Women's Autonomy and the German Novel Around 1900: Hidden Continuities and Generational Differences

Abstract

Around 1900, many women writers protested powerfully in their fiction against the patriarchal organization of society, seeking to empower other women by raising their consciousness of their collective oppression. How do ground-breaking German feminist novels from the 1890s and 1900s contribute to our understanding of the different ‘varieties of feminism’ (to borrow Myra Marx Ferree's term) existing in the early twentieth century in German? Treating bourgeois feminist fiction around 1900 as a case study for shifts and continuities in women's demands for autonomy, this article will analyze some of the political and social factors which played a part in the writing and reception of such fiction, and examine the continuities of its concerns with those of later generations of feminists. While late twentieth-century feminists felt ambivalence towards the perceived bourgeois conservatism of the Wilhelmine era, fiction around 1900 nonetheless treats themes which continue to resonate with later feminist concerns, especially with regard to the social importance of motherhood and the question of women's reproductive rights.