The women writers of this study, as noted in the previous chapters, presented a rather bleak view of how items such as the shoe, riding attire, or the corset impacted the freedom and movement of the nineteenth-century woman. Education, by contrast, was hailed by all as the key to social and personal betterment. Rosa Mayreder, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Louise Otto Peters wrote separate but strikingly similar treatises on the value of education for girls and women in the quest for emancipation and gender equality. Moreover, education is the one topic on which the writings within Der Bazar, Illustrirte Damen-Zeitung and the texts by the women writers named above agree. While these sources disagreed ardently on the role of fashion and the above named
accouterments of mobility, they came together in surprising harmony on the topic of education and schools for women. Both the magazines written for women and the texts written by women point to the importance of education in shaping the nineteenth-century woman’s life for the better.
Nineteenth-century men and women were seen as playing vastly different roles in their family and social communities and thus were granted different access to education and higher learning. Historian James Albisetti, who has written one of the most
comprehensive works on girls’ schooling in Germany during the nineteenth century, argues that it was not until the mid to late century that women’s education started receiving widespread interest and attention. In his work, Schooling German Girls and Women, Albisetti provides an overview of the ideologies and cultural understandings that shaped the state of women’s education, naming eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel
187 Kant as an influential figure in the debate on how and to what end girls should be
taught.318 According to Albisetti, Kant’s writings still resonated with thinkers of the nineteenth century, shaping the collective understanding of femininity and, by extension, the rights and freedoms accorded to women.
In his work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant addresses the different attributes of the two genders, noting how these fundamental differences prepare men and women for different tasks and spheres of influence. Women, whom he terms the “fair sex,” are predominantly marked by their outward appearance and aesthetic contributions: “Women have a strong inborn feeling for all that is beautiful, elegant, and decorated. Even in childhood they like to be dressed up, and take pleasure when they are adorned.”319 He terms men, by contrast, the “noble sex.” He believes that they are characterized by their ability to reason, their physical strength, their resolve and action, and, above all, their engagement with the world of intellect. Whereas men have a
“deep understanding” of the world around them, women merely have a “beautiful
understanding” thereof.320 According to Kant, “a woman who has a head full of Greek … might as well have a beard; for perhaps that would express more obviously the mien of profundity for which she strives.”321 In other words, a woman striving to be educated makes for a poor imitation of man. Kant continues to enforce the association between men and intellect and women and aesthetics, writing, “No insult can be more painful to a
318 See James Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women. Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
319 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 76-77.
320 Ibid., 78.
321 Ibid.
188 man than being called a fool, and to a woman, than being called disgusting.”322 Kant’s treatise on the genders establishes a mind body divide that leaves women firmly anchored on the side of the body, consequently excluding any respectable participation in matters of the intellect.
According to Albisetti, these were the ideas that continued to shape nineteenth-century thought on women’s education and schooling well after Kant’s lifetime. As a result, popular belief dictated that a woman’s sphere be the home and family. The idea of women learning a trade or pursuing higher education was not only considered counter productive to men and women’s intended roles but also as unlikely to be successful.
Kant’s ideas about women’s inability to learn still loomed large:
Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroy the merits that are proper to her sex, and because of their rarity they can make of her an object of cold admiration; but at the same time they will weaken the charms with which she exercises her great power over the other sex.323
A woman engaging in matters of the mind was warned about the dangers of
“painful pondering” and the stigma of being “bookish,” which was often enough to discourage even the most ambitious from pursuing education and learning.
Moreover, Kant not only enforced the idea that women were incapable of learning to the extent of their male counterparts (“whatever one does contrary to nature’s will, one always does poorly,”)324 he also argued that women did not desire higher learning and education: “A woman is embarrassed little that she does not possess certain high insights,
322 Ibid., 83. Emphasis in original.
323 Ibid., 78.
324 Ibid., 95.
189 that she is timid, and not fit for serious employments, and so forth; she is beautiful and captivates, and that is enough.”325 The writings of nineteenth-century women make it plain, however, that this was not enough. Women activists and social reformers in Germany began demanding better schooling and increased opportunities for women outside of the home. Albisetti writes that beginning with the 1860s, education reform was at the forefront of the women’s movement,326 a trend that is easily perceivable in the writings of Der Bazar and the three women writers of this study. As a result, the mid nineteenth century was marked by a clash in beliefs regarding women’s roles outside the home. On the one side, those still influenced by a century of thought born of Kant’s writings resisted any changes to traditional gender boundaries and gender-specific education, while others, such as Mayreder, Otto, and Ebner-Eschenbach, argued for women’s rights to higher learning and better schooling.
“Miseducation” (Verbildung) is listed by Albisetti as one of the predominant fears of those opposing nineteenth-century education reforms.327 Building on Kant’s idea that
“whatever one does contrary to nature’s will, one always does poorly,” anti-reformers argued against women being educated as “nature” deemed it impossible for such a task to succeed. As a result, those women would fall victim to the results of “miseducation,”
which presented in two ways; first, as a “bluestocking” or misguided scholar, and second, as a “woman of the salon.”328 Both of these roles made women a detriment to their
325 Ibid., 93.
326 Albisetti, xiii.
327 Ibid., 10.
328 Albisetti, 11. The two types of ‘miseducated’ women, according to Albisetti, are the “gelehrtes Frauenzimmer” and the “Salondame.”
190 families and society because they were likely to “neglect their children and home for other interests” and to be “undesirable as wives.”329
Mayreder, Otto, and Ebner-Eschenbach addressed society’s fear of the educated woman in their works of fiction and non-fiction alike. Mayreder and Otto in particular expressed the need for educational reforms in the schools available to girls, often drawing on their own frustrations and experiences growing up and meeting with resistance in their quest for education. Ebner-Eschenbach wrote less about women’s schooling and focused on the concept of education in general as a vehicle for personal betterment and growth.
Her works highlight the personal improvement that comes from being educated, which in turn, makes for a better society. The education of one thus benefits all. Der Bazar, too, published a number of writings that focused on women’s education and the meager opportunities available to girls forced to work outside of the home and support
themselves or dependents. However traditional Der Bazar may have appeared in terms of adhering to conservative fashion codes and enforcing an ideology of motherhood and domesticity, when it came to women’s education, the magazine did not withhold its support. The following sections explore how women’s education was presented in the pages of Der Bazar, followed by an analysis of how the women writers “wrote back” to (or, in this case, wrote along side with) popular discourses on schooling and education in both their private and public writings.