Through Science to Selfhood? The Early Generations of University Women in Fiction

Abstract

The figure of the female student epitomized, for many German-speaking writers around 1900, the intellectual and social freedom supposedly enjoyed by the New Woman. After World War One, these freedoms were more likely to be represented by a white-collar worker or woman in public life, with university now being just one of the many possibilities beyond the domestic sphere. This comparative study of texts by women about female scientists examines how far the figure of the Akademikerin had lost her radical potential by the interwar era. The examples of pre-war fiction considered here (Aimée Duc's Sind es Frauen? and Ilse Frapan's Arbeit) foreshadow the politics of location as practised in the academy in the late twentieth century by questioning hierarchies, challenging women's outsider status, and carving out new space for collective endeavours. By contrast, in the two novels from the interwar era (Grete von Urbanitzky's Eine Frau erlebt die Welt and Vicki Baum's Stud. chem. Helene Willfüer), the scientific setting serves mostly to heighten the presentation of a gifted woman in the ‘male domain’ of science. Earlier prejudices about female students are reprised as a foil for the clever, life-affirming heroine, yet her emancipatory potential may be undermined by the ultimate emphasis on her maternal instinct.