Mensch, Burger, Weib: Gender and the Limitations of Late 18th-Century Neohumanist Discourse

Abstract

Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel wrote his Uber die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber in 1792, yet his radical call for the full integration of women in society had virtually no impact on contemporary political debates in Germany. As Ruth Dawson notes, even women who were keenly interested in political reform never dared recommend the sweeping changes Hippel advocated.1 Of course, as Dawson also notes, the risks for women were much greater. Hippel, a career civil servant publishing anonymously, had much less to fear than a woman precariously perched on the edge of the public sphere, scandalously betraying her assigned role in life by openly taking pen in hand. But fear is only part of the picture. More importantly, the Enlightenment discourse of utility and civic duty that Hippel used to argue for a woman's equal access to education and occupational opportunities was no longer available to women pedagogical reformers at the beginning of the 19th century. By the end of the 18th century, neohumanist polemics had carried the day. Scholars have customarily valued the neohumanist pedagogical reform movement for its ability to subordinate utilitarian demands, aimed at training the citizen of the state, to a total education of the individual regardless of social and political constraints. The neohumanist attitude toward higher education is still reflected today in the traditional liberal virtues of academic freedom, pure research, and the striving after knowledge for its own sake. It is the purpose of this study, however, to show how neohumanist discourse, especially as exemplified in the early writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt on anthropology, education, and gender, foreclosed the possibility of women taking an active part in society. Whereas Hippel's ability to argue for the improvement of conditions for women in society rested on assumptions about the sociohistorical determination of human subjectivity, Humboldt adopted an anthropological discourse which used the prevailing Mensch / Biirger conceptual split to stress the autonomous actualization of human nature above and beyond environmental influence. Yet an examination of the latter's naturalized, Rousseauian views of gender difference reveal that women have only a subordinate role in this play of self-actualization. The effects of the relegation of women to a realm of essential passivity are even more clearly discernible in a neohumanist text explicitly designed to expand the role of education in women's lives, Betty Gleim's Erziehung und Unterricht des weiblichen Geschlechts. Gleim feels compelled to reject the fundamentally political and activist solutions of a feminist reformer like Hippel in favor of a gradual, inner improvement of the individual who remains true to the individuality of her sex. In the final analysis, an examination of Gleim's text reveals that neohumanism made room for a man to participate in life as a fully realized Mensch and as a socially productiveBiirger, but tended to confine women to a third category, one which was neither fully human nor at all civic-that of Weib.