Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity: The Debate on the Origin of the Family in Europe and the United States, 1860–1914

Abstract

OF THE YEAR 1913, THE VIENNESE NOVELIST Robert Musil wrote, The time was on move ... But in those days no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backwards.1 This new relationship to time, space, and history pervaded literature, arts, and social and natural sciences in Europe at turn of twentieth century, from about 1890 until 1914. William Everdell, author of a recent book on intellectual history of this era, defines its central theoretical project as the profound rethinking of whole mind set of nineteenth century. This process of rethinking eroded familiar nineteenthcentury European and North American paradigms: beliefs in progress and in seamless continuity were shaken by a new emphasis on rupture, randomness, and ontological discontinuity, and reliance on scientific objectivity by a recognition of subjective element in all thought and observation. Most of literature on European and North American intellectual history at turn of century emphasizes problematic and disorienting effects of (as Everdell puts it), the impossibility of knowing even simplest things that nineteenth century took for granted.2 In fact, characterization of period from 1890 to 1914 as an era of pessimism, alienation, and anxiety has become a cliche of intellectual history. In German political thought, Fritz Stern describes a mood of cultural despair; for social sciences, writes Lawrence Scaff, the central problem appears to be same in every case: a sense that unified experience lies beyond grasp of modern self and that malaise and self-conscious guilt have become inextricably entwined with culture. Eugen Weber remarks that, in France at turn of century, the discrepancy between material progress and spiritual dejection re-