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Feminist and Gender History Through the Literary Looking Glass: German Historiography in Postmodern Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Isabel V. Hull
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The purpose of this essay is not to provide a review of the extensive literature on women's history, gender history, or feminist scholarship, but to reflect on the implications that these three vantage points have for the practice of writing German history. The framework for these reflections is the charge of the conference at which an earlier version of this paper was presented, namely, to consider the interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological challenges to historiography raised by “postmodernism.” These challenges are roughly similar for all national historiographies, though Germany's historians, it could be argued, have distinguished themselves by their especially intense focus on state institutions, national events, aggregated socioeconomic structures, large organizations, and the theories and methods appropriate to these concerns. Such foci stand in particular danger of being dissolved by alternate historiographic interests, like feminist, women's, and gender history. When the center no longer holds, that is the “postmodern” condition; their part in dissolving the center is what links feminist, women's, and gender history to “postmodernism.” Rather than rehearsing specific examples of how, say, women's history has challenged the received picture of German history, and thereby implicitly to suggest methods of damage control, this essay instead attempts to discuss some of the broader theoretical and methodological issues that feminist scholarship poses to historians and to do so within the context of the “postmodern.” References to the specific German context are mostly in the footnotes.

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Central European History , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1989 , pp. 279 - 300
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

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References

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4. Ute Frevert, for example, discusses these difficulties directly, but nonetheless structures her narrative along these lines: Frevert, , Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford, Hamburg, and New York, 1989), 1–8, 307–27.Google Scholar

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13. Feminist women of color were instrumental in shaping this critique: Moraga, Cherrie and Anzaldua, Gloria, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; Hooks, Bell, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston, 1983)Google Scholar; Smith, Barbara, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

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19. Bock, “Historische Frauenforschung,” 25–29.

20. The “polycratic chaos” of the Nazi state and the “polycratic but uncoordinated authoritarianism” of the Wilhelminian state are commonplaces in German historiography: see Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 2d ed. (London and New York, 1989), 61–80Google Scholar. But postmodernist interpretations view all (at any rate quasi-modern) states as diffused, multicentered, and continuously contested; they are no longer seen as an apparatus, but a process that occurs in many micro-centers. See, for example, Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977), 138, 213–16Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1980): 92–95.Google Scholar

21. Most recent feminist studies that have carefully examined some aspect of public/private have confirmed the ideological utility (for males and the institutions associated with their interests) and the analytical futility (for understanding how things work in practice) of this concept. Gisela Bock gives a pithy summary of this subject in “Challenging Dichotomies: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives of Women's Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences” (unpublished essay presented at the conference “Strategies for Women's Studies in the Humanities,” Helsinki, 28–30 May 1989), 6–8. Hausen's, Karin influential essay, “Family and Role-divison: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century–an Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life,” in Evans, Richard J. and Lee, W. R., eds., The German Family (London, 1981), 51–83Google Scholar, is the classic account of the elaboration of this gendered distinction in Germany. For a demolition of this distinction in the example of the German revolution of 1848 see the articles by Lipp, Carola, in Lipp, , ed., Schimpfende Weiber und patriotische Jungfrauen: Frauen im Vormärz und in der Revolution 1848/49 (Moos/Baden-Baden, 1986)Google Scholar. The best example for the Third Reich is Bock, Gisela, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialisinus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986)Google Scholar. For the ideological underpinnings to the distinction see Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif, 1988)Google Scholar. For the most recent discussion of public/ private by German-speaking feminists see Gegen-Öffentlichkeit, Feministische Studien, 1/1989, especially Brigitte Studer, “Das Geschlechterverhältnis in der Geschichtsschreibung und in der Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Überlegungen zur Entwicklung der historischen Frauenforschung und zu ihrem Beitrag zur geschichtlichen Erkenntnis,” 97–121, who is critical of the way feminists have used the public/private distinction in their research.

22. This topic is perhaps the locus classicus of the “de-centered” viewpoint. In a recent article three feminist anthropologists have suggested that postmodern thought occurred when dominant, white Western males “experienced a decentering as world politics [decolonialization] and economic realities [the United States becomes a debtor nation] shift global power relations. …”: Mascia-Lees, Frances E., Sharpe, Patricia, and Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective,” Signs 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 7–34, citations on 15–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; bracketed comments are mine. The classical consideration by a literary critic is Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. The importance of the critique of imperialism to feminist theory and practice could hardly be overemphasized.

23. The most sparkling account of this problem for Germany is still Bock, Gisela and Duden, Barbara, “Arbeit als Liebe-Liebe als Arbeit: Zur Entstehung der Hausarbeit im Kapitalismus,” in Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beiträge zur Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen, Juli 1976 (Berlin, 1977), 118–99Google Scholar. In the meantime women and work (paid and unpaid) has become one of the major foci of feminist scholarship; the secondary literature on this topic is immense. For an introduction see Tilly, Louise A. and Scott, Joan W., Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. Winkler, Dörte, Frauenarbeit im “Dritten Reich” (Hamburg, 1977)Google Scholar; Daniel, Ute, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschafi: Beruf, Familie und Politik im ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bridenthal, Renate, “‘Professional’ Housewives: Stepsisters of the Women's Movement,” in Bridenthal, Renate, Grossmann, Atina, and Kaplan, Marion, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), 153–73Google Scholar; Quataert, Jean, “The Shaping of Women's Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households, and the State in Central Europe, 1648–1870,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 1122–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the essays of Regina Schulte, Marlene Ellerkamp and Brigitte Jungmann, Dorothee Wierling, and Sibylle Meyer, in Hausen, Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte.

24. The classic feminist account is Walkowitz, Judith R., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (London, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Germany see Schulte, Regina, Sperrbezirke: Tugendhaftigkeit und Prostitution in der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt a. M., 1979)Google Scholar. On respectability: Mosse, George L., Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Mosse, George L., “Nationalism and Respectability: Normal and Abnormal Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 2 (04 1982): 221–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Isabel V. Hull, “The Bourgeoisie and its Discontents: Reflections on ‘Nationalism and Respectability,’” ibid.: 247–68.

25. See Nolan, Molly, “Proletarischer Anti-Feminismus: Dargestellt am Beispiel der SPD-Ortsgruppe Düsseldorf, 1890 bis 1914,” Frauen und Wissenschaft, 356–77Google Scholar; Plössl, Elisabeth, Weibliche Arbeit in Familie und Betrieb: Bayerische Arbeiterfrauen 1870–1914 (Munich, 1983)Google Scholar. For women inside the socialist movement see Quataert, Jean H., Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1017 (Berkeley, Calif, 1974), esp. 161–88Google Scholar. On women and unions see Canning, Kathleen M., “Class, Gender and Working-Class Politics: The Case of the German Textile Industry, 1890–1933” (John Hopkins Univ., Ph.D. diss., 1988)Google Scholar; Loseff-Tillmanns, Gisela, Frauenemanzipation und Gewerkschaften (Wuppertal, 1978).Google Scholar

26. Gerhard, Ute, Verhältnisse und Verhinderungen: Frauenarbeit, Familie und Rechte der Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 1978)Google Scholar, and Gerhardt, Ute and Schütze, Yvonne, eds. Frauen-Situation: Veränderungen in den letzten zwanzig Jahren (Frankfurt, a.M., 1988).Google Scholar

27. van den Daele, Wolfgang, “Der Fötus als Subjekt und die Autonomie der Frau: Wissenschaftlich-technische Optionen und soziale Kontrollen in der Schwangerschaft,” in Gerhard and Schütze, Frauen-Situation, 189–218Google Scholar. On the ideology of motherhood that partly undergirds this: Schütze, Yvonne, Die gute Mutter: Zur Geschichte des normativen Musters “Mutterliebe” (Bielefeld, 1986)Google Scholar, and Allen, Ann Taylor, “Mothers of the New Generation: Adele Schreiber, Helene Stöcker and the Evolution of a German Idea of Motherhood, 1900–1914,” Signs 10, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 418–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the Weimar Republic, Grossmann, Atina, “Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign against Paragraph 218,” in Bridenthal, Grossman, and Kaplan, When Biology Became Destiny, 66–86Google Scholar. On non-heterosexuals see Lautmann, Rüdiger, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität (Frankfurt a.M., 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 2, “Diskriminierungsfeld Recht,” 47–61, and Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, “Antihomosexuelle Strafgesetze,” in Lautmann, ibid., 61–92; Ellermann, Rolf, ed., Soziale Diskriminierung Homosexueller (Sankt Augustin, 1987).Google Scholar

28. Peter Novick is less sanguine about this point: Novick, , That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Jonathan Culler gives a clear discussion of how deconstructionist techniques can practice non-resolution without utterly sacrificing meaning: Culler, , On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), esp. 134–55, 180–225.Google Scholar

30. Joan W. Scott, in response to a question, once answered that “how” had replaced “why” in her own work (Binghamton, N.Y., Autumn 1988). I am not sure if Gender and the Politics of History actually bears this out.

31. For critical comment on these differing feminist stances see Jardine, Alice, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985)Google Scholar, and Martin's, Biddy review in The Women's Review of Books, 4, no. 1 (10 1986): 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. See Culler, On Deconstruction, “Reading as a Woman,” 43–63, and Showalter, Elaine, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year,” reprinted in Alice Hardine and Paul Smith, Men in Feminism (London and New York, 1987), 116–32.Google Scholar

33. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen cite two pithy formulations of this problem. Andreas Huyssen: “Doesn't post-structuralism where it simply denies the subject altogether, jettison the chance of challenging the ideology of the subject (as male, white, and middle-class) by developing alternative notions of subjectivity?” and Nancy Cott: “… in deconstructing categories of meaning, we deconstruct not only patriarchal definitions of ‘womanhood’ and ‘truth’ but also the very categories of our own analysis—‘women’ and ‘feminism’ and ‘oppression.’”The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology,” 15, 27.

34. Hunt, Lynn, “Introduction,” to Hunt, , ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif, 1989), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Peter Jelavich considers the “new historicism” of the literary critics in his contribution to this volume.

36. Theory and method are often collapsed together as a single element, especially in polemical usage. Throughout this essay I have understood theory as a structured explanation of the dynamics among parts of a system, or between systems. Method is the systematic manner in which one evaluates material, or selects material for evaluation. Theoretical assumptions can obviously dictate choice of method, but method is not wholly dependent on theory. Various methods, for example, Quellenkritik, hermeneutics, deconstructive readings, oral history, statistics, serial record linkage, and so forth, can be used inside many theoretical frameworks, or independently of them.

37. Typical: Kocka, Jürgen, “Frauengeschichte zwischen Wissenschaft und Ideologie? Zu einer Kritik von Annette Kuhn,” Geschichtsdidaktik 5, no. 1 (1982)Google Scholar, reprinted in von Borries, Bodo, Kuhn, Annette, and Rüsen, Jörn, eds., Sammelband Geschichtsdidaktik: Frau in der Geschichte I/II/III (Düsseldorf, 1984), 271–78.Google Scholar

38. It should not be necessary to rehearse the abundant demonstrations of this fact. For brief discussions of the clash between feminism and various theories current in the social sciences see Harding, Sandra, ed., Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington and India napolis, 1987)Google Scholar. Even where social-science-theory-oriented historians perceive that gender is a fundamental principle of social organization and hierarchy, they are content to leave it untheorized and unexamined and to turn their attention instead to those social principles that apply to what they conceive of as the “public” sphere, and thus, primarily to men only. Hans-Ulrich Wehler makes this explicit in his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1700–1815 (Munich, 1987), 9–12, 125.Google Scholar

39. It is hardly accidental that the political turf battles within the German historical profession, since the founding of “scientific history” in the nineteenth century, have been expressed as disagreements about theory or method (Methodenstreite). Georg Iggers puts method at the heart of his narrative history of German historiography: The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968), 269–70, 278–86Google Scholar. Although Iggers recognizes that historians' conceptual schemas reflect their own social, political, and intellectual self-interests, he rarely presents the Methodenstreite within the discipline as political battles, nor does he consider their gender dimension. Iggers, , New Directions in European Historiography, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 203.Google Scholar

40. A good example is Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, which collapses the cultural, chronological, class, and other contexts of rape into a single, undifferentiated quintessence of male misogyny with but a single meaning. This universalizing assumption restricts the kinds of questions that even a subtle historian might pose of her data: Erika M. Hoerning, “Frauen als Kriegsbeute: Der Zwei-Fronten-Krieg: Beispiele aus Berlin,” in Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato, eds., “Wir kriegen jetzt andre Zeiten”: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern (1985), 327–44, esp. 331, where Brownmiller's thesis sets the parameters of Hoerning's study. Another, smaller example: Ute Bechdolf, “Frauen als Kreigsbeute: Vergewaltigungen beim Einmarsch der Franzosen; Elsa Gärtner: ‘Eine wahre Begebenheit,’” in Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für empirische Kulturwissenschaft der Universität Tübingen-Projekt Gruppe “Heimatkunde des Nationalsozialismus,” ed., Nationalsozialismus im Landkreis Tübingen: Eine Heimatkunde (Tübingen, 1989), 95–98.Google Scholar

41. Three influential books that advance theories of over-arching sameness among women, called essentialism by its critics, are Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar; Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, Calif., 1978)Google Scholar; Benjamin, Jessica, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. All have received extensive, critical discussion among feminists.

42. The dilemma of Marxist feminists was one of the major organizing points for the development of feminist thinking about theory and method. For a recent account of this problem see Sargent, Lydia, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston, 1981)Google Scholar; and Barrett, Michelè, Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (London and New York, 1988).Google Scholar

43. See Opitz's succinct discussion of methodological matters: “Der ’andere Blick,’” 85–89; and, as one example of a feminist view, Quataert, Jean, “A Source Analysis in German Women's History: Factory Inspectors' Reports and the Shaping of Working-Class Lives, 1878–1914,” Central European History 16, no. 2 (06 1983), 99–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. After citing Marguerite Duras as the most anti-theoretical of feminists: “The criterion on which men judge intelligence is still the capacity to theorize and in all the movements that one sees now, in whatever area it may be, the theoretical sphere is losing influence. … It ought to be crushed by now … and be still,” Hal Foster goes on to observe that most feminists “are ambivalent about theory…” because of “the inadequacy of currently existing theoretical constructs. …” Foster, “Feminists and Postmodernism,” 79, n. 19.

45. An enormous number of feminist scholars who disagree about many things nonetheless agree on the importance of what one of them calls “fidelity to parameters of dissonance,” rather than to “coherent theory”; that is, to theorizing from many different, clashing, irreconcilable perspectives. Harding, “Feminist Theory,” 650. Also Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen, “Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology,” 28; Flax, “Postmodernism,” 633; Fraser and Nicholson, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” 390–91; Uta Schmidt, “‘Betroffenheit,’” 516, following Becker-Schmidt, Regina, “Probleme einer feministischen Theorie und Empirie in den Sozialwissenschaften,” in Zentraleinrichtung, Methoden in der Frauenforschung, 224–37.Google Scholar

46. Bock, “Challenging Dichotomies.”

47. The gender system, then, is the system of knowledge and domination (and their patterned, social reproduction) based on an assumed dichotomy between male and female.

48. Fischer-Homberger, Esther, Krankheit Frau, und andere Arbeiten zur Medizingeschichte der Frau (Bern. Stuttgart and Vienna, 1979)Google Scholar; Laqueur, Thomas, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 1–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Nineteenth-Century Anatomy,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 42–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, Wis., 1989)Google Scholar; Outram, Dorinda, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven and London, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duden, Geschichte Unter der Haut. For feminist critiques of biological science: Bleier, Ruth, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; and Hubbard, Ruth, Henifin, M. S., and Fried, Barbara, eds., Biological Woman: The Convenient Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).Google Scholar

49. One of the few studies on this subject in Germany is Theweleit, Klaus, Männerphantasien (Frankfurt a.M., 1977)Google Scholar. It is no accident that its subject is a putatively “peripheral” one, (unacknowledged) homoerotic bonding among World War I veterans and postwar Freikorps activists, nor that their troubled relationship to women, more correctly, to the ideology of “woman,” should play such a central part in the analysis.

50. Roi, M. le, “homme, morale,” Denis Diderot, Encyclopédic, ou dictionnaire raisonne des science, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres (Lausanne and Bern, 1782), vol. 17, 675–82.Google Scholar

51. Desmahis, M., “femme, Droit nat.,” in Diderot, Encyclopedic, vol. 13, 929–37Google Scholar. On the encyclopedists' views on women (but not men) see Kleinbaum, Abby R., “Women in the Age of Light,” in Bridenthal, Renate and Koonz, Claudia, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 1st ed. (Boston, 1977), 215–35, esp. 220Google Scholar; and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Women and the Enlightenment,” in ibid., 2d ed. (Boston, 1987), 251–77, esp. 261–63.

52. Hull, Isabel V., “Sexualität und bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” in Frevert, Ute, ed., Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), 49–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the works cited in note 48.