Conclusion

Summary

This study has demonstrated the relationship between the situation of girls' schooling in the late nineteenth century and related pedagogical priorities of the German literature classroom and girls' reading material both inside and outside of school. The primacy given to the German classics in the Töchterschule—the idolization of Goethe and Schiller as writers and the authority accorded their interpretations of ideal German femininity—supported the conservative social agenda of Prussian pedagogues and was felt far beyond the classroom walls. The German feminine ideal as interpreted from classic literary texts had a social presence in Wilhelminian Germany that was not limited to the realm of the aesthetic. Rather, the literary interpretation of ideal womanhood informed educational priorities and more. it provided a high culture seal of approval for the gendered, aesthetic, and emotional nationalism that was a hallmark of bourgeois society in Prussia at the end of the nineteenth century.

This emotional nationalism held sway in the core curriculum of the Töchterschulen:German literature, history, and religion. These areas were treated as related subjects by Prussian pedagogues, with the result that the material and ideological instruction in them overlapped and reinforced one another. in this curriculum, educators sought to demonstrate that their cultural gender ideals were borne out not only in works of literature but also in female figures from history and in articles of faith.