Working for Utopia: Women's Gendered Labor, Activism, and the Kindergarten during the Revolutionary 1840s

Abstract

By 1849 the kindergarten spread across the German Confederation as an alternative space of revolutionary politics and protest. I argue that the kindergarten worked alongside the barricade as a key location to protest traditional forms of state and religious authority and cultivate a new humanity that centered on women's gendered labor and children's education. For the founder of the kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel and his supporters, the classroom was a garden for the future in which educators and children alike could “perform utopia.” For female revolutionaries, the kindergarten provided a forum to make political claims in ways not open elsewhere. This article provides insight not only into the history of Central Europe in the Age of Revolutions, but also into the histories of emotions, gender, and education. I argue that historians should examine how ideas of “utopian hope” have been utilized in moments of upheaval to create new spaces of opposition.

Friedrich Fröbel's kindergarten was an alternative space of politics during the revolutionary 1840s. The early children's educational institute was founded in the small spa town of Bad Blankenburg in the Thuringian Forest in June 1840. Its founder commemorated the kindergarten as a monument to social and cultural progress in line with the Gutenberg Press, Christian Baptism, and Martin Luther's presentation of his Ninety-Five Theses.¹ For Friedrich Fröbel, the kindergarten was a transformative space that was based on a new form of education for young children. Children should learn through free play led by the maternal love and care of women in ways that mimicked the ideal of a family home. This pedagogy, he hoped, would usher in a new era of humanity that was supposedly more in line with natural freedom.

This belief that a new era of humanity could emerge from the kindergarten was especially powerful between 1849 and 1851, the years that saw growing conservative reaction against revolutionary activism in German-speaking Europe. The liberal, democratic, and reformist groups that had united to create a German nation-state, parliament, and new citizen in March 1848 were increasingly growing apart by the summer of that year.² Conservative state officials who never accepted the goals of the Revolution saw an opportunity to assert their power and authority.³ Though hope for parliamentary action in the Frankfurt Assembly had reached a standstill, social reformers and revolutionaries continued to promote, imagine, and create a new world in different associations, newspapers, dissenting communities, and Fröbelian kindergartens.⁴

Women across the liberal and radical spectrum, many of whom belonged to dissenting religious congregations, recognized the kindergarten as a space to build a new society that empowered their supposed natural capabilities for love and care. In August 1849, Auguste Herz, the chairwoman of the Dresden Democratic Women's Association, founded a kindergarten in the city. While in May 1849, the Saxon military had suppressed the barricades, the kindergarten remained an open space that could be used to create a new democratic future.⁵ In that same year a kindergarten was opened in Breslau by the dissenting Christ-Catholic Women's Association as a way to re-imagine a community beyond confessional and class differences. An article on the Breslau kindergarten in the Pädagogischen Wächter argued that the institute was necessary to bring individuals of different classes together. As the writer stated, “the finely dressed child, who had initially shied away from touching the hand of the proletarian child, soon saw only his own kind in him.”⁶ In Hamburg and Nuremberg, kindergartens were funded and supported by the Women's Association to Support the German-Catholic Congregation. Additionally, both cities made clear that the kindergarten was open to all children regardless of confession, attracting supporters and activists for Jewish emancipation. For these activists, a new model of education shaped by freedom, play, and curiosity opened the doors to new kinds of political engagement.

This article focuses on the kindergarten as a space to examine the performance and articulation of utopian hope during the revolutionary 1840s. Why and how did revolutionaries and reformers continue to promote social and cultural change at a time when the tide had turned against them? And what insights into the transformation of politics and protest do we gain by looking at activism for the kindergarten? The activists examined here believed that by opening kindergartens they would invest and safeguard a new future. Through a reformulation of education, namely led by children's free play and maternal care, activists hoped to ensure a new liberal, and to some a democratic, tolerant world. In the process of constructing this new world, many women articulated a new ideal of politics and the self that actively included their labor. Activists left behind an archival trail that illuminates the ways that the kindergarten was a place where imagination, hope, and play came together that moved beyond the pedagogical ideals put forth by its founder Friedrich Fröbel. By examining the activities and desires of revolutionaries that moved into this space, this article emphasizes the ways the kindergarten was a political laboratory in ways similar to the barricades.⁷ Within this space, activists cultivated a new community, experimented with educational roles and labor, as well as reimagined an ideal of the self. This was a place for activists to perform utopia.⁸

This article contributes to the extensive historiography on the Revolutions of 1848 by turning to the kindergarten as a case study to examine the creation, functioning, and mobilization of a particular emotional community and protest space.⁹ The kindergarten is one such place where norms, values, emotions, and expectations were redefined, mobilized, and used to protest the status quo. The kindergarten provides a route to investigate how those excluded from formal politics, namely women, children, and minorities, were able to cultivate a new community and mobilize their ideals outwards.

The kindergarten was not an uncontested space. Many male pedagogues (and some female educators) noted the potential moral and sexual chaos that could emerge from a space dominated by educated and independent-minded women who moved away from the traditional, patriarchal household.¹⁰ Established state and religious authorities across German-speaking Europe also recognized the kindergarten as a space of revolutionary chaos. Berlin Police President Karl Ludwig Friedrich von Hinckeldey investigated the ways the kindergarten was dominated by a network of democratic notables working for the “party of upheaval.” This network of democrats provided proof, as Hinckeldey wrote, that “every kindergarten is undoubtedly a nursery of destruction.”¹¹ Prussia and Saxony accordingly banned the kindergarten in August 1851.

Historians have illuminated the ways women's activism emerged within distinct spaces during the revolutionary era, such as dissenting religious communities.¹² These spaces interacted with the revolution differently than parliaments or the barricades. Activists shaped these particular areas to cultivate a distinct belief and value system that stood in opposition to the existing religious and political structure.¹³ Scholars of the revolutionary era in Europe have also increasingly turned to the everyday, exploring the politics of carnival, communication and transportation routes, and newspapers.¹⁴ The kindergarten is not separated from this larger discussion.¹⁵ Historian Ann Taylor Allen has shaped our understanding of the kindergarten as a physical and discursive space. Male and female activists utilized the concept of maternal love and care to create opportunities for women's political engagement, career development, and education. Allen showed how the kindergarten was mobilized to articulate and promote feminist politics and ideas of belonging.¹⁶ This article contributes to this discussion by turning to this space in action to examine the performance of utopian hope that mobilized the supporters of the kindergarten.

The conclusions made here encourage the reader to widen their spatial analyses during moments of protest from the streets and parliaments to the schoolhouses where revolutionary scripts, hopes, and emotions can be examined. As an educational space, it was given the vital task of cultivating a specific future where particular performances, such as play and maternal care, were utilized in the hopes of creating a new citizen. Historians have illuminated the ways gender, religion, class, and race marked who could participate in parliaments, vote, and practice full citizenship.¹⁷ In histories of revolutionary protest, these markers of difference were at times even more pronounced. An analysis of the kindergarten allows us to see how these differences, particularly religious and gender, were articulated, reworked, and strengthened.

Ultimately, this article reveals how supporters of the kindergarten believed they were ushering in a new world through their labor and work with children. It begins with an examination of the ways the kindergarten was promoted as a space of utopian potential, diving into Fröbel's pedagogy and how he envisioned a new community. It then turns to the transformative experience many women had working with the kindergarten. Here, it focuses on how the kindergarten created a new emotional-value system where new forms of community, authority, and education were made possible. Finally, the article examines the ways in which the kindergarten was promoted to protest the status quo. The kindergarten was a space where individuals debated, reimagined, and played with ideas of authority, political identities, and the role of the individual in society. By turning to this space, we can track how utopian thinking, imagination, and hope mobilize activism and protest.

The Kindergarten as a Space of Utopian Potential

The kindergarten was a space of utopian potential. Friedrich Fröbel assigned the kindergarten a special responsibility to “rehabilitate” the way parents, and particularly mothers, cared for and educated their children. Fröbel's method encouraged parents and educators to entice children's curiosity through play. This approach required that parents and educators give their children “productive” freedom that was supposedly necessary for them to develop key learning skills. Fröbel maintained that by following this method, not only would there be new ethical relationships between children and educators but also between the individual, family, and community. As in a garden, the kindergartner, according to Fröbel, would be able, through special training, to cultivate a new world.

Thomas More defined the term “utopia” in 1516 as a place that is “no place” and a “good place.”¹⁸ Utopias cannot be separated from their specific political and social contexts. They reflect conditions that their creator had sought to challenge. The early “socialist utopians,” criticized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for lacking a “scientific approach” to understand crises and change, sought to reshape society through social engineering projects that focused on remaking ethical and labor bonds in new communities.¹⁹ Individuals such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri de Saint-Simon created blueprints in the forms of “phalanxes,” “communes,” and other kinds of spaces that contained within them radical potential for social change.²⁰ Within these areas, they utilized new technology and pedagogy to rework the place of the individual and the community. These spaces formed as critiques of traditional forms of love, marriage, and education. Many of these thinkers believed that once new social and ethical relations were established, it would spread beyond their communities.

Utopian thought was in no way limited to the thinkers described above. It has been, at least since the nineteenth century, a fundamental aspect of protest cultures. Across the globe individuals thought of ways to challenge imperial, capitalist, and state authorities in a variety of intentional communities and lifestyles.²¹ Anthropologists Charles Price, Donald Nonimi, and Erich Fox-Tree emphasized the need to take “grounded utopian movements” seriously in analyzing social movements.²² Historian Robert Kramm has recently turned to these grounded movements to highlight global knowledge networks of protest. Kramm emphasized that actors across the globe utilized their body and work to “do” utopia in his analysis on intentional communities in Japan, Jamaica, and South Africa. By “doing utopia” these communities were able to shape new understandings of life, modernity, and protest.²³ Intellectuals of the Black Futurism movement have also provided a valuable example of utopian activism in action.²⁴ The Black Panthers, for example, cultivated forms of resistance to systems of exclusion and racism that not only included violence but also new schools and meal programs that sought to rethink the history of knowledge and power.²⁵

Contemporary queer theorists on the politics of futurism provide additional insight into utopian activism and protest that is particularly fruitful for examining the revolutionary nineteenth century. José Esteban Muñoz emphasized in Cruising Utopia that scholars must take seriously the articulations and creative productions that sought to construct a new world where queer love, and particularly a queer future, would be possible. Muñoz showed that concrete hope, through speech acts, performance, and community building were steps towards ushering a new future. Queerness, he stated, “is performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”²⁶ Muñoz's approach, utilizing Ernst Bloch's analysis of hope, provides a methodology for historians to examine how individuals envisioned and promoted alternative futures that opposed traditional power structures. Muñoz challenged Lee Edelman's No Future that embraced the fatalistic “death drive” of queerness to oppose the heteronormative future presented in schools, literature, and politics.²⁷ To see activism in this light shows a different politics and understanding of community building and belonging. For Muñoz, a new future is possible and something that activists and ordinary individuals consistently embraced and worked towards. Activists for the kindergarten illuminated this trend as they spoke about building a new future through women's professional training, pamphlet writing, and children's play.

The fact that revolutionary activists turned to the kindergarten is not surprising. The ideological foundation of the nursery was steeped in the radical currents of early nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe. Friedrich Fröbel and his closest collaborators were participants in the nationalist student movement that sought to construct a new national community out of the ruins of the Napoleonic Wars. Fröbel's early educational project, a boys’ school in Keilhau, was under investigation by the Prussian police during the early 1820s as a suspected haven for political radicals evading the Carlsbad Decrees.²⁸ The Keilhau school moved away from structures of authority that encouraged boys to develop independent social, ethical, and physical skills. The teachers were members of the nationalist student fraternities and followers of the radical founder of the gymnastic movement, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.²⁹ Additionally, Fröbel and his collaborators espoused a dissenting ideal of religion and God that was found in nature. The belief in nature, progress, and development were put in practice in the kindergarten through the method of free play and maternal love and care.

Fröbel brought together two ideals in his conceptualization of the kindergarten: the natural scientific garden of the Enlightenment and the religious garden of God. The natural garden of the late eighteenth century was defined by scientific observation, organization, and categorization.³⁰ The plant was observed in relation to its environment, with the scientific garden providing a way to examine natural laws. The scientific garden, for Fröbel, was also the natural garden where God reigned. Like the Garden of Eden, nature provided a window to view God's work and developmental laws. The development of humankind, however, unlike the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden, was stripped of its sinful nature. Humanity was reimagined within a pantheistic ideal of Christianity. The child was born innocent, without sin. Rather than atone for the sins of humanity, the child developed as a flower would.

Fröbel's 1841 description of the garden combined the nursery and the garden in deeply romantic, naturalistic language that saw human development constantly progressing towards perfection. The gardener worked alongside nature, Fröbel wrote, protecting and caring for growth in the most sensitive way.³¹ Just as spring returns budding flowers, Fröbel continued, so too “man seeks to awaken and nurture early in the child the impulse and will for good, for the presentation of the noble and pure, in a higher human sense …a God-centred life.”³² A new spring of humanity, Fröbel argued, would emerge from this development. Children were no longer simply children. They had become representative of all of humanity.

Fröbel promoted free play as a method that ensured the cultivation of children's inner spirit and their relationship with the outside world. As early as 1826 he wrote that we should follow this “necessary inner mental activity” as an “endeavour for the progress of development.”³³ He argued that play allowed children to explore their environment and inner being naturally by inspiring their curiosity. The lack of force in this system ensured that children retained their learning and the meaning behind it. Fröbel's concept of play belonged to a larger cyclical philosophy that guided his work. This philosophy projected a belief in the cyclical developments of humanity and nature: a relationship that ensured the development of the inner-self and the outer-self united in one whole being.

Other pedagogues had written and theorized about play. In Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described play as a fundamental aspect of early education that would help develop social and intellectual skills. He wrote, “whether he is at work or at play, he [Émile], is content with either; his sports are his occupations.”³⁴ Under the guise of play, Rousseau wrote, “the child is doing the most serious things.”³⁵ Schiller had written about play in The Aesthetic Education of Men in his critical response to the excesses of the French Revolution. For the romantic writer, play was an aspect of human freedom that allowed individuals to move away from physical and spiritual constraints.³⁶ He maintained that play would provide a better route for political reform and change than revolutionary upheaval. Additionally, the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi emphasized the importance of specialized activities and games to develop key socially productive skills directed at lower-class children.³⁷ Fröbel followed these pedagogical trends by identifying play as a fundamental element attached to rethinking social and cultural relations.

In his Aufruf und Plan zur Begründung und Ausführung eines deutschen Kindergartens, published on March 4, 1840, Fröbel defined the pedagogical gap in the development of young children. The current approach to children's development, he stated, “repressed or neglected instead of strengthening the all-round sensory and mental activity demanded by the child's nature. The same is inhibited, even bound and weakened.”³⁸A child could only develop as much as they were aware of their own activities. An education in and through children's occupations (games and activities) was necessary to allow children to reach their full potential.³⁹

Fröbel identified women as fundamental emotional workers necessary for his educational project. As Fröbel wrote, “the means and ways to solve this task of cultivating the child and for the salvation of the family have been placed in the female mind, above all in the mother's heart and in the mother's hand.”⁴⁰ Work in the kindergarten would in no way threaten the pre-conceived idea of women's natural role as caring, sentimental, and emotional, mothers. In fact, Fröbel tied this work to an idealized construction of women's natural essence that supposedly began in infancy.⁴¹ Fröbel argued that women should see the work undertaken in the kindergarten as a living “monument” to their natural role of loving children and humanity. It would only better their “professions” as maternal beings. Pointing to their natural talents did not mean that women did not require further training.

Fröbel's discussion on women's natural essence and labor coincided with the strengthening of middle-class gender roles and the ideal of the family across Western Europe. During the late eighteenth century, publications on women's education increasingly focused on the need to cultivate women's supposed “Bestimmung,” their destiny, within the household as a wife and mother. Although women were expected to do the work of housekeeping, their primary and defining role was the emotional support they were to provide to their husbands and children. Fröbel's view on women's labor therefore reflects an interesting moment when the concepts and terms of gendered labor are under debate.⁴²

For the supporters of the kindergarten, the Fröbelian method provided an ideal way to develop emotional skills and community. Through specific toys and activities, children would develop their sense of individuality and responsibility to larger community. In addition, they would develop understandings of empathy, shame, and curiosity. Allwine Middendorff highlights this clearly in Doris Lütkens's Kindergarten-Chronik. In her observation of children's play she charted the emotional development of a young girl named Kätchen, who she wrote had, “a weak, cautious, and receptive disposition.”⁴³ Middendorff noted that Kätchen became more involved with the community of children after some earlier hesitation. “Now every day brings more pleasure and love,” Middendorf continued, “even if a serious word must be spoken from time to time, a look, a hint, is often enough to bring her back to the point.”⁴⁴ At one point, Kätchen was brought to tears out of a sense of shame for being caught violently reacting to another child touching a toy. Middendorff utilized facial expressions, childlike play, and questions to evoke children's emotional and social development.

For Fröbel and his supporters the kindergarten was a place of utopian hope that sought to actively rework bodies and minds. The physical space was imbued with the power to remake social relations that focused on opposing patriarchal authority with feminine love. Free play provided children with tastes of “productive” freedom. This ideal of freedom was to be the basis of a new civil society in opposition to the traditional status quo practiced by the monarchs across the German Confederation.

The Kindergartner and The Potential of the Garden

The women who joined Fröbel as kindergartners reported to him on the progress of the nursery in other cities and hoped to encourage its promotion into other communities interested in the cause of educational reform and political change. In contrast to the early donors of the kindergarten, women who joined the profession generally belonged to the middling classes and had experience in local civic activism. These women enrolled in kindergartner training seminars that had first opened in Bad Blankenburg and Keilhau before spreading to other German cities in 1849. Many students across these seminars reported on the political climate, the opportunity to create a community, and the kindergarten mission. The kindergartners themselves had gone beyond Fröbel in demonstrating the radical potential of the nursery.

Kindergartner training seminars provided women with a space to learn not only pedagogy and Fröbel's games, but also new approaches to parenting and family life. The seminars were divided into three learning approaches: theoretical, practical, and experiential. Fröbel's lectures provided the theoretical basis of the student's training, followed by practical education focused on specialized activities and “gifts” such as toys and games.⁴⁵ The last component of experiential learning was in the kindergarten itself. One student reported that the seminar in Dresden offered women a variety of different lectures divided into those who wanted to be teachers and kindergartners and those that focused on the practice of motherhood and family life.⁴⁶ Women learned the supposed scientific approach and art of performing maternal love and care through carefully laid out activities and games that would lead to a renewed strengthened relationship between child, parent, and society.

The women who joined Fröbel's seminar worked and lived together. According to Henriette Schrader-Breymann, who had joined Fröbel's seminar in Keilhau in 1848, twenty women had to be turned away from the student pension due to lack of space, illuminating the popular interest in the cause.⁴⁷ These women shared housework, listened to lectures, but also established a new emotional community and value system. As Schrader-Breymann wrote in a letter to her mother in May 1848, “the institution is now in full bloom. … One is always busy with spiritual interests.”⁴⁸ She reported to her mother on the food, community, and activists around Keilhau. By living alone, away from male authority figures usually found in the family household, these women established new bonds, expectations, and experiences for themselves.

The emotional community of the seminar co-existed side by side with other, often, clashing systems of feelings.⁴⁹ Scharder-Breymann's diary entry from the middle of May provides an example of this clash of communities. She reflected on a particular moment in a Rudolstadt church where a pastor called the congregation to reject the godless leading the current revolutionary moment. She rejected the pastor's conclusions against the revolutionaries. As she wrote, there was a lack of emotional connection with their approach to the Bible, “I am always looking for something in the church and I am not finding it. I am looking for a clear understanding of the Bible and the application of it to our lives. But so much remains obscure to me.” She continued, “I can't do anything with so many sayings and the admonitions of the senior pastor to turn away from the godless. It remains completely ineffective. Who is the godless? Who has a right to call the other so?”⁵⁰

Schrader-Breymann reformulated her understanding of Christianity, gender, and religiosity and believed that the revolutionaries may be acting to bring about a new world in line with Christian values. For her, religion and activism go hand in hand. As she wrote, “it may be difficult to interpret the Bible correctly, to inspire people for the good, but I think that anyone who wants to serve his God with fervent love and holy zeal is not just a preacher in the pulpit, but also a pastor in the world.”⁵¹

Schrader-Breymann responded and reflected on the limitations placed on women. The “barriers” placed on her sex “dampen the passion” of her soul and were made to “bend” her mind. She wrote, “is it any less beautiful to keep still, to work quietly and tolerate, than to wrestle strongly and strive? To be a woman in quiet dignity? Does this fact not have great significance?” She found that it was women who have a role in creating and upholding the Christian community, “was it not women who remained true to him until death, who first proclaimed his resurrection with the cry: ‘The Lord is risen, he is risen indeed!’ Yes, we women are not excluded from the highest, the most glorious on earth—that is my consolation.”⁵² For Schrader-Breymann, women had an active emotional role in the religious community that had been established in Christian history.

The seminar provided a valuable space for women and pedagogues to cultivate a new emotional community and system that encouraged vulnerability and intimacy. Schrader-Breymann's biographer Mary Lyschinska maintained that the secluded community, away from parents and families, made “harmless” romance common between female students and the male teachers at Keilhau.⁵³ Lyschinska addressed Schrader-Breymann's relationship with Marius Bendsen, a Danish teacher living in Keilhau with Fröbel. Bendsen was also romantically involved with Allwine Middendorff, Fröbel's niece and the daughter of Wilhelm Middendorff's (Fröbel's major collaborator). Though distance from family may have contributed, these relationships undoubtedly were a product of the intellectual and emotional ideas that brought this community together. Lyschinska highlighted this clearly when she described these relationships as products of the particular space and time. Lyschinska wrote, “here they [the Keilhau community] were prepared to see women as human beings, as equals”; indeed, they offered her a helping and supportive hand so that she could educate herself and become capable of fulfilling her one task in the world: “Freedom! O, the heavenly freedom of Keilhau!”⁵⁴ Though Lyschinska wrote that this freedom did not mean liberation “from the fetters of the parental home” but rather “an inner release from the half-conscious social pressure that weighed on the bourgeois position of women,” it was undoubtedly a product of a different value system put in place by Fröbel and his collaborators that actively reworked the power structures that shaped gendered labor and ideas of self-fulfillment.⁵⁵

Other students highlighted this new emotional community clearly in their personal letters to one another after the seminars had concluded. Individuals wrote about the progress of their kindergartens, criticisms, but also expressed gratitude for community and friendship.⁵⁶ The kindergartner Amalie Krüger wrote to Fröbel in September 1847 about how she faced criticisms from traditional educators while preparing for a trip to open a kindergarten in Switzerland. She highlighted that she was targeted for her untraditional lifestyle, particularly noting that women and their husbands would not welcome her. She requested that Fröbel burn the letter after reading it, indicating a close familiar friendship.⁵⁷ Fröbel himself participated in this emotional community. He showed vulnerability and softness in his early letters with kindergartners. In his letters to his student Luise Levin, this is especially the case. She later became his wife.⁵⁸ The seminars and pensions were fundamental in creating a lasting affective community.

Schrader-Breymann wrote about how this community provided her with the opportunity to be exposed to new religious and political currents spreading across the German Confederation, which in turn led her to embrace Fröbel's utopian vision of the kindergarten. She did not know how to take the unorthodox political and religious discussions happening around her in Keilhau. She was confronted with an image of Christian dissenter and key member of the Friends of Light congregation Gustav Wisclicenus hanging above a door with the quote “one cannot testify against the truth.”⁵⁹ She also was curious about the discussions on creating a unified Germany, to which she asked, “what do they understand by ‘free’?”⁶⁰ For Schrader-Breymann, Fröbel's seminar provided her with one of her earliest political lessons. By September 1848, Schrader-Breymann had taken an interesting turn in her evaluation of the political events around her. She embraced Fröbel's revolutionary language. She described Fröbel “awakening” the supposed tendencies within the German nation particularly in the field of education. She defined the kindergarten as a key tool to unify the family and larger society. Children she stated, “are brought into living connection with the great whole, which develops like a tree from the core of a holy family life.”⁶¹

Though Fröbel had promoted his training seminar since 1841, the period between 1846 and 1850 saw an increase in students interested in becoming kindergartners. These women came from diverse backgrounds and had different political ideals. They all identified the kindergarten as a transformative space. Ida Seele, who joined Fröbel in 1843 and later became the kindergartner that directed the Bad Blankenburg kindergarten, was born in 1826 in Nordhausen to a middle-class family. She noticed Fröbel's call for kindergartners in the local newspaper. She defied the wishes of her family in order to join this profession.⁶² She described herself as having a consummately womanly and almost childlike nature.⁶³ Fröbel also described Seele in these terms, defining her as the ideal kindergartner. She was sent to Johannes Fölsing's Darmstadt Institute in 1844 as a representative of Fröbel's method. Doris Lütkens also joined Fröbel in 1847.⁶⁴ She had already established herself as an educator in Hamburg. In 1841 she opened the Teaching and Pension Institute for Higher Daughters in the St. Georg North suburb of Hamburg. During her seventeen years as director, the school developed a reputation as a site for women's education for the middle classes that adhered to socially acceptable gender ideas. Lütkens remained tied to a class-based ideal of gendered education. She did not promote education across class lines, even though the St. Georg suburb was socioeconomically mixed. She met Fröbel at a children's festival in Quetz in 1847 and later requested that Allwine Middendorff join her kindergarten in Hamburg. Both Seele and Lütkens described the transformative power of the kindergarten. This was a location to develop and cultivate specific feminine labor for the social good.

The two women illuminate the diversity among kindergartners, that at times produced conflict. Allwine Middendorff wrote about her disagreements with Lütkens in her letters to Fröbel in 1849. Middendorff had established links with the democratic dissenting congregations whereas Lütkens represented one of the more conservative followers of Fröbel. She believed in the concept of the garden but rejected the dissenting Christian ideals it contained. Nonetheless, Lütkens was an important publicist for Fröbel's cause. She disseminated the kindergarten ideal through her publication Unsere Kinder.⁶⁵ It is here that Allwine Middendorff's reports on the activities and interaction with young children in the kindergarten was published and promoted to a wider audience.⁶⁶

Women from politically liberal and dissenting backgrounds also joined Fröbel in large numbers during this time. Amalie Krüger demonstrated this interesting mix of political hopes and desires during the 1848 revolution. Krüger, born in 1816 to a middle-class liberal family, joined Fröbel's institute in 1847. She was eager to enact social change that fit with a new world epoch of human rights and freedom. She lived with her sister and brother-in-law, Ludwig Hildenhagen, a Protestant pastor in the small town of Quetz before joining the kindergarten. Hildenhagen and Krüger had established connections with the Friends of Light.⁶⁷ In 1847, Krüger had traveled to Keilhau to be trained as a kindergartner under Fröbel's supervision. After completing her training, she sought to find a position to help create a new world that promoted freedom, individual development, and national integration. She displayed this hope clearly in her letter to Fröbel. “Please see to it that I can also enter some sphere of activity. The time is ripe. Great things are happening everywhere!” she exclaimed. “I want to, I have to, collaborate in the glorious new construction of the future. The foundation stones, the most genuine and firm, are children!”⁶⁸ The kindergarten represented the ideal location. Indeed, Krüger wrote excitedly, “the kindergartens are alive! Long live the man who first grasped the great idea and spreads it!”⁶⁹

In her letters to Fröbel, Krüger shared how she saw the kindergarten as a revolutionary institution. “I thought of you very much when I read that in Paris children from all classes, Jews as well as Catholics and Protestants, have gone hand in hand and asked the government for care and education!” she wrote.⁷⁰ It was the “springtime of peoples” and in 1848 the people of France, just like those in the German Confederation, were demanding their natural rights and freedoms. Education, for Krüger, was a necessary component to create this renewed humane and free society that encouraged individual cultivation and community integration. In the same letter Krüger attached poems sung by the crowd that called for a new united Germany and freedom.

Jewish emancipation activists also recognized the potential of the kindergarten and wrote to Fröbel for his support to open a kindergarten.⁷¹ Hamburg's Johanna Goldschmidt was one of the leading activists for the kindergarten.⁷² She was the daughter of the merchant Marcus Hertz Schwabe and was raised in the wealthy Reform Jewish circles in the city.⁷³ In 1847 she had written on the particular power of women to cultivate a tolerant religiously pluralistic Hamburg.⁷⁴ Her activism mirrored the goals of the Hamburg Society for the Social and Political Interests of Jews, founded in 1845. The society made of Jewish and Christian Hamburg residents, strove not only to promote the social and political interests and rights of Jewish men and women, but also to provide educational and employment opportunities for those who had suffered discrimination from the restrictive policies put forward by the city's exclusive merchant and guild culture.⁷⁵ In March 1849 Johanna Goldschmidt, working with members of the Society and the Dissenting German-Catholic Congregation, invited Friedrich Fröbel to come to Hamburg to set up a seminar to train kindergartners.⁷⁶

It was the kindergartners that helped move the kindergarten into more radical and political networks. The most vocal promoters had already developed their activism within political and religious dissenting associations across the German Confederation. For other students, like Henriette Schrader-Breymann, the political and cultural climate of these seminars was also a vital arena for experiencing and learning about political and religious dissent. Together, the seminars and kindergarten itself was a fundamental space to create an opposing emotional community that empowered new forms of protest and activism.

The Kindergarten and the Revolution of 1848

By March 1848, Fröbel and his supporters had defined the kindergarten as a garden that would usher in a new world. The utopian vision of a new society that would emerge from the kindergarten was not without conflict and debate. These conflicts largely centered on women's work in the kindergarten. The Fröbel trained kindergartner required freedom to perform gendered labor that broke free from traditional constrains placed on women's educational, professional, and economic development. Many liberals, who in fact deeply feared women's emancipation, saw this as a possible place of social, political, and sexual chaos.

Fröbel's major collaborator Wilhelm Middendorff outlined the kindergarten's utopian potential in an 1848 pamphlet directed to the Frankfurt Parliament that was established in March. Middendorff wrote that the kindergarten ensured the well-rounded development of young children before entering elementary school who may suffer from neglect in the family home due to the busy life of chores and daily care of multiple children.⁷⁷ This approach does not mean that parents would be relieved of their duty to care for all their children. Rather, Middendorff maintained, the kindergarten would provide an opportunity for parents, and particular mothers, to observe games and activities that would ensure a proper development of young children. In effect, the family would be strengthened with mothers learning from women who were specifically trained to educate and occupy children in contrast to the kindermädchen (nurse maids) who came from the lower classes.

Middendorff also emphasized the ways the kindergarten strengthened the individual's all-round development necessary for full participation in society. By playing, singing, and using special toys, Middendorff maintained that children would become acquainted with society as well as develop key social, physical, and emotional skills. Altogether, he wrote, “through their free creative joyful activity [and] beautiful imitation of the surrounding life of men and the natural world” children would establish a “connection in which they themselves, like every other being, stand with this whole.” This method would, “ensure peace and serenity.”⁷⁸

Middendorff maintained an ideal of play that sought to preserve social foundations. Play would bring progress and social change but, according to Middendorff, it would also pay respect to political and social institutions. A closer look at Middendorff's language however illuminates that these social foundations, the Frankfurt Parliament in particular, was itself the product of a revolutionary moment. He was appealing to institutions that were under debate. He hoped that the kindergarten would stabilize this new structure.

The kindergarten would provide the parliament with the basis for a unified German state, one of the highest goals for many revolutionaries. An institution that would ensure the development of young children, along with the cooperation between families and the larger national community, would help create a unified nation-state. The kindergarten, he stated, brought together “noble and low, Jews and Christians, Protestant and Catholics, blessed side by side, free from prejudice, united for the children.”⁷⁹ It would be “the magic wand” that would produce the unity of the Fatherland.⁸⁰ Middendorff appealed to the parliament to legislate and protect the kindergarten as a state-sponsored institution.

Middendorff promoted the spread of the institution on a national level. The Rudolstadt Teachers Assembly of August 17–18, 1848 also sought to call attention to the national goals and hopes of the kindergarten. It was an attempt by Fröbel and his supporters to gain official recognition for the kindergarten from state authorities. The invitation to the assembly made clear that this was a call to promote early children's education for both the rich and the poor, bringing them together in the hope of a future united German state. Just as the revolutionary French government had implemented new educational institutions that helped to stabilize the new state and its revolution, the German state would benefit from a more secure educational model that molded a better community.⁸¹ As the invitation stated, “the state must not only provide guidance on how to educate children but also better educate parents through the establishment of early children's educational institutes.”⁸²

Attendees represented the wide social diversity in the kindergarten's base of support. In addition to Fröbel and his close associates, there were leading pedagogues, such as the Saxon Julius Kell, and kindergartners Johanna Küstner, Doris Lütkins, Henriette Schrader-Breymann, and Amelie Krüger, and many others interested in the cause. Discussion focused on the necessity of the kindergarten as a state-sponsored institution, the position of the kindergartner and the education she was to receive, and the specific method and benefits of the system based on play.

Reform was emphasized from the beginning of the meeting. Both Fröbel and Kell highlighted the importance of reform for social and cultural order across all of Germany.⁸³ The Teachers Assembly, however, was soon divided on core questions. Although they all agreed on the importance of the kindergarten, participants differed on how to properly define the place of the institution. Was it to be part of state education? Or was it to be a private institution that assisted the functioning and molding of the family unit? Although the family was a “holy site” that “the kindergarten worked to protect,” Kell emphasized that “the state must be aware of the child as a whole and to consider the first years of childhood.”⁸⁴

Women's position in the project was also debated. For many men, too much education threatened the supposed natural position of women. A male teacher was skeptical of Fröbel's educational project, which fully depended on women's work. One participant objected completely, stating “I have a horror of philosophical women.”⁸⁵ Another male teacher also rejected the idea of providing scientific and philosophic education to women. Women, he stated, were not capable of completing the heavy work a philosophical education demanded.⁸⁶ These two men were not the only pedagogues to voice concerns over the type of form and training Fröbel's kindergartners would receive. Women were constantly defined as domestic and loving mothers who, they believed, belonged in the family home. Work in the kindergarten was imagined by pedagogues, and even for Fröbel, as temporary. Fröbel made this point clear in his early promotional material where he maintained that work in the kindergarten would better the profession of the mother.

Many kindergartners rejected these claims, demanding the rights to education, training, and a profession outside of marriage and the traditional family home. Johanna Küstner⁸⁷ voiced these demands loudly. She stated “we women require as clear and thorough a cultivation as men. Women are humans and demand the philosophical education that Fröbel provides.”⁸⁸ Henriette Schrader-Breymann responded to this discussion in her diary: “We should do nothing but serve men, they should dominate us, and without them we are nothing? I was happy from the bottom of my heart that Fröbel and Middendorff think so very differently about women… they believe in our worth.”⁸⁹

The Rudolstadt Assembly nonetheless illuminated a vital fact about the kindergarten during the revolution. It had become a space utilized by activists to discuss the shape of a new society that opposed traditional status quo. Though the position of women was a source of contention among pedagogues, religious and political dissenters took to the kindergarten as a vital space for the future. This trend was only demonstrated further with dissenting congregations taking the lead in opening kindergartens in 1849 and 1850.

Women's Mobilization of the Kindergarten and Education

For Christian dissenting women the kindergarten was a space that provided them the opportunity to create a new world in direct defiance to state authorities that had already unleashed the forces of conservative reaction by 1849. A combined effort by local activists in Hamburg to open kindergartens launched a cross-German-state promotion of the institution that was led by Johannes Ronge, the founder of the German-Catholic Congregation. From early 1849 to late 1850, the Dresden Democratic Women's Association, Hamburg's Social Association, The Breslau Women's Association, The Women's Association of Kessel, The Women's Association of the Free Christian Congregation of Nuremberg, and The Women's Association of Schweinfurt, contacted Friedrich Fröbel to help them open and organize kindergartens.⁹⁰ These kindergartens explicitly framed the early children's educational institution as a space to continue the religious, cultural, and political transformation underway in German-speaking Europe.

During the 1830s and 1840s dissenting interpretations of Christian scripture and the Bible emerged in protest against the established traditional authorities in both the Catholic and Protestant Churches of Germany. The conflict centered around notions of religious authority and power. In Protestant circles this was a movement against the rise of a special class of church bureaucrats tied to the state. The form of Neo-Pietism in this class sought to strip away freethinking in Protestant churches. In Catholic circles, this dissent was also directed against what activists saw as the overbearing authority of Rome in matters of sex, social relations, and personal freedom. This dissenting form of Christianity was epitomized by the German-Catholic and the Friends of Light Congregations. The two congregations broke away from traditional interpretations of scriptural Christianity in the hopes of establishing a new rationalist belief system. They emphasized a religion of humanity, love, and freedom and formed a union in 1850.⁹¹

The congregations sought to promote a rationalist Christian community. The Principles and Provisions of the German-Catholic Church, published in 1845, declared that the congregation rejected the primacy of the Pope, celibacy, auricular confession, the invocation of the saints and veneration of relics and images. The author made their rationalist hopes clear, “we set the Church and the individual the task of bringing the content of our religious teachings to a living knowledge that corresponds to the consciousness of the times.”⁹² This goal of progress and “keeping up with the time” required also complete “freedom of conscience and free interpretation of the holy scriptures, not restricted by any external authority.”⁹³ They declared that “the main task of Christianity” was to “not only bring the community members to a living consciousness through public worship and instruction, but also to promote the spiritual, moral and material well-being of their fellow human beings to the best of their ability through active charity, without distinction.”⁹⁴

Historian Todd Weir showed the ways the movement thrived in locations of mixed confessionality and where Protestantism dominated. It was also particularly strong with Liberal Protestants who outnumbered Catholic followers. In Königsberg, where only 2,000 Catholics resided, 25,000 people attended Ronge's lecture in July 1845. In the Catholic states of Bavaria and Austria the movement was banned and was only given a platform during the 1848 Revolution. By August 1845 there were 173 German-Catholic congregations: 118 in Prussia, twenty-two in Saxony, seven in Mecklenburg, fifteen in Hesse, two in Nassau, three in Baden, two in Württemberg, as well as one each in the cities of Frankfurt am Main, Bremen, Braunschweig, and Lübeck.⁹⁵ In 1846 a congregation was founded in Hamburg while in Nuremberg one was founded in 1848. This trend mirrored the growth of the kindergarten.

Christian dissenting support for the kindergarten had expanded in 1849 following the decision to open the Women's College [Hamburg Hochschule für das weibliche Geschlecht] that was led and organized by the kindergartner Johanna Küstner and Karl Fröbel, Friedrich Fröbel's nephew and former student.⁹⁶ The couple promoted an institution that explicitly mobilized women's supposedly natural gender attributes, such as love and care, and applied them to a curriculum to cultivate independent women who could utilize their strengths and knowledge on a wider basis outside of the home.

For Friedrich Fröbel, this took women's education too far.⁹⁷ Although Fröbel advocated women's education for motherhood, he never sought to cultivate women students and scholars. The kindergarten, the elder Fröbel hoped, would support and strengthen the household. In other words, women's work as kindergartners was not just to benefit the children they taught. It was also to enhance their capabilities as wives and mothers. Indeed, although the elder Fröbel trained women to work outside the home specifically as kindergartners, he did not intend that their training should prepare them to enter other lines of work. Karl Fröbel and Johanna Küstner's institution, by comparison, utilized the family as a model for a gendered education in the hopes of social and cultural transformation. Women would continue to be defined as maternal and loving, but these qualities would develop into skills that could be applied to social work, education, and other possible careers.

On May 2, 1849, kindergartner Amalie Krüger invited the Hamburg Christian dissenters Emilie Wüstenfeld and Bertha Traun to consider Karl Fröbel and Johanna Küstner's pedagogical institute as a model for their social endeavors.⁹⁸ The two women had promoted and defended the German-Catholic Congregation in Hamburg and were leading members of an interreligious partnership with German Jewish activist Johanna Goldschmidt in the Social Association for the Reconciliation of Confessional Differences. Together they sought to encourage religious tolerance and liberal reforms. The network of women here had already contacted Friedrich Fröbel in March 1849 in the hopes of opening a kindergarten based on their goals. Krüger's appeal was an attempt to sell an even more radical approach to social reform that openly appealed to the threads of women's emancipation, democracy, and anti-clericalism of the 1848 revolution.

The Social Association's desire to establish a kindergarten, Krüger wrote, required an institution to train kindergartners. The couple had included such an institute in their plan for a “women's university” focusing on the scientific and philosophical education of women for their supposedly natural professions. Such an education, provided at the proposed institute, Krüger continued, had been promoted by the great activists of 1848, such as Louise Otto and Johanna Goldschmidt. They had emphasized women's special role in the family, as well as the importance of developing spiritual independence and working for the cause of freedom.⁹⁹ By naming these women Krüger appealed to a new and growing form of women's activism within the movement. Johanna Küstner's publication in the journal Sozial Reform further emphasized this point. The journal, edited by the revolutionary Louise Dittmar, focused particularly on promoting women's rights, education, democracy, and freedom of religion. It was no surprise then, that this was the article Krüger recommended that Wüstenfeld and the Social Association read.

Wüstenfeld and Traun agreed to open, fund, and support the school through the Hamburg Chapter of the German-Catholic Women's Association despite opposition that demonstrated the fault lines in the network of women's activism in Hamburg and across the German Confederation.¹⁰⁰ This conflict demonstrated the different meanings and uses of women's education and emancipation. For Goldschmidt, women's education was tied solely to a socially-uplifting ideal of motherhood. Although the activist spoke about shaping and promoting a spiritual sisterhood that moved away from confessional divides, she did not encourage economic, social, or political independence. By comparison, Wüstenfeld and Traun increasingly spoke of the need to cultivate a truly independent woman. Although still spoken of in gendered terms, the idealized woman was not bound to marriage or to a family unit.

Notwithstanding this important division, the Women's College was embedded within the larger dissenting congregation across German-speaking Europe which saw its wider goals for social and cultural change mirrored in the school's platform. Johannes Ronge played a large part in promoting the proposed institution and kindergarten. For the dissenter, women's education was part of the goal of the emancipation of humanity from what he saw as outdated superstition and dogma. Ronge attributed the cultural discrimination and limitations placed on women to religious authorities, who supposedly benefited from the weakness of the individual. From July 1849 onwards, Ronge enthusiastically supported the goals of the Women's College and kindergarten and hoped that it would spread amongst the German-Catholic congregations. For him, the kindergarten and the Women's College had become part of the movement for freedom.

A modern educational institution for women, he argued, was necessary to spread and promote the “sacred power of motherly love.” As he declared in his pamphlet Maria, or the Position of Women in Old and Recent Times, “You must hear me, German daughters. Think highly of yourselves, become aware of your free human dignity and win the right of free self-determination.”¹⁰¹ Ronge's pamphlet title echoed Mary Wollstonecraft's 1798 novella Maria: Or the Wrongs of Women, that focused on a woman imprisoned in an asylum by her husband. Wollstonecraft criticized the patriarchal order of society that denied women a right to autonomy, particularly through marriage, property, and the legal system.¹⁰² These themes are brought forth in Ronge's pamphlet directed at religious authorities. “For up to now,” Ronge wrote, “you have always been admonished to think little and lowly of yourselves. They [the Catholic Church] have sought to restrict your right of free personality, to possess you more outwardly than to strive for your sanctifying love, which can and may only be a free love.”¹⁰³ For Ronge, an education that cultivated women's femininity, emotions, and love in order to enhance and strengthen their ability to practice Christian charity was necessary for all of humanity.¹⁰⁴

By late 1849, Ronge had fully integrated the kindergarten and women's education into the German-Catholic congregations as a way to transform society. He saw utopian potential in women's educational institutes and in the kindergarten. While fleeing Prussian forces, he wrote, “our reformation is not finished with the changed worship. We must rather transform the whole life and begin with children and women who are the foundation and source of all morals and attitudes.”¹⁰⁵ He repeated this sentiment again in a report to the Hamburg Women's Association.¹⁰⁶ By 1850, Ronge had incorporated the kindergarten and women's education into the statute of the Hamburg Women's Association to Support the German-Catholics. The general goal of the association, the 1850 statute stated, was “to develop, through humane education and upbringing, the female sex for its higher destiny, and for the awareness of its dignity and to promote with free self-determination the spiritual and external well-being of humanity.”¹⁰⁷ These goals would be reached, he continued, through the establishment of kindergartens, the founding of women's colleges, the establishment of schools for women of the working class, the spiritual and bodily development of the poor, and care for the sick. Educational facilities were particularly important. The Women's College, Ronge stated, would be a school “that involves the training of kindergartners and other independent educational institutions that bring the family into closer contact with school education.” It was especially important, he continued, “to give motherly love in femininity the natural right of education.”¹⁰⁸

The Hamburg activists’ goals to create schools for women and children therefore became a widespread movement across German-speaking Europe as political and religious dissenters helped to fund the Hamburg Women's College and create their own kindergartens. The German-Catholic congregations in Breslau, Hanau, Schweinfurt, and Nuremberg helped finance the school in Hamburg, which opened in January 1850. Ronge had included the vital aspect of financing the school through the different women's associations charters. In this important development, the women's associations thus created and mobilized a cross-state German national, educational, religious, and social movement.

The daily life of the Women's College highlights some of its revolutionary potential. Women from the age of sixteen were able to enroll in classes taught by teachers across the confessional divide. In the summer semester of 1850, the pastor of the Hamburg German-Catholic Congregation, Georg Weigelt, taught geography. Karl Fröbel taught English, pedagogy and drawing, and Anton Rée, Jewish reformer and pedagogue, taught German literature, poetry, and physics.¹⁰⁹ Courses were offered in German and general history, French, and political geography. The teachers insisted that students comment on and question the lessons. This method ensured, a former student of the college reported in her memoir, “to make the study all the more stimulating and to give them the certainty that it is not just dead listening.”¹¹⁰ The kindergarten and the pension house were under Johanna Küstner's direction, two areas that put women's supposed knowledge as caregivers into practice. Women would also take part living in a shared community, partaking in chores such as cleaning and cooking.¹¹¹ The student body included 100 women during its existence between 1850 and its closure in 1852.¹¹²

Supporters of the college put in motion a wide promotional campaign. Louise Otto's Frauen-Zeitung, the leading platform of the 1848 women's movement, was dedicated to women's political and social issues, particularly the need for women's education, better working conditions, and their inclusion into a new and reformed society. The newspaper published Johannes Ronge's letter to all German women's associations on January 19, 1850. In this letter, Ronge repeated the need to create a support network to help establish and fund women's higher educational institutes and kindergartens. This education, he repeated, was necessary to re-establish the importance of motherly love and care in society.¹¹³ On February 2 an article promoting the school was published that repeated its national mission.¹¹⁴

Support from other pedagogues and reformers, however, was more complex. Diesterweg pointed to the college's special mission, which reflected women's economic dependence and the reality of marriage as a sort of loveless necessity. “Women,” he wrote, “do not receive an education corresponding to that of the male sex. They fall short of it and therefore do not enjoy the position they deserve in the family and in life.”¹¹⁵ Marriage, he continued, loses its true meaning and sanctity. Rather, it becomes an economic necessity, which, he stated, is “not at all satisfactory and joyful.” Those who are not able to find a marriage to “crawl under” are forced to engage in prostitution, which “can be counted by the thousands in the cities of great population.”¹¹⁶ A proper education, he stated, can prevent this “shipwreck of life, which is mostly hidden and secret, but which is present in most parts of the world.”¹¹⁷

For all of his criticism of marriage's burden, Diesterweg nonetheless described a gendered ideal of women's education that was fixated on their ability to cultivate sons and converse with husbands. “The woman should not only be an assistant to the man in the household,” he wrote, “but she should be able to understand him in his higher aspirations, to support him in them and to educate his children well, to educate the boys for their public profession in life and in the world.”¹¹⁸ Ordinary German women, he claimed, “only have the family and the individual in mind” and “lack the sense of a great effectiveness of men's life in the world.”¹¹⁹ Women, he stated, needed to understand the “conception of life in ideas” that were necessary to transform and educate the world and assist their sons and husbands.

Diesterweg's admiration of the educational project in his article was also matched by his fear of the women's emancipation movement. Those who would use the school for emancipatory ends (“blue-stockings”), he wrote, would be disappointed. The school, he stated, focused on only what is “feasible, practical, and good.”¹²⁰ Diesterweg, who was also known for his staunch anti-Catholicism and secular views on education, nonetheless feared that the lack of any religious underpinning in the school would harm women. The absence of religious stories or histories, he believed, might allow “too much” free thinking that would poison their minds and charms.¹²¹ He wrote, “religious toleration and disregard of the denominations and their differences can lead to ‘religious’ indifference.”¹²² He continued, “it is possible that radical or fanatical followers of the Free Community (every new religious movement has its fanatics) will throw the students into a sea of doubts and scruples, which requires a force to overcome and independently resolve that one can hardly expect from any of the ten young women.”¹²³

The issues of love, marriage, and the family shook the core of the Women's College in spring 1851. In April, Bertha Traun left her husband and three of her six children to join her future husband, Johannes Ronge, in exile. For polite Hamburg society, this act embodied the immorality fostered by the school. Women at the college were educated to embrace independent lifestyles, love, and freedom. Financial woes and scandal followed Traun's departure, as funding declined from community members.¹²⁴ A cloud of conservative reaction was spreading throughout the German Confederation further damaging the institute's position.

The Prussian state used Karl Fröbel and Johanna Küstner's pamphlet on the Hamburg Women's College as proof of the kindergarten's plot to spread socialism and atheism to children. The Fröbelian kindergarten was subsequently banned in Prussia and Saxony in the fall of 1851. At this time, the couple left Hamburg and their position in the Women's College, as the Women's Education Association was seeking to attract a new director. With these conflicts, both political and economic, the association decided it was better to close the school. The Women's College, the first of its kind in Europe, was closed on April 1, 1852.

Conclusion

The kindergarten was a space of radical potential. Through free play and women's maternal love and care, Fröbel hoped to usher in a new world. It was women who infused the kindergarten with a more radical meaning. They saw their labor and participation as vital in ensuring a new community in line with the revolutionary goals of 1848. Women's mobilization of the kindergarten differed from the discussions that took place during the Rudolstadt Teachers’ Assembly. Though women's education and their role within the project was seen as a social and political threat among pedagogues in Rudolstadt, women in Hamburg, Breslau, Dresden, and other cities opened kindergartens in line with their own political goals and interests.

By banning the kindergarten in August 1851, the Saxon and Prussian authorities demonstrated the ways the institution was a threat to the political, social, and cultural status quo that shaped German-speaking Europe. State authorities targeted the kindergarten because it was used to create a new democratic and liberal world in ways similar to the barricades. Berlin Police President Hinckeldey made this point clear by pointing to the network of democrats that moved within the space. For individuals like Ludwig Storch, the kindergarten was a nursery for the future that all democrats were working towards.¹²⁵ State officials recognized the ways women's labor shaped this space. When the kindergarten ban was lifted in April 1860, the Prussian minister and king both made clear that only those women with “proper” moral, political, and religious qualifications could become kindergartners.¹²⁶ Women's political activism, made illegal with the Prussian Law of Associations of March 1850, remained in place until 1908.¹²⁷

The kindergarten nonetheless continued to be a space of utopian potential for leading activists and supporters. Women like Johanna Goldschmidt continued to open middle-class kindergartens in Hamburg as a space to cultivate a religiously pluralistic society into the 1850s. For Berta Traun and Johannes Ronge, the kindergarten project traveled with them to Britain. For middle-class activists like Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow, the kindergarten was a space to solve the “social question” that required women's labor in a way that was ardently anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary. Both activists and state authorities, however, consistently referred to the revolutionary moment as a key period in defining the kindergarten's reputation.

By analyzing the kindergarten and the way it was promoted, described, and supported we gain insight into the ways hope for a new future mobilized activism. The individuals presented here believed that through the kindergarten they can carve out a new future that included their participation and labor. Utopian hope and performance mirrored activism in the barricades but also went beyond it. These activists presented a concrete plan to transform society. By looking at the kindergarten and its supporters, this article emphasized that we must turn to the classroom, utopian thinking, and hope in order to understand the ways politics was transformed during the revolutionary 1840s.