arguments against women’s equality in the mid-nineteenth century sociological: that all progress...

ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN’S EQUALITYin the mid-nineteenth century

SOCIOLOGICAL: That all progress of civilization depends on a strict division of labor between the sexes and devotion by women to child-rearingNEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL: That only the male brain is suited for quantitative and abstract reasoningMEDICAL: That adolescent girls would become barren if asked to study as hard at school as boysPSYCHOLOGICAL: That women are especially prone to mental illness (“hysteria”)

Experts began to challenge all these arguments in the 1880s and ‘90s….

Rural family scene (1839)

The (bourgeois) Children’s Nursery (1823)

“The Sewing Room” (1823)

The tyranny of French fashion (Iris, 1852)

“The Female University Student”

(cartoon from 1847)

“In the Women’s Club” (1848):

“We demand that skirts be abolished and that men take

over the housework!”

BEYOND Kinder, Küche, Kirche: The Women’s Rights Movement in Imperial Germany

1865Foundation of the “German Women’s Association” (ADF) by Luise Otto-Peters: 12,000 members in 1877; 14,000 in 1914

1894Formation of the League of German Women’s Associations (BDF), with 300,000 members in 1914

1900 German Civil Code takes effect

1904Foundation of the “League for Sexual Reform” by Helene Stöcker, which disintegrated in 1908

1908Women gain the right to enroll for degrees in Prussian universities and to join political clubs

1918German women gain the vote after war’s end

A female bicyclist (ca. 1900)

Berlin exhibit of women’s “Reform Dress” (around 1903)

Gymnastics class for girls, around 1912

German parents did give daughters some freedom to choose a suitor (courting in a Berlin park, around

1907)

A bourgeois family, photographed in the studio around 1895:

The ideal of “companionate

marriage” pervaded the middle

classes by the 1890s.

THE SPREAD OF FAMILY PLANNING IN GERMANYTotal number of children born by women married in the

years--

Pre-1905

1905-09 1910-14 1915-19

In cities with over 100,000 people

Self-employed

3.30 2.40 1.98 1.61

White-collar 3.01 2.40 2.04 1.74

Blue-collar 4.03 3.16 2.64 2.18

Among the peasantry (villages with under 2,000)

Self-employed

5.42 4.64 4.10 3.52

Farmworker 6.18 5.38 4.87 4.26

Luise Otto-Peters

(1819-1895): The founder of the “German

Women’s Association”

(ADF)

Helene Lange (1848-1930) and Lily Braun (1865-1916)

Girls’ High School in Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1896:Most of these students soon became housewives

Berlin medical students (all male) attend a lecture in 1905

Young women practice good posture at a dancing school, 1899

University students in 1908:Baden admitted women in 1900; Prussia in 1908

Delegates to the Women’s Suffrage Congress in Munich, 1912

“Women’s Dreams about the Marriage of the Future” (1908)

Emmeline Pankhurst arrested outside Buckingham Palace

Picture of her prison cell, 1911

“Give Us Women’s Suffrage,” poster for the

International Women’s Congress of March 1914,

organized by Clara Zetkin:“Until now, prejudice and reactionary attitudes have denied full civic rights to women, who as workers,

mothers, and citizens wholly fulfill their duty, who must pay their taxes to the state as well as the municipality.

Fighting for this natural human right must be the

firm, unwavering intention of every woman, every female

worker.”