Oftentimes I hear, more or less bluntly put, that working on woman intellectuals in Germany is a niche, something one would do because she shies away from engaging with the big names and grand theories.
This is nonsense. A growing tide of very serious researchers are in there with me—just take a look at the recent publications on women in philosophy in Germany, such as Dyck’s volume or this wonderful edition of translations of women philosophers in Germany
In this post, I address why unearthing these thinkers is so valuable for our work as historians. They show us the complexity of the establishment of an intellectual persona. They also show us how women’s involvement into philosophical discussions ultimately changed how we view those intellectuals in general—less afloat above our problems, but immersed in them.
Despite long-lived and still wrong assumptions, a lot of women partook in important philosophical circles—one prominent example being the Early Romantic circle that, among others, contained the brothers Schlegel, Schelling, and their wives, Brendel Mendelssohn and Caroline Michaelis.
Wait. Brendel Mendelssohn doesn’t ring a bell? The second daughter of the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was married off to the merchant and banker Simon Veit, fourteen years her senior and, as reports have it, not as witty as his wife, now named Brendel Veit. Unhappy in her marriage, Brendel met Friedrich Schlegel in Henriette Herz’ salon. They became lovers, Brendel divorced. She started signing her letters with Dorothea instead of Brendel (without formerly converting, though). Her affair was scandalous, in particular after Schlegel published the novel Lucinde that presumably portrayed their relationship.
They finally married (and she officially converted) in 1804, begetting her the name under which we now know her: Dorothea Schlegel. And still, we rarely find her name on a book. The one novel she wrote, Florentin, was published under her husband’s editorship and without an author’s reference. Her translations are still known under her husband’s name (and authorship). Her letters are known to a small group of academics, and that’s it.
Even more names were once attached to Caroline Michaelis, the daughter of orientalist Johann David Michaelis. With her marriage to Johann Böhmer she became Caroline Böhmer.
Her husband died; the widow was a stout supporter of the Republic of Mainz; on her flight from the German coalition, she was incarcerated, had to hide her pregnancy by a French Lieutenant, and ultimately gave birth to the illegitimate child while in hiding. Her future husband W.A. Schlegel visited her there regularly. But before Caroline could re-enter the more conventional ways of life, she had to give up the illegitimate son and move several times, as she was banned from the cities where she sought refuge. Her marriage with Schlegel might have also been a calculated move for more social and monetary stability. The already familiar-sounding name Schlegel she then traded for Schelling when she divorced her second husband to marry his (younger) philosophical rival. While Caroline published some reviews under her own name, she mostly stayed in the shadows of Romantic published life.
We already sense a pattern. The name changes make these women cumbersome to detect. They stayed mostly anonymous, or at least hidden behind pseudonyms. Since women were generally barred from university training, we barely see women in Germany of the time engage in a strictly academic discourse (the situation is a bit different for women philosophers in Great Britain, see Alison Stone’s entry).
Despite how little women officially contributed to the field, knowing about them helps us better understand the historical periods. To detect and to understand the women, we are forced to go into detail and look more closely at the theories already at hand. Knowing and reading these women also significantly improves our hermeneutical skills, as they require us to read between the lines, to learn about historical, sociological, religious, and monetary contexts—and about the art of indirect argumentation and presentation. Re-discovering woman intellectuals in my field of interest also requires an interdisciplinary approach. As we do not easily see female contributions to “philosophy proper” in the form of treatises and ‘grand systems,’ we need to revert to other forms of intellectual expression, such as reviews, letters, and novels.
What is specific about works by women authors, particularly if the authors entered public discourse in the form of a publication? If we consider them as a group, we should not so much look at the content, as at the form of their works, to see if there is a specific trait designed as some sort of response to their particular situation. One decisive problem for women writers was that they lacked a definite space in society—understood both as a proper location, but also as accepted identity within the public sphere. Women lacked accepted exemplars. If they chose to seek academic training, or wanted to publish, their aspirations were not generally viewed as positive, but they were taken as failed types of womanhood—and this trend did not improve, but rather worsened over time, with a particularly low dip after 1848. Women should instead fulfill their vocation as “wife, mother, and housemaker.” Of course, this ideal was not one of the nameless masses, but mostly pertained to nobility and the upcoming middle class: for them, it was imperative to be able to read and write in order to manage a complex household, to adequately entertain a husband and his guests, and to educate the children, at least on a basic level. But anything beyond that was seen as transgressive: these women were harming their actual vocation. There are heaps of treatises on the vocation of woman, in particular at the end of the century (see, for instance, Angelika Feurer, The Vocation of Woman As Wife, Mother, and Housemaker, or Wilhelmine Halberstadt, Letters concerning Morality, Dignity, and Vocation of Woman—but also, in a much more critical regard, Amalia Holst, On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Education—the field of “Bestimmungsliteratur” still remains to be fully discovered). But also the introductions by mostly male authors for treatises written by female authors pay attention to this requirement: the mere fact that a woman published her thoughts was presented as the exception, not meant to upset public order.
One widespread option to avoid this impression was to just publish anonymously. Alternatively, women sought the authorization of a male editor who usually also wrote the preface, endorsing the authoress while stating the common trope that her style leaves a lot to be desired, but could prove to be effective at least in reaching other women of her class and educate them. One example we already mentioned: Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin. Another famous example is Sophie von La Roche’s Fräulein Sternheim which appeared under the editorship of her cousin, Martin Wieland.
In case the author really wanted to see her name on the cover, she had to build more elaborate edifices of retained modesty: Women authors had to prove their virtue, not their intellectual prowess. They did this by stressing that they do not publish for their own vanity, but to help with the household income. Not creating, but supporting and serving is the deal.
Inadvertently, this allowed for a rather direct engagement between author and the reader in these prefaces. These excuses themselves needed to be part of the novel itself and formed a meta-narrative—giving writings by women intellectuals at times a somewhat circumvent air. However, this also creates a more dialogical way of writing that thrived on the increasing perforation of the fourth wall.
This very need for justification and the engagement with the reader subversively brought the question of femininity in society to the fore. As Hannah Arendt points out in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen , the published woman was an outstanding individual. She moved on terrain that was mainly uncharted, and thus many steps she took were the first ones on paths that others might navigate after her. This modeled the role of women for their readers.
And some of these new types of women indeed set out for success. The Enlightenment is the age of the reader—and with this it brings the promise of a possible life as an intellectual who is also able to live off her work. Women intellectuals of the long 18th Century thus stood a chance to envisage an alternative life to “wife, mother, and housemaker.” And they did. It is quite obvious that they did not necessarily feel constrained by a specific genre, the longevity of the prejudice of the ‘female enthusiasm for the novel’ be damned. Women writers also tried themselves at poetry. They wrote biographies, autobiographies, jotted down travel journals, and created letters with the intent for their wider circulation and ultimately their publication (one prominent example here is Rahel Varnhagen-von Ense; after her death, her husband published a collection of her letters under the title Rahel, a Memorial Book for her Friends).
Hence, it is not by genre that we can identify a particularly female contribution. Rather, we have to have a look at what surrounds the publication: who is named as author, who is editor, what is said in the foreword, how is the author (if she is named at all) going about justifying her step into the public?
The justification alone does not, of course, hold the philosophical point of the respective treatise. Rather, it shows us how a female writer justified her decision to leave the conventional roles behind and choose a new one. And this also means: how they conceptualized femininity and either put themselves in contrast to it, or worked to change the concept itself.
In a lot of cases, the perspective was not meant to be of importance: Bettina von Arnim in her This Book Belongs to the King wanted to advise the king on the hard realities of poverty. Karoline von Günderrode intended to publish poems, not female poetry with her Gedichte und Phantasien. Even Dorothea Christiane Erxleben’s Rigorous Investigation of the Causes that Obstruct the Female Sex from Study is not necessarily a female perspective on the issue, but a neutral justification as to why women should also be allowed to study at the university. And still, these women could not avoid the fact that their contributions would be seen as other, and that these contributions would either be put as a fine example of female writing or as an aberration. Hence, Bettina von Arnim only published this straightforwardly political work when her status as a public intellectual is already well in place (her first book, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child did exactly that); Karoline von Günderrode chose to publish under the pseudonym “Tian”; Erxleben’s book appears with the approving introduction written by her father.
In the aftermath of successful publication, you could also see how society struggled to contain the author again in her midst, to make the provocation of female authorship digestible. La Roche, for instance, was quickly addressed as “mother” by her readers, Goethe prominently among them: as the first female published novelist, she was also one of the first who became the epitome of the nurturing figure. And thus, her role was subtly defined as still within the range of female occupations; just that the term “mother” now had a more ‘public’ air.
Women who stepped into the public eye could most safely do so as exceptions to the rule. The unique woman, the exception from the rule was tolerable. What was not acceptable was the thought that this could be a new type of woman. But, in a loose adaption of Kant: once a good thought is in the world, it is hard to snuff it out. Accordingly, what we see in the publications of woman intellectuals of the long 18th Century in Germany is a sort of slowly developing model of the new woman, with all her flaws and complexities (the overload of expectations to be both a perfect mother and a successful author is already visible in the female members of the Early Romantic circles). They produced a large variety of works, some of them influencing public discussions at least for a while, but mostly they returned to anonymity soon after. But quite a lot of them came with their more or less unique ways of justification, carving out this new form of expression. And even more slowly, they changed their audience to become more sensitive to their voices as well.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.
Anne Pollok
Anne Pollok is a historian of Philosophy concentrating on aesthetics and philosophy of culture from the 18th up to the early 20th century, particularly in Germany. Formerly an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina, in 2019, Pollok returned to her native country where she is currently a tenured research assistant at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. She returned home right at the beginning of worldwide lockdowns in early 2020. Despite being confined to the virtual classroom, she enjoys teaching courses in Aesthetics, Existentialism, and on Woman Intellectuals and Writers.
