Man's Duty to Woman: Men and the First Wave of German Feminism, 1865-1919

Thesis advisor: Devin O. PendasThesis advisor: Paul Breines"Man's Duty to Woman: Men and the First Wave of German Feminism, 1865-1919" charts the modernization of gender relationships in Imperial Germany through an exploration of German men's engagement with both organized feminism and the so-called "Woman Question." An examination of German men's contributions (as well as challenges) to feminist newspapers, women's suffrage societies, women's educational and vocational organizations, and the discourse of expanding women's civil and political rights illuminates not only the ways in which German men helped shape the "first wave" of German feminism, but also the process by which German men were, in turn, shaped by feminism and women's breach of a male-defined public sphere during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. While Germany is better known for its misogynistic intellectual legacy of thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the maxim of "Kinder, Küche, und Kirche" (children, kitchen, and church) used to describe the so-called "women's sphere," my dissertation demonstrates that the cause of German women's rights enjoyed a broad base of male support during the Imperial era and that women's reforms were pivotal to progressive liberal, socialist, and conservative social policies. My examination of male allies, therefore, counterbalances and critiques the longstanding view of Imperial German society and German men as fundamentally hostile to women's rights. Male allies of German feminism, I contend, were motivated by a twin mission to genuinely improve the lives of and opportunities for women in the industrial economy, and to utilize feminine energies--both spiritual and biological--for their own ideological designs. While these male allies retained some degree of principled commitment to expanding women's opportunities in Germany society over time, they were opportunistic men, as well, who sought to harness and direct the power of the "eternal feminine," a power which the moderate female-led feminist movement celebrated and deployed in their own work. My dissertation also considers the ways in which German men reconciled their own masculine identity with their support of reforms that ultimately undermined male hegemony. In the late 1870s, after female leaders took the helm of women's educational and vocational associations and began to embrace the rhetoric of maternalist feminism, men committed to women's reforms were forced to carve out new forms of pro-woman and feminist advocacy within, or alongside of, woman-led feminist organizations. As a result, male allies of German feminism developed a variety of masculinities. Although a few feminist men like Karl Heinzen, Georg von Gyzicki, and Hanns Dorn advocated a gentler, egalitarian masculinity that rejected most aspects of traditional masculinity, the majority of male friends of first wave feminism embodied a hyper-masculinity to balance their commitment to increasing women's social, economic, and (in some cases) political power. The act of becoming a "modern German man" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century necessarily entailed figuring out how to retain one's manliness and maintain refuges of male authority in a world in which women were becoming ever more powerful and visible. Male allies of German feminism represent an essential case study in this project of modernizing masculinity.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History