Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750-1830

Abstract

Gleixner, Ulrike, and Marion W. Gray, eds. Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750-1830. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 391 pp. $21.50 paperback. It is fitting that this international and interdisciplinary anthology on the Sattelzeit is dedicated to Karin Hausen, the historian whose pathbreaking work on gender is reflected throughout the volume. It is also notable that the authors actually convened for a workshop and thereby became acquainted with each other's research. The final product was certainly intended to gain the coherence that anthologies often lack. The effect on the readers, nevertheless, requires that they do a lot of the connecting themselves. While there are glimmers of conversations, they remain discretely contained within each individual contribution. One in particular that is often part of discussions about gender in the late Enlightenment, and indeed, in the 19th century as well, is the open rejection of so-called learned women: a denial that is as present in the writings of women themselves as it is in those who attacked such an idea. In this instance, a fruitful exchange might have been launched with Rebekka Habermas, whose argument that German middle-class women benefited from being educated by their learned mates pales next to Ruth Dawson's lively and outspoken piece that raises important questions about the effects of limiting the education of an entire sex. The conversation could continue with William Rasch's interesting account of the Berlin salons, read against his acknowledgment that the extrasocial arena of those salons, neither domestic nor public, simply fortified the narrowness of the world of intellectual women who, however they might have benefited from the intellectual exchange, remained ensconced in the home, ideologically and actually. The view of gender propounded here as, in most cases, the decisive factor within a time of social transformation is important, if not new. For that reason, it is indeed refreshing to read Dawson's chapter, which immediately acknowledges class, or Marion Gray's interesting study of Amalie Holst's writings on female education, but also those of the lesser known Christina Gurnth, whose work on women's education was grounded in the practicalities of a rural economy, or Dietlind Huchtker's examination of the changes in the poor relief system, where sexuality was bound up with moral discourse and female poverty itself became sexualized. …