap­ pear to have gained at least as prominent a place in higher educa­ tion as their French sisters.67 The country where the number of women students and their percentage of overall enrollments stands out as highly atypical is Russia. As of 1905, the Women's Medical Institute and the other higher courses for women enrolled about 5,000 students, thus a higher absolute figure than that for either the French or the Ger­ man universities in 1913-1914. After the opening of many new courses in the following years and a reduction in the number of Russian women going abroad to study, the total female enrollment in Russian higher education in 1914 approached 34,000. This com­ pared to a total of 93,000 men attending universities and technical institutes, so that women accounted for 27 percent of the students in tsarist Russia on the eve of World War I. 68 Thus, in the acquisi­ tion of higher education, German women clearly lagged behind not the daughters of the western European bourgeoisie but those of the Russian gentry and Jews. In no country, of course, did fewer women obtain university teaching posts before 1914 than in Germany. Yet in most European nations women had only slightly better success in breaking into 67 Charrier, L'evolution, pp. 160, 151, 167-68, and Table 20; Weisz, Modern Univer­ sities in France, pp. 245-46. Not included among the French women students were those attending the women's Ecole Normale Superieure at Sevres, which admitted fewer than thirty a year at this time: Charrier, ϋένοίηϋοη, p. 112. 68 Patrick L. Alston, "The Dynamics of Educational Expansion in Russia," in Jarausch, ed., Transformation, pp. 96-98. See also Christine Johanson, Women's Strug­ gle for Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1900 (Kingston and Montreal, 1987), pp. 100101.

299

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the professoriate. Sofia Kovalevskaia pioneered as a professor of mathematics in Stockholm in 1883, but a quarter century later Sweden had only two female professors. The pioneer in France, Marie Curie, was, like Kovalevskaia, a foreigner, and she obtained her chair only as a successor to her dead husband. That only six women occupied professorial positions in France in 1930 suggests that Curie's fame did not make it significantly easier for her successors to pursue careers in French higher education. Only one Austrian woman, Elisa Richter, became a Privatdozentin before the war, and as of 1930 none of the six female faculty members at the University of Vienna had obtained a full professorship.69 After the turn of the century, women in Russia did instruct members of their own sex at many of the higher courses. Yet, when Moscow University attempted to hire a woman in 1908, the government blocked her appointment in much the same way that the Prussian government refused to allow the Habilitation of Marie von Linden at Bonn in the same year.70 In England after 1900, "posts in the provincial Universities were, now and then, filled by women; Oxford and Cambridge remained rigorously inaccessible." After the opening of degrees at England's leading universities, which continued to have separate women's colleges, a dozen women obtained academic positions there by 1930. Among the countries most open to female professors was Italy, where as early as 1909 ten women held university positions. Even the Fascist regime did not alter this situation: in 1930, Italian universities had twelve female professors and fifty instructors.71 The exclusion of German women from almost all areas of legal practice until after World War I had its counterpart in many other countries. Russian women who studied law after 1906 could not practice until after the Revolution of 1917. Women did not gain access to the bar in Austria, England, and Italy until 1919, in Belgium not until 1922. In nations that did open the practice of law before 1914, very few women took advantage of the opportunity. 69 Kathe Schirmacher, The Modern Woman's Rights Movement, trans, from the 2d German ed. by Carl Conrad Eckhardt (New York, 1912), p. 107; Charrier, L'tvoluHon, pp. 408, 433; Forkl and Koffmahn, eds., Frauenstudium in Osterreich, p. 22. See also Elise Richter's autobiographical sketch in Kern, ed., Fuhrende Frauen, pp. 7093. 70 Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia," p. 294. On Marie von Linden, see above, p. 255. 71 Mary Agnes Hamilton, Newnham: An Informal Biography (London, 1936), pp. 160-61; Charrier, devolution, pp. 451, 463-64; Schirmacher, Woman's Rights Movement, p. 201.

300

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS,

CONCLUSIONS

For example, as of 1909 Italy had one woman lawyer, Norway just two. Even in France, where Jeanne Chauvin's admission to the bar in 1900 gained international attention, only eleven women had followed her example as of 1914 and nineteen more were in their probationary period as stagiaires. The total of ninety-six women lawyers in France as of 1929 compares rather unfavorably with the figures for Germany in 1933.72 That Germany opened access to medical certification so much later than most European countries meant that in the years before the war the number of German female physicians lagged behind the figures for Russia, England, and France in absolute terms as well as in relation to population. Yet, by the end of the 1920s, Germany had clearly surpassed some countries in this area. According to data collected by Edmee Charrier for 1929, France then had 519 female physicians and Italy 350, in each case a total that not only in absolute terms but also in relation to population fell far below the figure of 2,231 that she cited for Germany—a number that was itself probably several hundred too low.73

CONCLUSIONS

These comparisons, tentative and incomplete as they may be, do not reveal, either on the eve of World War I or in the late 1920s, any clear pattern of German backwardness in matters of female education. On the contrary, they suggest that, rather than having taken a Sonderweg, German women had witnessed an evolution of their educational and employment opportunities that for the most part bore striking similarities to the experiences of their sisters in western—and eastern—Europe. No European country, Germany included, consistently took the lead or trailed in extending educational and employment opportunities for women. That women from economically and politically backward Russia enjoyed such great successes in higher education before 1914 illustrates, in fact, how inclusion of an examination of the social position and rights 72

Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton, 1978), p. 175; Forkl and Koffmahn, eds., Frauenstudium in Osterreich, p. 16; Charrier, L'evolution, pp. 450, 459, 436-37; Schirmacher, Woman's Rights Movement, pp. 201, 121; Michele Tournier, "L'acces des femmes aux etudes universitaires en France et en AIlemagne, 1861-1967" (thesis, 3d cycle, University of Paris, 1972), pp. 129, 136. 73 Charrier, L'&volution, pp. 301, 459, 428. With regard to the number of female physicians in Germany, see note 48. 301

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of women can complicate, if not invalidate, accepted notions of the extent of "modernization" in various countries.74 Yet Margrit Twellmann's assertion that in the area of women's education "developments in Germany can only be characterized as ineffectual, slow, and tentative, perhaps even as timid and oldfashioned" does have a limited validity for the period she describes, the years up to 1889.75 As was noted in Chapter Four, in this era German women did not have the access to university studies and medical certification that women in a number of other countries had achieved. A variety of German traditions—state control of the universities that made private women's colleges a practical impossibility, the requirement of the classical Abitur for admission to the universities, forms of student life deemed wholly inappropriate for women, and the requirement of matriculated study for admission to certification as a physician—contributed to this situation. The fears of radicalism inspired by the Russian women students at Zurich also reinforced the resistance to change maintained by professors and educational officials. Yet it is difficult to link these traditions and fears to the factors usually associated with the notion of a German Sonderweg in the nineteenth century: the persistent power of the agrarian elite and the related political weakness of the bourgeoisie. Conservative junkers may not have favored opening the universities and professions to women, but their opposition was not a major factor in blocking these steps. In any case, what successes women in other countries had gained as of the late 1880s did not, with the exception of the Sue law in France, depend on the strength of parliamentary government or of liberal political parties. The extent of male influence in the girls' schools can be seen as another "peculiarity of German history" throughout the era covered by this book, one that placed special frustrations in the paths of many women teachers. Although this domination also had deep roots in German traditions, here again it is not easy to establish any clear linkage to the political failures of the bourgeoisie. Of greater import were the major role Protestant pastors had traditionally played in educational affairs and the early development in 74 Complications also arise, of course, when countries take the lead in one area of women's rights but lag far behind in others, as Switzerland did in not introducing suffrage for women until the 1970s. 75 Margrit Twellmann, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung im Spiegel reprasentativer Frauenzeitschriften: Ihre Anfange una erste Entwicklung, 1843-1889, 2 vols. (Meisenheim am Glan, 1972), 1: 68.

302

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

the German states of bureaucratic systems for certifying teachers and inspecting schools. These combined to encourage city governments to hire trained and certified men for the public schools they operated. As Gustav von Gossler correctly pointed out in response to the "Yellow Brochure," it was city governments, not the Ministry of Education, that had hired the overwhelming majority of male directors at public schools. The bourgeois liberals who dominated many such governments in Imperial Germany had the power to give women a greater voice in the education of girls—if they had wanted to do so. It is ironic that the critical period of transition in the fight for greater educational opportunities for German women, the five years from 1889 to 1894, is precisely the period not covered either by Twellmann's study of the early development of German feminism or by the works of Richard Evans and Barbara GrevenAschoff, whose intensive research begins only with the formation of the League of German Women's Associations in 1894. These were the years of the major petitions demanding access to the Abitur and the universities, the first discussions of female education in the Reichstag and most state legislatures, the admission of women as auditors at universities in several states, the foundation of the first Gymnasium courses for girls, and Kathe Windscheid's degree from the University of Heidelberg. Although Baden was the first state officially to open auditing and the Abitur, the Prussian Ministry of Education under Robert Bosse soon followed suit. Friedrich Althoff deliberately sought women students for Gottingen, Karl Schneider helped to develop the Oberlehrerinnenpriifung, and Bosse allowed teachers desiring to take this examination to audit university courses. As was discussed in Chapter Seven, in 1895 Bosse came very close to granting Abiturientinnen the right to matriculate in Prussian universities. Although at that time he was unwilling to override the views of leading professors, in the later 1890s he went against the expressed views of most male physicians and pushed the Bundesrat to allow women to become certified physicians on the basis of audited courses. Despite this quickened pace of reform, however, the Prussian Ministry of Education under Bosse and his successor, Konrad von Studt, endeavored more to contain than to stimulate the desire for higher education among German women. Although from the early 1890s the key officials recognized the inevitability and even desirability of having some young women become physicians or academically trained secondary teachers, at no time did the ministry 303

NINE

undertake or contemplate a reform that would encourage more girls to pursue the Abitur and enter the universities. Even in the reforms of 1908, the preference given to the seminars and Frauenschulen over the Studienanstalten revealed an interest in limiting the number of Abiturientinnen and steering as many girls as possible toward their supposedly natural Bestimmung. German educational officials were not alone in their hesitancy to stimulate women's pursuit of higher education. Karen Offen has pointed out "the reluctance with which many prominent republicans confronted notions of equalizing either educational or professional opportunities for women" in France.76 On many occasions during the later nineteenth century, Russian officials took steps— calling home students from Zurich, closing down the women's medical course, stiffening entrance requirements for other advanced programs—designed to curtail the expansion of higher education for women. The British government did not have sufficient control over the schools and universities to take similar actions, but it certainly never pursued educational policies designed to bring large numbers of women into the universities. Some of the tactics for dealing with recalcitrant officials adopted by German feminists, especially moderates such as Helene Lange, had ambiguous consequences for German women. Emphasis on the need to have women teachers and physicians to instruct and treat girls and women proved to be an effective way to win support for reform from men in positions of power, and the availability of female physicians certainly was a welcome innovation for many German women. Yet the heavy reliance on this argument helped to restrict women teachers and physicians to dealing only with members of their own sex, a constraint not placed on their male colleagues. As noted in Chapter Five, the failure to extend this tactic to higher education and argue that women should have their own independent institutions may have purchased a shortterm gain—access to the facilities and faculties of the existing universities—at the long-term costs of forcing female students to adapt to the traditions of the male universities and of severely limiting the opportunities for women to become professors. German women did not, of course, share a single viewpoint with regard to educational reforms. The various conflicts that arose between Catholics and Protestants, moderate and radical feminists, young students and older leaders of the women's move76

Offen, "Second Sex," pp. 277-78. 304

AFTERMATH, COMPARISONS, CONCLUSIONS

ment, and active teachers and feminists outside their profession illustrate the complexities involved even in the history of women from the upper classes. Especially the opposition of most women teachers to the introduction of coeducation and to removal of the ban on married teachers highlights the perhaps unfortunate but certainly undeniable fact that sisterhood and self-interest do not always coincide. Given these divisions within the women's movement and the limited enthusiasm of many government officials for expanding educational opportunities, the reforms in female education introduced by the various German states and the national government between the early 1890s and 1909 must be seen as a major victory for German feminism. This is true even though these reforms were, as has been said of the advances in women's education in England after 1870, "contained within the established framework of conventional social structures and attitudes."77 The admission of women to the Abitur, to matriculation and degrees at the universities, to certification as physicians, and to the examination pro facultate docendi, along with the creation of numerous Studienanstalten supported by city and state governments, may well, in fact, have constituted the greatest successes achieved by feminists in Imperial Germany. 77

Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of the Education of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1979), p. 22.

305

Glossary ABITUR: Diploma awarded by German secondary schools, required for matriculation at the universities FRAUENSCHULE: After 1900, a continuation school for girls over age sixteen who did not aim at university studies GYMNASIUM: Classical secondary school for boys, generally with a nine-year course from age ten to nineteen H O C H S C H U L E : Generic term for post-secondary educational institutions H O H E R E MADCHENSCHULE/TOCHTERSCHULE: Generic term for "secondary" schools for girls, which often included elementary grades and stopped at age fifteen or sixteen; translated throughout the text as "higher girls' school" LYZEUM: In the nineteenth century, a name chosen for some higher girls' schools; after 1908, the official designation for those Prussian schools recognized as 'secondary' under the new regulations OBERLYZEUM: After 1908 in Prussia, the official title for seminars for women secondary teachers, often including as well a Frauenschule OBERREALSCHULE: Modern secondary school for boys, of the same duration as the Gymnasium P E N S I O N A T / P E N S I O N : Small boarding establishment or "finishing school" for girls in their mid- to late teens REALGYMNASIUM: Semiclassical school for boys, offering Latin but not Greek, of the same duration as the Gymnasium REALSCHULE: Six-year modern school for boys, aged 10 to 16 SEMINAR: A S used in this book, normal schools for male or female elementary teachers or for women who wanted to teach in a higher girls' school STUDIENANSTALT: After 1900, especially in Prussia, the name given to the six-year programs for girls which led to the Abitur, following either a Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, or Oberrealschule curriculum

307

Bibliographical Note interested in the history of German women can turn to several valuable bibliographical aids. For the period covered by this book, Hans Sveistrup and Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, eds., Die Frauenfrage in Deutschland, 1790-1930: Stromungen und Gegenstromungen (Berlin, 1930), is absolutely indispensable, although it does have some gaps. After World War II, the Deutsches Akademikerinnenbund edited a number of volumes carrying this bibliography past 1930, and these have now been combined into Die Frauenfrage in Deutschland, 1931-1980 (Munich, 1982). This work continues: see Deutsches Akademikerinnenbund, ed., Die Frauenfrage in Deutschland, n.s., vol. 1:1981-82 (Munich, 1983). The published catalog of the Gerritsen Collection of Women's History, now available from University Microfilms International, also contains hundreds of titles related to German women. Most works listed in the catalog are now at the University of Kansas, with a few at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, but all are available on microfiche or microfilm. The Gerritsen Collection includes complete runs of many periodicals, including Die Frau (1893ff.) and Frauenbildung (1902ff.) Not included in this collection, unfortunately, are Zeitschrift fur weibliche Bildung (1873-1901) and Die Lehrerin in Schule und Haus (1885ff.) SCHOLARS

Among bibliographies limited to educational history, Gustav Krusche's Litteratur der weiblichen Erziehung und Bildung in Deutschland von 1700-1886 (Langensalza, 1887), provides the best introduction to older works. For the period before 1800 this can be supplemented by the excellent bibliography in Ulrich Herrmann, "Erziehung und Schulunterricht fur Madchen im 18. Jahrhundert," Wolfenbutteler Studien zur Aufkldrung 3 (1976): 101-127. As for so many fields, the Widener Shelf List published by Harvard University Library provides easy access to many titles; vols. 16 and 17 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) deal with education. Pamphlets, speeches, and other sources related to the debate about admission of women to the German universities are included in Wilhelm Erman and Ewald Horn, Bibliographie der deutschen Universitaten, 3 vols. (Leipzig and Berlin, 1904-1905), 1: 218-226. The most difficult sources to identify—and to locate—for this study were the histories of individual higher girls'schools. Sveistrup and Harnack list many, but far from all. Another useful listing 309

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

is in the bibliography of Jiirgen Zinnecker's Sozialgeschichte der MMchenbildung: Zur Kritik der Schulerziehung von Madchen im burgerlichen Patriarchalismus (Weinheim and Basel, 1973). The "Alter Realkatalog" at the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in West Berlin proved to be a valuable aid: it divides school histories and programs of all sorts by city, with the girls' schools, rather predictably, being toward the end of each city's file. The same catalog led me to several autobiographies of women teachers. Biographical information on German women is also somewhat difficult to obtain. The early issues of Wer ist's? did not include many women, but I did use the 4th edition (Leipzig, 1909) and the 9th edition (Berlin, 1928). The most valuable source for the nineteenth century is Sophie Pataky, ed., Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1898; reprint Bern, 1971), which includes many autobiographical sketches by women still living when Pataky assembled the information. Also of use in this regard is Elise Oelsner, Die Leistungen der deutschen Frau in den letzten vierhundert Jahren auf wissenschaftlichen Gebiete (Guhrau, 1894). Longer sketches of early leaders of the women's movement and other prominent women can be found in Lina Morgenstern, Die Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts: Biographische und culturhistorische Zeit- und Charaktergemdlde, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1888-1891). This can be supplemented by Anna Plothow, Die Begrunderinnen der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Leipzig, 1907), and Bahnbrechende Frauen, edited by the Deutscher Lyzeum-Club (Berlin, 1912). Autobiographical sketches of a later generation of women can be found in Elga Kern, ed., Fuhrende Frauen Europas (Munich, 1928), and the new series under the same title (Munich, 1930). Well-informed, but without references, is the collection of short biographies of some of the first German women to pursue academic careers, Renate Feyl, Der lautlose Aufbruch: Frauen in der Wissenschaft (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1983). A very useful handbook that came to my attention too late to be used for this study is Daniela Weiland, Geschichte der Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland und Osterreich: Biographien, Programme, Organisationen, Hermes Handlexikon (Dusseldorf, 1983). Some information about the first generations of German women students can be found in Elisabeth Boedeker, ed., 25 fahre Frauenstudium in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Hannover, 1935-1939). This is for the most part simply a listing of dissertations, but the first volume includes a short historical introduction and a list of the degrees in fields other than medicine obtained by German women in Switzerland before 1908. For women who became at least Privatdozentin310

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

nen at German universities, see Elisabeth Boedeker and Maria Meyer-Plath, 50 Jahre Habilitation von Frauen in Deutschland (Gottingen, 1974). I learned much about American women who studied in Germany from Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore and London, 1982). Additional biographical information came especially from Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-1915 (New York, 1914). Secondary literature on the history of German women has been expanding very rapidly in the last decade. The most up-to-date survey is Ute Frevert's Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Burgerlicher Verhesserung una Neuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt, 1986), which contains a good bibliography. John Fout has provided a detailed bibliographical essay in the collection he has edited, German Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984). This volume also offers a listing of works in English, many of which Frevert does not include. Fout has recently published another review essay, "Working-Class Women's Work in Imperial Germany," History of European Ideas 8 (1987): 625-632, which is broader than its title implies. Numerous bibliographical references as well as articles by many scholars working in the field can be found in the continuing series Frauen in der Geschichte, edited by Annette Kuhn and others (Dusseldorf, 1979ff.). For references to secondary works on female education in other European countries, I have relied heavily on the extensive bibliography in Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, the Family and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif., 1983). Franklin Parker and Betty June Parker, Women's Education, a World View: Annotated Bibliography of Doctoral Dissertations (Westport, Conn., 1979), led me to several unpublished works much sooner than I would have found them by other means. For the virtually unexplored area of women in dentistry, including the German women who studied this field in the United States, valuable references came from Constance Boquist and Jeannette V. Haase, An Historical Review of Women in Dentistry: An Annotated Bibliography (Washington, D.C., 1977). Primary and secondary sources are included in Linda Frey, Marsha Frey, and Joanne Schneider, Women in Western European History: A Select Chronological, Geographical, and Topical Bibliography, 2 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1982 and 1984), which sacrifices depth to breadth of coverage. The Widener Shelf List and the catalog of the Gerritsen Collection also provide numerous references to primary works on women's education in other European countries. 311

Index Page references for cities and states hat do not have subheadings concern aspects of female education in those localities. Aachen, 61-62 Abbott, Francis Peabody, 124 Abbott, Helen, 139 Abiturientinnen:first,in various states, 208-209, 211, 21 In, 212, 232; characteristics of early, 215-17; petitions for matriculation by, 244-47 abortion, 127, 137 Academic Union (Berlin), 158, 162, 191 Adams, Hope Bridges. See LehmannAdams, Hope Bridges Adelmann, Helene, 71, 74-75, 76, 159 Albert, Eduard, 190 Alexandra, Duchess of Saxony-Coburg, 30 Alexandrinum (Coburg), 30 Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, 86, 103, 119 Alice Association for Women's Education and Employment, 103 Alice Lyceum, 119 Allen, Ann T., 177 Alsace-Lorraine, 220, 251, 282-83. See also Strassburg University Altenburg, 25 Althoff, Friedrich, 227, 247, 249, 303; and reform of Prussian girls' schools, 261-69 Altona, 54, 279 Altotting, 24 Anhalt, 271. See also Antoinette School Anstandsdamen. See chaperones Anthony, Katharine, 292, 297 anti-Semitism, 57, 217n, 245 Antoinette School (Dessau), 27, 28, 271 Apelt, Mathilde, 232 Archer, Georgina, 117-19, 120, 151 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 5, 12 Association for a Girls' Gymnasium (Cologne), 214-15, 258 Association for Girls' Secondary Education, 110, 113, 114, 146, 159; and ad-

vanced courses for women teachers, 141-42, 218; criticizes Berlin curriculum, 147, 149; criticizes 1894 curriculum, 166; opposes long Abitur courses, 180-81, 256 Association for Promoting the Employability of the Female Sex. See Lette Association Association for Women's Educational Reform, 209-210, 214. See also Association for Women's Education and University Studies Association for Women's Education and University Studies, 173, 210, 244, 256, 273, 284, 288; local branches of, 213, 214 Association of Catholic Women Teachers, 145, 173, 253, 271 Association of Christian Women Teachers, 219 Association of Collegiate Alumnae (USA), 224, 225, 226, 234-35 Association of Directors and Teachers of Higher Girls' Schools. See Association for Girls' Secondary Education Association of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, 160 Association of German Women Teachers and Governesses, 84-85, 110, 141 Association of German Women Teachers in England, 86, 145 Ast, Elisabeth, 265 Aston, Louise, 100 Augsburg, 61. See also Stetten Institute Augspurg, Anita, 73, 205, 288 Augusta, Empress of Germany, 86 Augusta School (Berlin), 29-30, 40, 44, 46, 47, 140, 258, 260-61, 276; seminar at, 62-63, 68, 117, 146, 268; Studienanstalt at, 278 Augusta Victoria, Empress of Germany, 260-62, 269

3 .3

INDEX Augustastiftung, 30η Augustenburg seminar, 68-69, 87, 143, 146, 267-68 Austria: coeducation in, 295; girls' sec­ ondary schools in, 39, 88, 90, 91, 292; job training in, 104; preparatory courses in, 294-95; women lawyers in, 300; women physicians in, 130, 189, 240; women professors in, 300; women students in, 240, 297; women teachers in, 88, 90, 92, 296. See also Vienna University baccalauriat, 294 Baden, 66, 70, 114, 163, 225, 242-43, 251, 256, 272, 281-83. See also Frei­ burg University; Heidelberg Univer­ sity; Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium Baden (pastor), 13 Balch, Emily Greene, 233, 234 Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, 125 Bamberg, 24 Barth, Carola, 252 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 12, 16, 28 Basel University, 297 Baumer, Gertrud, 50, 51, 69, 70, 75, 83, 192, 222-23, 264, 265, 293 Baumler, Anna, 138n Bavaria, 20, 24, 36, 48, 60, 70, 143, 243, 250, 253, 257, 272. See also Erlangen University; Munich University; Wurzburg University Beale, Dorothea, 89, 201-202 Bebel, August, 169, 183-84, 185, 197 Bedford College (London), 89 Beger, Lina, 135 Belgium: lack of coeducation in, 295; lectures for ladies in, 121; prepara­ tory courses in, 295; women lawyers in, 300; women physicians in, 130; women students in, 149, 297, 298 Bender, Clara, 213 Bergmann, Ernst von, 229 Berlin, 30, 34, 38, 61, 107, 109-110, 139-40, 279; kindergarten training in, 98; Lange's Gymnasium course in, 206-209, 216, 231, 241, 251, 258; sec­ ondary enrollments in, 54; women elementary teachers in, 67, 143. See 314

also Augusta School; Charlotte School; Elisabeth School; Luise School (Berlin); Luisenstiftung (Ber­ lin); Margarete School; PestalozziFroebel House; Sophie School; Victo­ ria Continuation School; Victoria Ly­ ceum (Berlin); Victoria School Berlin city council, 45, 106 "Berlin curriculum" of 1886, 147-49, 150, 152, 154 Berlin School Commission, 43, 54 Berlin University: centennial of, 286; first doctorate at, 236; women audi­ tors at, 122, 221, 225, 227-28, 232, 236, 244, 245-46; women students at, 286, 289, 290 Bern University, 128, 137, 204, 298 Bertling, Agatha, 33, 77 Beseler, Max von, 269 Bestimmung of women, 10-11, 14-20, 109, 171 Bethe, Wilhelm, 266 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 248, 269 Bickford, Elizabeth, 227 Bildung, ideal of, and women, 15, 1718, 109 Bischoff, Theodor, 126, 181, 185, 186 Bismarck, Otto von, 24, 48, 113 Blankenburg im Harz, 26, 44 Bleichroder, Gerson von, 118 Bluhm, Agnes, 72, 198, 204, 205 Blumberger, Friedrich, 266 Blume, Ethel, 236, 241 Boeck, Pauline, 125 Boetticher, Karl von, 164, 229, 239 Bonn, advanced courses for teachers in, 219, 220, 222 Bonn University, 255, 286 Boretius, Marie, l l l n Bormann, Karl, 30, 62-63 Bornecque, Henri, 292 Bosse, Robert, 165-66, 208, 213, 215, 219-21, 229-30, 238-39, 303 Brandenburg (city), 67, 279 Brandes, Ernst, 11, 14, 21 Braun-Vogelstein, Julie, 52, 53 Braune (teacher), 267 Braunschweig (city), 66, 77, 103 Braunschweig (state), 66, 85, 114

INDEX Bri, Ruth, 176 Bremen, 31, 34, 39, 43, 67, 212, 271, 282. See also Lyceum Janson Breslau, 24, 33, 47, 49-50, 54; advanced course for teachers in, 219, 222; Gymnasium course in, 213, 214, 25859; Lyceum for Ladies in, 119; seminars in, 63, 116; Women's Education Association of, 103. See also Maidens' School Breslau University, 221, 232 Breymann, Henriette. See SchraderBreymann, Henriette Breymann, Margarete, 209, 231, 243 Breymann Institute, 34, 44, 53, 66, 73 Briecke (teacher), 266 Bronk, Isabelle, 225 Brtihl, Carl Bernhard, 179 Bryant, Dixie Lee, 232 Bryce, James, 90 Bryn Mawr College, 228, 247 Buchner, Ludwig, 192 Buchner, Luise, 59, 73, 97, 103, 119, 198 Buchwald, Bertha, 77 Buckeburg, 38 Bulow, Bernhard von, 262 Bumm, Ernst, 290-91 Bundesrat, 239, 240, 241 Bunsen, Marie von, 55, 73, 135 Burghausen, 24 Burgsteinfurt seminar, 260 Buss, Frances, 89 Butler, George, 91 Butler, Josephine, 91, 117 BUtschli, Otto, 226

Catholics: not involved in redefinition of sex roles, 9; as opponents of coeducation, 173; underrepresentation of, among women students, 216-17, 290 Catholic schools, 24-25, 35-36, 114-16, 263 Catholic teaching orders, 24-25, 28, 29, 58, 115, 143, 275. See also Dernbach Sisters; English Sisters; Ursulines Catholic women teachers, 74, 83, 116, 177-78 Cauer, Eduard, 142 Cauer, Minna, 72, 151, 158, 162, 172, 175, 288 Celle, 42, 43, 50, 106 Central Association for the Welfare of the Working Class, 101 Channing, Eva, 122 chaperones, 41, 59 Charlotte School (Berlin), 140, 206 Charlottenburg, 214, 260 Chatelet, Marquise du, 11 Chauvin, Jeanne, 301 Chemnitz, 113 Chisholm, Grace EmUy, 227, 234 Clausthal, 53, 275 Clement (trade school director), 102 Cloister School (Hamburg), 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 54, 69 Clough, Anne Jemima, 121-22 Clune, Ellen, 224 Cocalis, Susan, 7 coeducation, 15-16, 173, 213, 257, 28184, 295-96 Colescu, Leonida, 232 Colmar, 26 Cologne, 39, 115, 277; Girls' GymnaCalkins, Mary Whiton, 223 sium in, 214-15, 251, 260, 278; ProtCallnberg seminar, 64, 66, 69, 75, 84 estant Lyceum in, 35, 50, 86, 115, Calm, Marie, 68, 76, 84-85, 87, 103, 166, 275; Ursuline school in, 24, 61, 136, 151 278; Victoria Lyceum in, 119 CaIw, 68 Columbian Exposition, 164, 226, 227, Cambridge University, 131, 186, 189, 258 195, 297, 300. See also Girton College; Cotta, Alice von, 151, 218 Newnham College Crain, Lucie, 54, 71 Campe, J. H., 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 19 Caprivi, Leo von, 164, 229 Cremer, Wilhelm, 144, 145, 180 career privileges, lack of, 270-71 Criisemann, Hedwig. See Heyl, HedCarossa, Hans, 234 wig Castner, Elvira, 73, 125 Curie, Marie, 300 315

INDEX Einsiedel, Julius, 144-45 Elberfeld, 37, 59, 63 Elisabeth, Queen of Prussia, 29, 46 Elisabeth School (Berlin), 13, 25-26, 29, 40, 44, 47, 113, 140, 217, 258, 278 England: attitudes toward girls' education in, 22; coeducation in, 296; German governesses in, 76, 78, 80, 14445; lack of municipal schools in, 39; lectures for ladies in, 121-22; "redundant women" in, 99-100; reform of girls' schools in, 107; secondary enrollments in, 293-94; women lawyers in, 300; women physicians in, 129, 186, 301; women professors in, 300; women students in, 131; women teachers in, 89-90, 91, 296. See also Cambridge University; Girton College; Headmistresses' Association; London University, Newnham College; Oxford University English instruction, 47-48 English Sisters, 24, 25, 67, 272 Erdmann, Rhoda, 284-85 Erfurt, 67, 279 Erkelenz, Fraulein von, 34 Erkelenz, Hermann, 167n Erlangen University, 128, 231, 232, 239, 243, 289 Essen, 39, 115, 276, 278 eugenics, 177, 194 Evangelical Women's League, 267 Evans, Richard, 210, 249, 303 Evreinova, Johanna, 123, 130 Ewald, J. L., 11 examination pro facilitate docendi, 140, 230, 250-53 Eysoldt, Anna 198

Dacier, Ann, 11 Dahms, Anna, 129 Danzig, 33, 77 Darmstadt, 26, 117 Daszynska, Sofia, 205, 233 Davies, Emily, 121, 158 deaconesses, 60, 63, 70, 80 Delbriick, Hans, 207, 286 Demmin, 275 Democh-Maurmeer, Ida, 241-42 Denmark, 88, 130 Dernbach Sisters, 116 Dermoid, 30, 49 Dieckmann, Hermann, 40, Hn, 142, 167n Diels, Rudolf, 207 Dierbach (teacher), IHn Dilthey, Wilhelm, 207 Dittrich, Franz, 264, 266 Doblin (teacher), 266 doctoral degrees for women, 123, 12829, 226-27, 232 Doemming, Anna von, 125, 210 Dohm, Hedwig, 96, 98, 119, 122, 124, 173, 188-89, 191, 192, 197, 198 Dortmund, 80 Dransfeld, Hedwig, 70, 255 Dresden, 39, 44, 50, 68, 84, 113, 143 Droyssig seminar, 64-66, 80, 88, 260; graduates of, 68, 74, 84 Dryander, Ernst von, 266 Dublin University, 131 Duden, Barbara, 7, 8 Duensing, Frieda, 73 Diihring, Eugen, 118, 119 Duisburg, 139 Duren, 24-25, 115 Duruy, Victor, 107, 121 Dusseldorf, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 67, 275, 279. See also Luise School (Dusseldorf) Dyer, Florence, 233 Eberty, Frau Eduard, 151-52 Ecole des demoiselles, 27 Ecole Normale Supeneure (Paris), 297, 299 Ecole Normale Superieure (Sevres), 150 Edgell, Beatrice, 232 education for motherhood, 97-99

FaIk, Adalbert, 108, 109, 111-16, 129 Fehling, Hermann, 186 Female Physicians for Women's Diseases (Weber), 160, 181 Fenelon, 25 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3, 5, 13, 15 Flashaar, Friedrich, 40, 87, 95 Fliedner, Theodor, 60, 63 foreign observers of German education, 23, 292 foreign women: as language teachers,

316

INDEX 42, 49; as students in Germany, 12223, 125-26, 128-29, 139, 223-28, 23235, 244-45 "fourth way," 252-55, 289 France: attitudes toward girls' education in, 22; German governesses in, 76; girls' schools in, 39, 107, 150; job training in, 104; lack of coeducation in, 295; lectures for ladies in, 121; preparatory courses in, 294; secondary enrollments in, 293; women lawyers in, 301; women physicians in, 182, 301; women professors in, 300; women students in, 130, 297, 298-99; women teachers in, 89, 90, 91, 296. See also Ecole Normale Superieure (Sevres); See law Francke, August Hermann, 25 Frankenthal, 26, 27 Frankenthal, Kate, 52, 284, 286 Frankfurt am Main, 24, 30-31, 43, 44, 67, 149, 276, 282; Gymnasium course in, 214, 259, 278. See also Model School; Philanthropin (Frankfurt) Frauen-Anwalt, 102, 108 Frauenschulen, problems of, 277 free places. See scholarships Freeman, Alice, 81 Freiberg Mining Academy, 123 Freiberg University, 128, 138, 225, 227, 239, 242-43, 244 French instruction, 19, 25, 26, 28, 47 Frevert, Ute, 4, 8 Freytag, Olga Katharine, 234 Freytag, Thekla, 251, 252 Friedlander, H. H., 59, 63, 78, 105 Friedlander, Karl, 108, 109 Friedrich III, Emperor of Germany, 47, 151, 155 Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, 61, 115 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, 29 Friese (school inspector), 266 Froebel, Friedrich, 97 Fullgraff, Alma, 125 Gehilfin, 167, 219 Gelderblom, Constance, 227 gelehrtes Frauenzimmer, 11, 13,18

General German Pension Institution for Women Teachers and Governesses, 85-86 Geneva University, 186, 187n, 189 Gentry, Ruth, 225-26 Gerber, Karl von, 113, 128 Gerhard, Adele, 175, 192, 196 German Association for Poor Relief and Charity, 181 German Christian Union of Studying Women, 287 German ideal of womanhood, 3-10 German instruction, 19 German League of Academic Women's Associations, 287 German Teachers' Association, 84-85, 144, 179-80 German Women Teachers' Association, See Women Teachers' Association German Women's Association, 84, 9597, 102, 105, 125, 169, 170; petitions by, 159-60, 161; scholarship funds of, 138, 254, 287; and secondary schools, 97, 160, 174, 211 Gernet, Marie, 215, 225, 226 Gierke, Anna von, 55 Gierke, Otto von, 200 Giessen, 46, 54 Giessen University, 128, 201, 231, 232, 249, 289 Girls' Public Day School Company, 151 Girton College, 121, 151, 152, 156, 158, 195, 197, 201 Gleim, Betty, 16, 17-19, 31, 42, 43, 50, 58,59 Gleiss, Maria, 232, 236, 243 Gnauck-Kiihne, Elisabeth, 76, 195, 233 Gneist, Rudolf von, 207 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 4 Goette, Alexander, 226 Goitein, Rahel, 194, 211, 234, 243, 288 Goldbeck, Karl, 206 Goldschmidt, Henriette, 103, 104, 119, 278 Goldschmidt, Johanna, 103 Goodman, Kay, 7 Gordon, Alice, 186, 189 Gossler, Gustav von, 139, 146, 147-49, 155, 156, 218, 258, 303 Gotha, 26

317

INDEX Gottingen, 6, 44; advanced courses for women teachers in, 219, 220, 222 Gottingen University, 123, 221, 225, 227, 231, 234, 289 Gottschalk, Johanna, 265 Gouges, Olympe de, 14 governesses, 53, 59, 76, 144-45 Governesses' Benevolent Association (England), 91 Greek instruction, 18 Greifswald University, 228 Grenz, Dagmar, 7 Greven-Aschoff, Barbara, 155, 303 Grey, Maria Shirreff, 90 Gruber(t), Marie, 124 Gruner, Gottlieb Anton, 20 Griinwald, FrI. von (teacher), 265 Gwynn, Mary, 122 Gymnasium courses for women, 206217

Hausen, Karin, 7-10 Haym, Klara, 75 Headmistresses' Association (England), 91, 107, 296 Hecht, Marie, 71-72, 159 Hecker, Johann Julius, 25-26, 29 Heidelberg, 17 Heidelberg University, 122, 128, 138, 225, 226, 242, 244, 289 Heigenmooser, Josef, 257 Heim-Vogtlin, Marie, 189, 196 Heine, Margarete, 171, 202, 208, 215, 230, 232, 242, 250, 265, 286 Heintzeler, Emil, 256 Helmholtz, Anna von, 151, 207 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 207, 225 Helsinki University, 130 Henckell von Donnersmarck, Count Guido von, 207 Henschke, Margarete, 265 Henschke, Ulrike, 98, 157, 196 Haag (professor), 210 Hensel, Johann Daniel, 11, 43, 59 Haarbriicker, Theodor, 40, 108, 109, Herber, Pauline, 75, 145, 147, 173, 264, 111, 141^2, 167n 265 Hackenberg, Albert, 266 Herkner, Heinrich, 191 Halein, Kathinka, 70 Hermes, Ferdinand, 107, 108, 109 Halle, 25, 41, 50, 75, 139, 279 Herrmann, Laura, 165 Halle University, 228, 231, 232, 236, Herrmann, Ulrich, 8 239-40, 289 Hesse, 70, 114, 282, 283. See also GiesHallmann, Amalie, 135, 198 sen University Hallmann, Frau, 198 Hessling, Klara, 265 Hamburg, 17, 39, 46, 67, 271; GymnaHeyl, Hedwig Criisemann, 45, 207, sium courses in, 212-13, 271; 261n Oberlehrerinnenpriifung in, 220. See Heymann, Lida Gustava, 213 also Cloister School; Hochschule ftir das Heyse, J.C.A., 13, 20, 42, 59 weibliche Geschlecht Higher Girls' School and Its Destiny Hamilton, Alice, 228 (Lange). See "Yellow Brochure" Hamilton, Edith, 228, 233-34 Hildegardis Association, 287-88 Hannover (city), 33, 49, 111; GymnaHildesheim, 80, 115 sium course in, 214, 259, 278; semiHildesheimer, Jenny, 220-21 nars in, 66, 69, 74, 80. See also HofHillebrand, Marie, 32-^33, 42, 76 tochterschule Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von, 14, 15Hannoversch-Miinden, 49 16,59 Hansemann, Ottilie, 285 Hirsch, Jenny, 71, 102, 103 Hanstein, Adelbert, 191 Hirschfeld, Henriette Pagelsen. See TiHardt, Walther, 180 burtius-Hirschfeld, Henriette PagelHarnack, Adolf von, 261-62, 266, 269 sen Hartmann, Eduard von, 193 history instruction, 19-20, 165 Hartung, August, 34 Hochschule fur das weibliche Geschlecht Haupt, Dr. (teacher), l l l n (Hamburg), 97, 103, 278 318

INDEX Hoftochterschule (Hannover), 28, 41, 46, 59 Hoffmann, Emma, 137 HoUe, Ludwig, 248, 269, 270 Holtzendorff, Franz von, 102, 103 Homberg, Tinette, 45 Horney, Karen Danielson, 213 Housselle, Marie. See Loeper-Housselle, Marie Huch, Ricarda, 138, 205, 212 Hufton, Olwen, 8 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 5, 15 Humboldt Academy (Berlin), 158, 205 Hyde, Ida, 226, 233 Ichenhauser, Eliza, 195 Immerwahr, Clara, 232 Independent Student Association, 287 Industrie-Tochterschule (Blankenburg), 26,44 International Congress of Women, Berlin, 176-77, 193 Irmer, Bernhard, 266 Isenberg, Marie, 68 Italian instruction, 48 Italy, 91, 130, 296, 300-301 Jacoby, Louise, 125 Jean Paul. See Richter, Jean Paul Jena University, 218, 224, 231, 232, 249 Jessen, Louise, 151, 152n Jewish women, 56-57, 216-17, 290. See also anti-Semitism job training for girls, 101-104, 105-106 Jones, Constance, 158 Kaiserswerth, 63 Kamen, 83 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 11, 12, 15, 19, 20 Kappes, Johanna, 211, 243 Karl Eugen, Duke of Wurttemberg, 27 Karl Theodor, Elector of the Palatinate, 27 Karlsruhe Girls' Gymnasium, 209-211, 226, 242, 291 Kassel, 103, 269 Kastner, Julie von, 265 Katharine, Queen of Wurttemberg, 29 Katharinenstift (Stuttgart), 29, 37, 40,

41, 44, 49, 82; seminar at, 68, 69, 74, 84 Kaufmann, Frederike, HIn Kehr, Kathe, 230, 243 Keller, Ida Augusta, 223 Kempin, Emilie, 188, 205 Kerschbaumer, Rosa, 189 Kettler, Hedwig, 52, 161, 172, 174, 184, 209, 210 Keudell, Elise von, 252 Key, Ellen, 175, 190 Kiel, 39, 49, 54, 279 Kiel University, 289 Kienle, Else, 285 kindergartens, 97-98, 104, 277 Kipfmuller, Bertha, 159 Kippenberg, August, 142 Kirchhoff, Arthur, 201, 203 Kladderadatsch, 235 Klausner, Gertrud, 217n Klausner, Irma, 236, 241, 242, 243 Klein, Felix, 227 Klockow, Ida, 265 Konig, H. Z., 145 Konigsberg, 34, 276; advanced courses for women teachers in, 219, 222; Gymnasium courses in, 214, 259 Konigsberg University, 125-26, 221, 232 Kopke, Reinhold, 217n Kopp, Cardinal Archbishop Georg, 264, 266 Kovalevskaia, Sofia, 122, 123, 130, 300 Krause, Marie, 265 Kreyenburg, Gotthold, 105-106, 108, 109, 111, 167n Kritzinger (pastor), 64 Krosigk, Ernestine von, 61, 70 Krukenberg, Elsbeth, 190, 265 Kuhn, Annette, 8 Kiihne, Elisabeth. See Gnauck-Kuhne, Elisabeth Kiihne, Johanna, l l l n Kuhnow, Anna, 72, 202, 204 Kulturkampf, 24, 114-16 Kunast, Clara, 125 Kundt, Frida, 265 Ladd-Franklin, Christine, 225 Lagarde, Paul de, 142

319

INDEX Lage, Bertha von der, 145, 150, 159, 189-90 Lammers, Mathilde, 145 Landmann, Marie, 264, 265 Landmann, von (Bavarian minister of education), 188 Lange, Helene, 52-53, 54, 69, 71, 73, 75, 120, 124, 153, 192, 193, 215, 288; and advanced courses at Victoria Lyceum, 155; attacks Cremer, 144-45; founds Gymnasium course, 205-208; founds Realkurse, 159; as leader of moderate feminists, 170-71; and need for women physicians, 187; opposes "fourth way," 254; opposes marriage ban, 178; opposes 10 plus 3 plan for Studtenanstalten, 264; passed over for directorship of the Victoria Lyceum, 151; relations of, with Prussian Ministry of Education, 164, 165; visits England, 156, 157-58, 195, 197; and a women's university, 139; and the "Yellow Brochure," 136^37, 152, 154 Langelutke, FrI. (teacher), 265 Langemann, Ludwig, 267 Langer, B. (physician), 187, 188 Laskowski (professor), 186, 189 Latin instruction, 18-19; at the Victoria Lyceum, 120 Latzel, Minna. See Cauer, Minna Laube (teacher), 180 Leach, Abby, 223 League for the Protection of Mothers, 168, 172, 176, 196 League of Catholic German Women Students' Associations, 287 League of German Dentists' Associations, 181 League of German Women Students' Associations, 287 League of German Women's Associations, 169-70, 176, 282, 284, 303 League of Progressive Women's Associations, 170, 172 "lectures for ladies," 117-22 Legouvo, Ernest, 107 Lehmann-Adams, Hope Bridges, 137, 183, 204n Lehmus, Emilie, 72, 125, 129, 189

Die hehrerin in Schule und Haus, 71, 145, 151 Leipzig, 33, 37, 39, 44, 66, 104, 113; Gymnasium course in, 211-12; Hochschule for Women in, 278; Lyceum for Ladies in, 119 Leipzig University, 122-23, 128-29, 137, 223-24, 232, 234, 244-45, 248-49, 289 Lemonnier, Elise, 104 Lenz-Heymann, Luise, 138, 160, 210, 211 Leopold II, Prince of Lippe, 30 Leopold Friedrich Franz, Prince of Anhalt, 27 Lermontova, Iulia, 122, 123 Lette, Adolf, 101 Lette Association, 101-102, 125, 157 Lewald, Fanny, 34, 51, 72, 95, 96, 119 Lexikon of German Women Writers (Pataky), 191, 196 Lexis, Wilhelm, 263, 266 Leyen, Else von der, 209, 236, 240-43 Leyen, Margarete von der, 209 Lichnewska, Marie, 176-77, 190 Liliencron, Baroness Anne-Marie von, 252 Linden, Countess Marie von, 228, 255 Lindner, Bertha, 33, 108, 146 Lippe, 30, 271 Loeper-Housselle, Marie, 71, 145, 146, 152, 159 London School of Medicine for Women, 131 London University, 131, 182 Liibeck, 13, 34, 39, 271 Luchs, Hermann, l l l n Lttders, Marie-Elisabeth, 52, 55, 72, 287 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, 29 Luise, Grand Duchess of Baden, 101 Luise School (Berlin), 38, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 82, 86, 140 Luise School (Dusseldorf), 45, 46, 69, 82-83, 115 Luisenstiftung (Berlin), 21, 29, 46, 61 Luisenstiftung (Posen), 46, 48, 49, 57; Realgymnasium at, 278; seminar at, 63, 116, 146; as Simultanschule, 115 Luneburg, 47, 50, 82, 276, 277 Ltiroth, Emmy, 211n

320

INDEX Luxemburg, Rosa, 199 Luxenburg, Adele, 224 Lyceum for Ladies (Breslau), 119 Lyceum for Ladies (Leipzig), 119 Lyceum Janson (Bremen), 34, 271 Mackenroth, Anna, 205 Maddison, Isabel, 227 Magdalenenstift (Altenburg), 25 Magdeburg, 83 Maidens' School (Breslau), 26, 43 Mainzer, Auguste, 211 Maistre, Joseph de, 22 Maltby, Margaret, 227, 234-35 Mannheim, 281 Marburg University, 232 Marenholtz-BQlow, Bertha von, 72, 98, 104 Margarete School (Berlin), 140 Maria Grey Training College, 90, 151 Markgroningen, 66 marriage and career, 175-78, 192, 196 Martin, Marie, 220, 222, 260-62, 265, 269 mathematics instruction, 20, 69, 120, 165, 256, 257, 275-76; shortage of teachers for, 274 matriculation for women, 229, 238-39, 242-50, 252-55 "maturity" examination in Switzerland, 158, 241 Matz, Elsa, 252 Matzner, Heinrich, 40, 167n Mausbach, Joseph, 266 Max Joseph, King of Bavaria, 27, 28 Max Joseph Institute, 28 Mecklenburg, 39, 220, 252n, 271. See also Rostock University Meier, Johann Heinrich, 13, 20, 45 Meiningen, 33, 80 Mejer, Sophia, 219 memoirs of school life, 51-53 men teachers: concern about, teaching girls, 41, 52; as directors of private schools, 34-35; as directors of public schools, 39-40; oversupply of, for secondary schools, 140; and reform of the higher girls' schools, 104-106; shortages of, 50, 67, 274, 280; status

concerns of, 105; with university training, 50, 140-41 Mensch, EUa, 73, 137 menstruation, 168, 188-89 mental and physical capacities of women, 185-93 Merg, Heinrich, 266 Merget, August, 40, 59, 60, 111, 112 Messner, Lucie, 207 Meub, Lina, 211 Mevissen, Mathilde von, 214 Meyer, Hermann von, 198 Meyer, Paul, 260, 261n, 263-64, 268, 270 Michaelis, Carl Theodor, 266 Michigan University Dental School, 125 Mill, John Stuart, 11, 94, 171-72, 185 Mindelheim, 24 Minden, 13, 37, 39, 40, 45 miseducation of girls, 10-14 Misused Women's Energy (Key), 175, 190 Mithene, Jeanne, 85, 108 Mobius, Paul, 185, 191 Model School (Frankfurt), 20, 38, 44 "moderate" feminists, 169-78, 193 Moldehn, August, 142 Mommsen, Adelheid, 55 Mommsen, Theodor, 215 Montabaur seminar, 116 Montgelas, Maximilian von, 27, 28, 60 Morgenstern, Lina, 119, 192 Morrill, Georgiana, 224 Mount Holyoke College, 247 Mues, Anna, 76, 77-78 Muhler, Heinrich von, 110, 124, 12526, 127 Miihlhausen, 26 Muller, Luise, 205 Miiller, Paula, 265 Munich, 24, 38, 47, 60, 61, 101; Gymnasium course in, 212, 243, 272 Munich School Commission, 13, 38 Munich University, 122, 228, 232, 239, 243, 289 Munk, Marie, 54, 72, 284, 286 Miinster: advanced courses for teachers in, 220, 222; seminar in, 61, 62, 111, 146 Miinster University, 221, 289 Miinsterberg, Hugo, 194-95

321

INDEX Musterschule. See Model School Nechaev, Peter, 127 needlework. See sewing instruction Netherlands, 88, 91 Neuenhaim, 32 Neumann (teacher), 266 Neumann, Else, 235-36 New Daughters' School. See Augusta School Newnham College, 122, 151, 156, 195 Nienberg, 275 Niethammer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 12 Noether, Emmy, 73, 231 Nokk, Wilhelm, 242 Noldeke, Wilhelm, 36, 40, 53, 54, 108, 109, 139, 149, 166, 167n Noodt (director), 43, 45 Nordhausen, 13, 38 North of England Council for the Promotion of the Higher Education of Women, 117, 121 Norway, 149 Nowack, Marie, 137 nuns. See Catholic teaching orders nursing, 93, 157 Nymphenburg, 28-29, 67, 272 Oberlehrerinnenprufung, 87, 142, 146, 166, 219-21, 250 obstetrics, 191, 192 Oelsner, Elise, 103, 191, 192n Oertzen, Olga von, 125 Offen, Karen, 304 Offenbach, 32 Ohio Dental College, 124 Oldenburg (city), 52, 67 Oldenburg (state), 114, 281 Orth, Johannes, 233 Osthoff, Hermann, 226 Otto-Peters, Louise, 96, 97, 100, 102, 159, 175 Overberg, Bernhard, 61 overburdening, 45-46, 148, 275-76 Oxford University, 131, 186, 189, 297, 300 Paderborn seminar, 62, 68, 70, 74, 146 Pancritius, Marie Charlotte, 232

parents, influence of, on girls' schools, 41-43 Parker, Harriet, 122 Pataky, Sophie, 191, 196 Paulsen, Friedrich, 118-19, 207, 262, 264, 266 Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, 124, 125 Pensionaten, 32-33; criticisms of, 14, 18, 35, 38, 94-95 pensions for teachers, 50, 82, 86, 105, 147 Penzoldt, Franz, 184, 200 Pestalozzi-Froebel House, 104, 278 Petersen, Adolphine, 125 Petschauer, Peter, 7 Pfleiderer, Otto, 207, 215 Pharmacists' Association, 181 Philanthropin (Frankfurt), 26, 27, 35, 43, 44, 47, 50, 275 Philanthropinnen, 26-27, 47 Philanthropists, 3, 12, 16, 21, 26-27 physical education, 48-49, 140 physicians, oversupply of, 131, 181-82 Physicians' Congress, 182, 184 Pietists, 25-26 Piatt, Julia Barlow, 225 Plehn, Marianne, 212 Pohlmann, Margarete, 265 Polish instruction, 48 Pope, Rhama D., 107 Posadowsky, Arthur von, 239, 240, 246 Posen, 42, 67. See also Luisenstiftung (Posen) Preussische Jahrbucher, 195, 198, 286 Protestant pastors as teachers, 40, 49 Protestant schools, 35 provincial school boards (Prussia), 109, 147, 284 Prussia: certification of teachers in, 64, 112-13; conference of 1873 in, 11113; conference of 1906 in, 264-67; curriculum of 1894 in, 165; debate of coeducation in, 282-84; early seminars in, 61-64, 67; marriage ban in, 70, 177; opens examination pro facultate docendi, 251-52; opens "fourth way," 253; opens matriculation, 24849; recognition of schools as Lyzeen in, 274-75; reform of girls' schools in, 322

INDEX 257-71; secondary enrollments in, 293 Prussia, House of Deputies, 136, 155, 162, 163-64, 213, 284 Prussia, Ministry of Education, 30, 64, 88, 110, 208. See also Althoff, Friedrich; Bosse, Robert; FaIk, Adalbert; Gossler, Gustav von; Holle, Ludwig; Meyer, Paul; Muhler, Heinrich von; Puttkamer, Robert von; Raumer, Karl von; Reinhardt, Karl; Schneider, Karl; Stiehl, Ferdinand; Studt, Konrad von; Trott zu SoIz, August von; Zedlitz-Triitzschler, Robert von Prussia, Ministry of State, 213, 247-48, 259, 262, 268-69 Prussian Association for Public Higher Girls' Schools, 149, 166, 253 public examinations, 45- 46, 121 Puttkamer, Robert von, 113 Queen's College (London), 89 Raaz, C. (director), l l l n "radical" feminists, 169-78 Rassfeld, Karl, 266 Raumer, Karl von, 94-95 Realkurse (Berlin), 158-59, 242; criticisms of, 161-62 Realgymnasien for girls, 209, 212, 280 "redundant" women, 67, 99-101, 183 Reichstag, 136, 162-63, 164, 197 Reinhardt, Karl, 264, 268, 270 Reissert, Oswald, 147-48 religious instruction, 19, 40, 165 retirement homes for teachers, 85 revolutions of 1848-1849, 94, 96, 97 Reuter, Gabriele, 53 Rheinbaben, Georg von, 247-48, 26869, 270 Rhenish League of Cities, 284 Richter, Elise, 300 Richter, Jean Paul, 6, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20 Richthofen, Else von, 73 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 94-95 Ringer, Fritz, 293 Rittershaus-Bjarnason, Adeline, 255 Rodelheim, 32-33 Rosier, Augustin, 193-94, 197 Roethe, Gustav, 285

Rohr, Abbess von, 265 Rossiter, Margaret, 223 Rost, Bernhard, 55 Rostock University, 128, 249, 289 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 14, 20 Royal Augusta School. See Augusta School Royal Elisabeth School. See Elisabeth School Royal HoUoway College, 156 Rubinstein, Susanna, 123 Rudolphi, Karoline, 16-17, 19, 21, 31, 58 Runge, Max, 185 Russia: attitudes toward girls' education in, 22; closing of St. Petersburg medical course in, 150; coeducation in, 295; decree in, calling home women from Zurich, 126-28; girls' Gymnasien in, 39, 88-89, 245; job training in, 104; lectures for ladies in, 121; preparatory courses in, 295; secondary enrollments in, 294; women physicians in, 130-31, 189, 240; women professors in, 300; women students in, 130-31, 297-98, 299-300; women teachers in 89, 90, 296-97 Saarburg, 116 Salomon, Alice, 53, 55, 72 Salondame, 11-12, 13 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 26 Sarwey, Otto von, 163, 243-44 Saxony: certification of women teachers in, 66; coeducation in, 282; legislature of, 75,163; opens examination pro facilitate docendi, 250; opens "fourth way," 253; opens matriculation, 248-49; public schools in, 39; recognition of secondary girls' schools in, 113; reforms of 1909-1911 in, 272; seminars in, 58-59, 64, 66, 68, 143; social origins of pupils in, 55-56. See also Leipzig University Saxony-Coburg, 30, 271 Saxony Weimar, 30, 163, 251. See also Jena University Schafer, Director, 154 Schallenfeld, Rosalie, 21 Scheie, Anna, 265

323

INDEX Schepeler-Lette, Anna, 102 Schumacher, Kathe, 88, 199, 205 Schlawe, 77 Schlegel, Friedrich, 6 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 11, 15 Schlesinger, Helene, 217n Schmidt, Anna, 33 Schmidt, Auguste, 33, 63, 66, 84-85, 103, 108, 159, 160, 170, 208 Schmidt, Erich, 118 Schmidt, Friedrich, 229 Schmidt, Suse, 81 Schmoller, Gustav, 207, 233 Schneegans, Maria, 161 Schneider, Elisabeth, 177 Schneider, Karl, 111-13, 147-49, 154, 164, 165, 217-18, 219, 222, 226, 230 Schneider, Lina, 119 Schnepfenthal, 26 Schonaich-Carolath, Prince Heinrich zu, 207 Schonburg-Waldenburg, Prince Otto Viktor von, 64, 66, 88 Schoneberg, 216, 260 scholarships: for advanced courses, 221; at Berlin Gymnasium course, 207; at girls' schools, 28, 29, 37, 45; at seminars, 62; for women students, 138, 287-88 Schools Inquiry Commission (England), 89-90, 107, 111 Schornstein, Richard, 40, 48, 105, 108, 109, 111, 167n Schrader-Breymann, Henriette, 34, 66, 71, 98, 103-104, 151, 155, 207 Schuback, Frau, 32, 33 Schuback-Schmidt Lyceum (Dusseldorf), 32, 33, 275 Schubert, Clare. See Schubert-Feder, Clare Schubert-Feder, Clare, 135, 137, 19899,205 Schultz, Otto, 29 Schulze, Wilhelm, 285 Schumann, Eugenie, 44 Schwabisch-Gmund, 66, 69 Schwarz, F.H.C., 6, 14, 19, 20 Schwelm, 34, 50, 80 science instruction, 20, 48, 62-63, 69, 165, 220

Sue law (France), 150, 302 Seeberg, Reinhold, 266 seminars, 18, 73-74, 143, 146, 165, 259, 263, 276 Semple, Ellen Churchill, 224 sewing instruction, 17, 21, 47, 165 Sexauer, Georgina, 243 Seydewitz, Paul von, 201 Sherzer, Jane BeUe, 223, 225 Shirreff, Emily, 90 Sickenberger, Adolf, 212 Siemens, Hertha von, 207 Simkovitch, Mary Kingsbury, 233 Simon, Helene, 175, 192, 196 Simultanschulen, 115-16 Skeat, Ethel Gertrud, 228 Smith, Erminnie Piatt, 123 Smith College, 247 Social Democrats, 163, 169, 173, 197 social Frauenschulen, 278 Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (England), 101 Society for the Professional Education of Women (France), 104 Society for Women's Work (Russia), 104 Sommer, Otto, 167n Sophie, Duchess of Weimar, 30 Sophie School (Berlin), 55-56, 139-40 Sophienstift (Weimar), 30, 41 Spain, 149-50 Spiegel, Father, l l l n Spilleke, August, 13, 19, 45-46 "spiritual motherhood," 98, 171, 175 Sprengel, Auguste, 53, 75, 155, 218, 265 Stackel (teacher), l l l n Stargard, 37, 41, 42, 54, 63 Stein (teacher), 266 Steiner, Oswald, 142 Stengel, Karl von, 186 Stetten Institute (Augsburg), 31-32, 50 Stiehl, Ferdinand, 80 Stocker, Helene, 72, 172, 177, 184, 203, 228, 233 Stocker, Lydia, 174 Stoephasius, Marie, 73, 106, 108, 136, 146 Strassburg, 218

324

INDEX Strassburg University, 123, 226, 231, 249, 289 Strinz, Martha, 279 Stritt, Marie, 170, 176, 288 Studienanstalten, numbers of, 280 Studt, Konrad von, 215, 246-48, 25152, 257-59, 262, 268-69 Stuttgart, 27, 33, 80; Gymnasium course in, 212, 243, 272. See also Katharinensnft Sumper, Helene, 159 Supprian, Karl, 40, 50, 148 Svetlin, Wilhelm, 186 Sweden, 88, 92, 104, 121, 300 Switzerland, 91-92, 130. See also Basel University; Bern University; Geneva University; Zurich University Sybel, Heinrich von, 99, 125 Teachers' Training and Registration Society (England), 90 technical institutes, 249 tentamen physikum, 240, 241 Thilo, Amalie, 119 Thomas, M. Carey, 122, 128-29, 201 Tiburtius, Franziska, 72, 76, 125, 12627, 129, 158, 189, 201, 206, 207 Tiburtius-Hirschfeld, Henriette Pagelsen, 123-25, 129, 196, 204 Tilsit, 46, 48, 50, 67, 277 Tornieporth, Gerda, 7, 8 Trefurt, Johann Philipp, 6, 13, 44 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 200-201, 228 Trier, 116, 117, 260, 278 Trinks, Thekla, 33, 76, 78-79 Troschel, Elise, 242 Trott zu SoIz, August von, 284 Truman, James, 124 Tschudi, Hugo von, 118 Tubingen University, 128, 228, 231, 239, 243-44, 286, 289 tuition at girls' schools, 44-45, 141 Twellmann, Margrit, 302, 303 Uellner, Viktor, 45-46, 82, 87, 108, 167n United States, 124, 186, 194-95, 247 Ursulines, 24, 61, 67, 115-16, 276, 278 Uxkull, Gertrud von, 212 Vaerting, Mathilde, 292

Vassar College, 125, 201, 247 Versorgungsprinzip, 58-59, 64, 70, 87, 99, 116 Victoria, Crown Princess and Empress of Germany, 47, 85, 86, 101-102, 104, 117, 124, 151, 155-57 Victoria Bazaar, 102 Victoria Continuation School, 157 Victoria Lyceum (Berlin), 117-21, 146; advanced courses for teachers at, 155-56, 195n, 217-18, 219, 222, 223; courses for teachers at, 120-21, 14142; subsidies for, 120-21, 147 Victoria Lyceum (Cologne), 119 Victoria School (Berlin), 38, 40, 53 Vienna Girls' Gymnasium, 206 Vienna Physicians' Congress, 182 Vienna University, 130, 137, 215, 300 Virchow, Rudolf, 99, 103, 106 VoUmer, Vera, 71, 255 Vorwerk, Anna, 66, 69, 70, 71, 85, 98, 155, 218-19 Waetzoldt, Stephan, 156, 217, 250, 25253, 257-60, 283 Wagner, Adolf, 233 Wagner, Mathilde, 242 Waldeyer, Wilhelm, 160, 181, 184, 185 Walton, Alice, 224 Ward, Maria, 24 Waren, 75 Wartensleben, Gabriele, 215, 252 Waser, Hedwig, 194 Weber, Marianne, 33, 176, 193, 287, 288 Weber, Mathilde, 160, 187, 198, 202 Wedel, Christiane von, 252 Wegscheider-Ziegler, Hildegard, 173, 199, 208, 214, 215, 228, 230, 232, 234, 250 Weihmann, Helene, 267-68 Weimar, 30 Weimar conference, 108-109 Weizsacker, von (university chancellor), 163 Wellesley College, 81, 247 Wenckebach, Carta, 53, 80-81 Wentzel-Heckmann, Elise, 207 Werder, Karl Friedrich, 122 Wesel, 35, 78, 79, 80, 115 Wespy, Leon, 266

325

INDEX Westenholz, Baroness Elisabeth von, 252 Westerkamp, Alix, 232 Weyrowitz, Auguste, 84-85 Whiting, Sarah Frances, 225 Wiesbaden, 277, 279 Wiese, Ludwig, 110, 125 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von, 118, 215 Wilcke, Valeska, 125 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 117, 269, 270 Wilhelm-Augusta Women Teachers' Association, 85 Willcox, Mary Alice, 224 Windscheid, Kathe, 211, 224, 226, 303 Winston, Mary Frances, 227, 234 Winterhalter, Elisabeth, 72, 204, 214, 241 Wobcken, Karl, 40, 105, 106, 167n Wolfenbuttel, 34, 66 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 14 Wolstenholme, Elizabeth, 91 Wolters (pastor), 78 Women and Their Vocation (Btichner), 59, 97 women auditors, 122-23, 125-26, 128, 139, 220-21, 223-37 women civil servants, opposition to, 247-48 women dentists, 124-25, 204 women lawyers, 97, 129-^30, 205, 232, 286, 291, 300-301 women physicians, 125, 189, 204, 291, 301; certification of, 129, 238-42; needed to treat women, 97, 160, 18283; opposition to, 205 women professors, 247, 255, 291-92, 300 women students: caricatures of, 13234, 195, 202n; characteristics of, 233, 289-90; distribution of, by university, 289; experiences of, 285-86; and feminist movement, 288; graduation rates of, 189; health of, 126, 156; marriages of, 156, 194, 195-96, 29091; numbers of, 255, 288-89; opposition to, 125-28, 226, 246, 247; and political radicalism, 197; protests against, 128, 236, 245

women teachers: advanced courses for, 152, 155, 217-23; careers of, 74-81; certification of, 60, 64, 66, 112-13, 272; as directors, 30-33, 39, 264, 267, 271, 276; health of, 75, 187-88, 18990; marriage ban on, 70, 90, 175, 176-77, 190, 291; marriages of, 49-50, 74; needed to teach girls, 59-60, 62, 97, 152, 261, 262; numbers of, 83-84, 143; opposition to, 85, 142-45, 17981, 190; perceived oversupply of, 68, 100, 141, 146; salaries of, 82, 190; shortages of, with examination pro facultate docendi, 252, 286; success rate of, certification examination, 69-70, 146 Women Teachers' Association, 159, 169, 170, 173, 174, 256, 259, 267, 271, 284 Women's Association of Baden, 101 Women's Education Association (Breslau), 103 "women's emancipation," 100, 128 Women's Employment Association (Vienna), 104 Women's Reform Association, 161-62, 169, 174. See also Association for Women's Educational Reform; Association for Women's Education and University Studies women's universities, proposals of, 139, 141-42, 146, 152, 174, 200-202 Women's Welfare Association, 162, 169, 170, 213, 214, 221 Wrangell, Margarethe von, 286, 292 Wurttemberg: certification of teachers in, 66; coeducation, 281-82; legislature in, 37, 163; marriage ban in, 70; opens "fourth way," 253; opens matriculation, 243-44; recognizes girls' schools as secondary, 114, 256-57; reforms of 1914 in, 272; seminars in, 66, 68, 143. See also Tubingen University Wtirzburg University, 232, 243, 289 Wustenfeld, Emilie, 97, 103 Wychgram, Jakob, 150, 258, 264, 266, 271, 282 Xanten seminar, 116

326

INDEX "Yellow Brochure," 136-37, 146, 152, 154-56, 218, 303 Zedlitz-Triitzschler, Count Robert zu, 164,225 Ziegenbein, Johann, 19, 20, 21, 26 Ziegler, Hildegard. See WegscheiderZiegler, Hildegard

Ziegler, Kathe, 209, 234 Ziegler, Theodor, 207, 218 Zurich University: German women stu­ dents at, 123, 125, 135, 137-θ8; 204205; medical degrees at, 125, 120, 298; professor-student marriages at, 196; Russian radicals at, 126-27, 197, 199; student life at, 197-99, 202

327