Bavarian Female writers and the bourgeois women’s movement in Bavaria around 1900
- Bavarian Female writers and the bourgeois women’s movement in Bavaria around 1900
- The womens movement documents
The womens movement documents
Novels, poems and stories by female writers from Munich that thematically dealt with traditional bourgeois role models and critically questioned existing gender relations were published from 1895. The search for a new female self-image, the attempts of bourgeois girls and women to set out on a new path are the hallmarks of works by Carry Brachvogel (1864-1942), Helene Böhlau (1856-1940), Gabriele Reuter (1859-1941), Maria Janitschek (1859-1927), Emmy von Egidy (1872-1946) and others.
In her novel Alltagsmenschen (1895), Carry Brachvogel uses the protagonist Elisabeth to show how a young bourgeois woman has no real access to life and can only escape from emptiness through fantastic dreams; she commits adultery and tries to make her dream come true in an affair. Helene Böhlau bases her novel Halbtier (1899) on a simple, albeit radical, programme of emancipation: "a child and work" is the demand by the protagonist Isolde; both should be possible for a woman and yet remain denied her. Isolde chooses murdering men and suicide as the final consequence. And in her novel Marie-Elisa (1898), Emmy von Egidy describes an unfortunate "half marriage" in which there is no agreement, no real understanding between the spouses and at the end of which there is just one imperative: "Husband look for your wife's soul and assimilate it into you so you may both become one single being" – that's how the Munich writer Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934) describes it in his book review.
Fictional works and essays by Eva von Baudissin (1869-1943), Anna Croissant-Rust (1860-1943), Lydia Danöfen (after 1906-?), Emmy von Egidy, Maria Janitschek, Helene Raff (1865-1942) and Gabriele Reuter are presented in the following.
Baudissin begins with her female artist novels Kapellmeisterin Hanna von Santen (Conductor Hanna von Santen) and Die Königin der Tränen (Queen of Tears) , the war novel Die Laterne über der Tür (The Lantern over the Door) and the mountaineer's book Sie am Seil (Her on a Rope). This is followed by Croissant-Rust, who describes the hard life of two totally deprived mountain farmers' daughters in her folk novel Die Nann. Danöfen left behind a relatively small oeuvre with her novella Estella and the two novels Der Charlatan and Maruschka. Egidy presented a pure type of women's emancipation with her novel Ilse Bleiders. Janitschek is more heterogeneous in her works: while the novel Mimikry (Mimicry) is a flaming protest against man's adaptability, Die Amazonenschlacht (The Battle of the Amazons) seems like an ironic swan song to the modern women's movement. And Reuter, as a single mother of a daughter, addresses the relationship between generations (Großstadtmädel (Big City Girl), Die Herrin (The Mistress), Töchter (Daughters)) in addition to free motherhood in Das Tränenhaus. Raff is an exception with her Altbayerischen Legenden (Old Bavarian Legends).
The final part is cultural-historical essays and lectures by Baudissin on topics such as Ursachen der Liebe (The Causes of Love), Der Toilettentisch (The Dressing Table) or Frauenleistungen auf der Bühne (Women's Performances on Stage). Reuter's essay Das Problem der Ehe (The Problem of Marriage) accordingly attributes the discrepancy between man and woman to socio-cultural circumstances.