Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos

Northern Michigan University

Educational reformists writing in the decade after the French Revolution help us to see how conservative social and political reaction to the Revolution demanded new rhetorical strategies to succeed at two seemingly incompatible objectives: to advance woman’s education and to avoid being received "scandalous."

Amalia Holst’s Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höheren Geistesbildung (1802) has been given scant attention by scholars of education history, a field dominated by writers who construct and impart the narrative of male learning only (1). Its recent printing (1984) permits us to interrogate how feminist educationists used the rhetoric and forms of pedagogical writing to contest conduct book literature and to tell the story of a woman’s life beyond marriage within the context of shifting political tides. Holst was a known figure in her day, as one of a handful of eighteenth-century German women to be awarded a university degree and as the daughter of Heinrich von Justi, a well known and prolific cameralist. Though von Justi died when she was thirteen, Holst was undoubtedly aware of his mid-century radical proposals for women’s academies and for civil courts administered by elected women officials (2). Holst’s text was reviewed and her lengthy obituaries attest to regional recognition of her life’s work to improve both the praxis and theory of women’s education (3).

Holst’s text incorporates dialogical argumentation, mini-narratives, and vignettes of great women to overturn contemporary anthropological and pedagogical misogynist discourse against the learned woman, as well as to pitch an intense home education program. On the pedagogical front, her participation in the debates between the philanthropinist and neohumanist movements is richly textured by her dual focus on pedagogical and gender issues (4).

Although Holst wrote her treatise at a time when male Romantic voices were challenging women’s intellectual equality, she echoes the voices of early Enlightenment feminists such as her father, the Gottscheds, and Dorothea Leporin, who relied on the empiricism of Locke, Leibniz and Wolff to promote female learnedness. Against the growing tide of late eighteenth-century writers, Holst returns to Enlightenment strategies to redefine higher learning and thereby make it available to women. She did not, however, espouse women’s active participation in the public sphere, as did Hippel in his Über die bürgerlichen Verbesserung des Weibes and instead accommodates neohumanistic and Romantic thought regarding gendered role domains.

Holst’s line of argument is refreshingly unfettered by the conflicts and contradictions confounding Sophie von La Roche and others writing in response to attacks on female learnedness. Holst instead disentangles current prejudices against female learnedness from accepted notions about woman’s role and Bestimmung in order to set up an argument that accommodates both the highest degree of formal study and woman’s role. The title of her treatise, an arresting extension of the cliché "Bestimmung des Weibes," sets the stage for her advocacy of a gender role enriched and expanded by an ungendered education. And, she expands the word "Bestimmung" to include alternate destinies for exceptional and unmarried women.

Holst appears fearless of stepping out on a limb. She did not write anonymously. She deploys the term "learned" (gelehrt) forthrightly at a time when other post-Enlightenment feminist educationists turned to less inflammatory terms such as "educated" or "cultivated" (gebildet) (5). She speaks to the importance of being educated and presents the rationale for woman’s access to deep "male" learning. And she attacks by name popular writers such as Karl Pockels and Ernst Brandes, who would deny women the right to advanced education. And yet, this educationist who founded and directed three small schools insists on home education under maternal tutelage and resists discussion of institutional education (6).

Almost all feminist tracts on education propose a plan or outline how one should be implemented. In the late eighteenth century and especially at the time of the Revolution in France, the school was becoming increasingly accepted as the site for collective improvement; the most egalitarian European feminists—Condorcet, Hippel, and Wollstonecraft—were proposing advanced public coeducation. Holst instead insists on a professional maternal plot: the maternal educator will instruct her children in all the academic disciplines, not only during their early childhood, but through their adolescence. It seems unrealistic to expect that most mothers could create the conditions, much less embrace the necessary commitment to sustain this kind of lengthy educative engagement. If they could do so, however, as Holst’s ideal prescription suggests, their professional role would collapse the dichotomy of separate spheres. Certainly the professionalizing of the maternal educator provides Holst ample justification for adopting "male" neohumanist pedagogy for women. And yet, how does she foresee generations of women collectively attaining to learnedness? Is home education perhaps a retreat from the argument for national coeducation—a retreat from "scandalous" ideology? If so, does she belong in this discussion?

I suggest that in carving out a space for women’s education in the era of backlash against the Revolution in France, Holst foresaw no possibility of equal institutional education being implemented in the near future. The discursive opening enabled by the events in France and seized a decade earlier by Condorcet, Hippel, and Wollstonecraft to publicly advocate universal co-education had closed. Holst’s silence on institutional education is a marker of self-censorship and helps us to understand the cultural obstacles she faced in advocating access to the "male" education required for women’s "tiefe Kenntnisse." Her turn to home education enables her to limit the argumentative features of her treatise to challenging contemporary attitudes about the content and depth of woman’s learning. And yet, it is in these challenges and in the implications of her home education program that her reception as "scandalous" could not be avoided. For example, the reviewer in the Hamburg und Altona Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Zeit, der Sitten und des Geschmacks remarks,

Holst is the only feminist educationist I have encountered who not only names Hippel, but emphatically recommends his work. She encourages her internal audience of "Freundinnen" to read his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber "mit dem innigen Streben nach einer immer größeren Ausbildung" (16) and she lauds him for defending women’s rights. While readers of Hippel might infer her endorsement of public, state-supported coeducation, Holst resists any such direct assertion. She makes the limits of her claims for women clear when she differs with Hippel on his advocacy of woman’s active engagement in state operations: "So sehr wir den rühmlichen Eifer mit Dank erkennen . . . so kann ich in dieser Meinung ihm nicht beipflichten. Ich glaube vielmehr, daß eine solche völlige Umwälzung in den bürgerlichen Verhältnissen [möchte] viel Verwirrung hervorbringen" (19). The use of the word "Beruf" in the title of the first chapter, "Steht die höhere Ausbildung des Geistes mit dem nähern Beruf des Weibes als Gattin, Mutter und Hausfrau im Widerspruch?" indicates Holst’s unequivocal elevation of woman’s domestic role to a profession. Here she completely parts company with Hippel, who elides discussion of mothering. Significantly, she announces that she does not want to be perceived as a "Revolutionspredigerin" and remains silent on Wollstonecraft, whose Rights of Woman (translated 1793) was widely read and had been praised by writers such as Wieland and Forster, who had supported the Revolution (7).

The labeling of Wollstonecraft as "eine wüthende Fürsten- und Adelsfeindin" by the Göttingen professor Christoph Meiners in 1788 would have deterred Holst from encouraging association with Wollstonecraft (8). As Susanne Zantop points out, the Revolution generated an obsession among German male literati of all political stripes with "transgressive femininity, with women who cross the boundaries between the private and the public sphere and become advocates of change (9)." Holst accommodates these boundaries, but at the same time she transforms normative definitions of the woman within them and unhesitatingly attacks popular misogynist writers such as Karl Pockels and Ernst Brandes.

On the one hand Holst draws on early Enlightenment feminists for philosophical support of the ungendered mind and to decry complementarians’ conflation of woman’s biology and her mind: "Es ist nicht gegründet, daß der Kopf des Weibes nicht zum Auffassen der höheren

Wissenschaften organisiert sei" (53). On the other hand, her emphases on maternity and individual perfectibility situate her in the wake of Rousseau and in the Romantic thought appropriated by neohumanists (10). While she derides the mysticism associated with Romanticism, it was Romantic thought that opened a new space for intellectual engagement, both for men and for those women who refused to define themselves as intellectually gendered (11).

Romantic reaction against the rationality of the late Enlightenment generated general disdain for traditional barriers in many spheres, including those between art, knowledge, and life (12). Within this "revolutionary" dimension of the Romantic movement, the academic world is viewed as narrow. An ideal cross-fertilization of higher and deeper learning with art and life itself sowed the seeds for new forms of literary and artistic expression, for informal participation in the intellectual world, and for changing definitions of "learned." This new hybridity created conditions that would foster women’s intellectual growth. It was then that German women organized salons that served as forums for intellectual exchange, and that some women took to attending university lectures (13). Holst drew peripherally on this informal climate of expanding intellectual participation and on Romantic theory that argues for transcending conventional distinctions between inner and outer worlds. Advocating depth of knowledge in history, the sciences, philosophy, geography and the arts, she argues also for the inner integration of knowledge ("Kenntnis inne haben," 98 and passim) and the facility to draw meaningful connections among all disciplines as foremost qualities of the effective maternal educator.

Holst tacitly adopts a neohumanist-Romantic semantic universe to argue that women too require scholastic depth to work toward individual perfectibility and that they, like men, want and deserve the freedom to develop all their strengths "in der schönsten Harmonie zur höchsten Vollkommenheit" (41). Thus she openly supports self-development for its own sake, not masked by social function, and she promotes women’s participation in Romantic individualism. Indeed Holst attacks women’s partial knowledge as dangerous. "Halbes wissen ist schlimmer, als nichts wissen"(98). Woman’s inclusion in the neohumanist concept of "human," Holst argues, means that woman is human being (Mensch) first, and woman/wife (Weib/Gattin) second.

In a simple but startling observation, Holst derails the arguments of male educationists—both neohumanist and philanthropinist—who insist on a female education geared to training in household management. Men are not criticized, she writes, for seeking culture and knowledge beyond what they need to know in order to execute professional obligations and fulfill civic duty: "man schätzt sie [Männer] um so höher, wenn sie neben den Kenntnissen, die zur Erfüllung ihrer eigentlichen Berufspflichten gehören, sich noch viele und mannigfaltige Kenntnisse erworben haben." And she asks, "Warum läßt man aber den Weibern nicht die gleiche Gerechtigkeit widerfahren? Warum eifert man so sehr über die Gelehrsamkeit der Weiber? Ist die Gelehrsamkeit denn ein Monopol der Männer?" (64). Such questions emplot woman’s education and future in a lifelong process of self perfection: "Lass uns . . . mit Eifer und Ernst an unserer Ausbildung arbeiten, sie ist nicht mit unserer vollendeten Erziehung in der Jugend geendigt, wir selbst müssen uns noch immerfort erziehen . . . unabläßig nach unserer fernen Ausbildung streben" (115). Continual education suggests the unfolding of a life outside of and beyond motherhood, an emplotment revisited several times in Holst’s fixation on the education of adolescent, young adult and older women, to which she pays greater attention than to the curriculum for young children.

The self-development that underwrites Holst’s reform of women’s education can serve both maternal and alternate destinies. Her broad demands include the complete freedom to study every subject, including all branches of philosophy, and access to original sources instead of the books written expressly for women, which offer only "halbes oberflächliches Wissen" and "worin wir eigentlich nur wie große Kinder behandelt werden" (43). She advocates formal university education for women of exceptional intellect and she repudiates those who deny woman’s capacity to achieve in the highest spheres of abstract thought—in speculative philosophy and higher mathematics. Asserting that the dearth of examples demonstrates instead women’s lack of access to the continuous uninterrupted formal study that these disciplines demand, she fantasizes about the many female "philosophische Köpfe" that would have rivaled the likes of Kant and Leibniz, had women been granted the opportunity to study.

This alternate destiny for exceptional women relies on a paradigm of study and scholarly productivity transcending marriage and children. It is surely no accident that Holst selects the figures of Kant and Leibniz as examples of genius, as she refers to their celibacy to propose parallel scholarly lives for women of intellectual talent. Claiming that intellectually gifted women are of equal importance to the nation’s future as mothers, she assigns procreative status to their scholarly contributions: if exceptional women were exempt from the pressure to reproduce, she writes, the loss to the population would be "[n]icht mehr als sie [die Bevölkerung] durch Kant und Leibniz im Zölibat verlor, welche die Welt bloß durch ihre unsterblichen Werke, als Kinder ihres Geistes bereicherten" (55). While she emplots equivalent roles for men and women of genius in suggesting neither should marry, at the same time her professionalization of the maternal educator clearly bars concurrent commitment to scholarly research (14).

Because the learned mother needs a thorough education to play a double role as teacher and model of learnedness, Holst openly denounces the philanthropinists’ narrow program directed to fulfilling woman’s destiny in the household. She targets Campe for promoting female attention to domestic crafts over academic subjects and for recommending that girls be given an "allgemeine Übersicht" of some disciplines and no instruction in subjects such as foreign languages. Above all, she assails him and his colleagues for their fear that higher learning and development of artistic skills will inspire a distaste for maternal tasks (108). Holst argues that it is precisely this mentality about home and children, this devaluing and trivializing of motherhood from its rightful position of profession to one of mindless attention to trivial tasks that has fostered "leere Seele": the vanity, pretentiousness, lack of reasoned judgment, laziness, and foolishness of miseducated women (109).

To dramatize the problem—and the danger—of miseducated women, Holst borrows the tactic utilized by Wollstonecraft of embedding mini-narratives into her polemical presentation. Empty women become substandard mothers who put their children in double jeopardy; seeking external self-gratification, they provide neither adequate models nor even safe caretaking: "Wenn die Gräber sprechen könnten, was würde man da nicht für schauderhafte Erzählungen von verwahrlosten Kindern hören? Verwahrloset nicht durch Gelehrsamkeit, nein, durch Unwissenheit" (109). She echoes Wollstonecraft’s assertions that only miseducated women allow passions and foolishness to rule over reason and, like Wollstonecraft, she exposes the fallacious belief that childrearing skills are as innate as the mother-child bond; instead, she writes, miseducation is to blame for maternal deficiencies.

Holst’s negative narratives follow the expected trajectory of miseducated mothers and innocent child victims. One mother who could not spend an evening at home, not only went out to play cards as a daughter lay deathly ill, but contined to play upon receiving news of the child’s death. A mother who hosted a ball while a child lay ill, although informed of the child’s death during the evening, announced the death only the following day in order not to ruin her company’s entertainment. The fashion-obsessed woman with fertility problems who finally became pregnant, nonetheless determined to wear a light dress on a cold night, became ill, miscarried and could never again bear a child. Another mother, who followed the trend of nursing her own child, refused to give up outside entertainment; one evening a nanny tried to satisfy its hunger with food it could not digest, and the baby died, yet another "Opfer der Vergnügungssucht, der Bequemlichkeit und der Unwissenheit seiner Mutter" (111). In contrast, Holst writes, the children of learned mothers rarely fall prey to such victimization: "solche Opfer hat die weibliche Gelehrsamkeit . . . kaum eine der Menschheit gekostet" (112).

Holst wonders at the specious arguments of writers who castigate learned women and who refuse to recognize the most prevalent and pernicious causes of child neglect (15). In deconstructing the arguments of male writers who unleash their "ganzen Zorn" on learned rather than on frivolous women, she suggests deeper causes than the male fear that learned women lack femininity (Weiblichkeit). Instead, men fear that "bei einer sich erworbenen höhern Ausbildung es den Weibern auch einmal einfallen möchten, sie wegen der mancherlei Ungerechtigkeiten, die sie erdulden müßen, zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen" (78). Here the term "injustices" hints at rebellion by women who have gained an education. Although to this point Holst has deployed "justice" and "rights" to refer solely to education, her remark here implies other inequities. While she resists any elaboration, the picture of an expanding collectivity of thoroughly educated women that her thesis suggests conveys the potential for rebellion. Holst’s writerly resistance to elaborating political and civic injustices refers us to her fear of being implicated as a revolutionary, particularly by male reviewers. As careful as she was, certain topics incited reviewer alarm. For example Holst, like Hippel, recognized the power of Biblical misinterpretation to undermine woman and she devotes two pages to countering interpretations of Adam and Eve, of the words of Moses, Jesus, and Paul. That this brief discussion attracted more hostile reviews than any of her other arguments, suggests not only the expected adherence to the doctrine of separate spheres, but the narrow boundaries set for female argumentation. (Example, from the Kaiserlich-Privilegierte Hamburgische Neue Zeitung:

While Hippel took far greater liberties in Biblical interpretation than did Holst, his hostile reviewers were silent in this regard.

Though Holst had to move cautiously in assuming a heterogeneous audience, her introduction of friendly women readers as internal narratees enables her to put forth her most subversive claims. From the first page she establishes this relationship of collective defensiveness: "Männer wagten es, unserm Geiste die Linie vorzuziehen, über welche im Felde des Wissens er nicht hinüber schreiten dürfe" (17). At chapter openings and endings she invokes the collective "we" to take up "our" cause. In contrast to Hippel, who jocularly coaxes an imagined audience of misguided male peers into seeing the errors of their ways, Holst warns her female reader "friends" that those who denigrate women cannot be taken lightly. While she encourages her women readers in a comradely way to seek serious education, she also invites them to share her vexation.

The targets of her anger constitute strategic choices. Aside from the philanthropinists, she names only Rousseau, Jakob Mauvillon, Ernst Brandes, and Karl Pockels. Left unnamed are contemporary "greats" who adhered to the doctrine that women are intellectually incapable of, or disinclined to engage in abstract speculation and reasoning, e.g., Herder, Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, and Schiller (16). Her opening line—"Seit kurzem ward so viel über die weibliche Bestimmung geschrieben"—could as easily be addressed to them as to Pockels and Brandes. One can speculate that her decision to refrain from identifying these thinkers marks a strategic restraint in order not to alienate male reviewers, and perhaps even female readers. Or, her silence could indicate genuine homage paid these literati and philosophers, an according of greater weight to their genius than to their ideology on women. Perhaps she hoped that her incorporation of women into the neohumanistic theory of education that these figures supported would prove flatteringly persuasive. Pointed rhetorical questions, however, appear designed to shame the great as well as the common: "Denkt etwa unser Geist damit nach andern logischen Gesetzen, nimmt er die Dinge der Außenwelt anders auf, als die Männer? Wer wäre der, der dies zu behaupten wagen möchte?" (19)

In targeting the more plebeian figure of Pockels, Holst inserts his lengthy invective on female "Gelehrsamkeit" as a vehicle for colorful argumentation. Pockels’ narrative of a learned woman’s failure to fulfill spousal, maternal and housewifely responsibilities relies on a rigid dichotomy of gender difference and illustrates the kind of bombast one might well regard as archetypal of popular misogynist writers:

By punctuating his narrative with critical commentary to shape a dialogical debate, Holst sets her readers up to be not only amusedly offended, but also awakened to injustice (17).

Further, Holst offers a humorous and powerful satire of a learned father to deconstruct Pockels’ derogatory narrative of the learned mother. When a child is dangerously ill and the learned man’s wife looks to him for advice and comfort, he is too busy researching the question of whether Romulus’ wetnurse was truly a wolf or instead a woman named "Wolf." When his wife falls ill, he fails to notice or fetch a doctor, and is bewildered when brought the news of her death. If he belongs "zu der Klasse der schönen Geister," however, he composes a praiseworthy history of her life! Until he can find a second wife, he must undertake management of the household and upbringing of children. An expert on how Persians and Spartans raised their children, he is incapable of imparting culture to his own. When his house goes up in flames he rushes to save his manuscripts before thinking about how to save his children. The instant his youngest child falls into a pond, he is paralyzed: having myopically centered his whole life on the mind, he had never bothered with the physical triviality of learning to swim. When the child dies before his eyes, he thinks only that the day laborer or peasant should have saved it. Ever invested in his own poetic skill, however, he’ll nab this opportunity to compose an eloquent elegy and thus display his sublime feelings to the world (71-73).

In addition to emphasizing a life beyond the maternal role for women with children, Holst addresses alternate destinies for single women Unlike the many writers who ignore the ranks of single women in their articulation of woman’s maternal destiny, Holst acknowledges this growing demographic group in her the chapter "Über die Bildung des Weibes im ehelosen Stande" and offers reasons for their high numbers. War and disease, more fatal to men, contribute to the imbalance. More significantly, while increasing costs of maintaining a household truly prohibit some men from marrying, she writes, others succumb to the "Freidenkerei" which debases the sanctity of marriage. Though these observations are embedded in a discussion of single women, Holst’s condemnation of male indulgence in luxury, self-interested spending and fulfillment of sensual pleasure reminds the reader of Wollstonecraft’s call for male reform and is clearly addressed to men. Excluded from the tripartite role (mother, wife, household manager) without benefit of support for professional training and engagement, unmarried women have little recourse but to become dependent on the good will of relatives and, she observes, they too easily fall prey to the ills accompanying idleness. Instead, if all women received thorough education and training, single women too would be personally transformed and expand the teaching corps. By thus inscribing the learned single woman into a wider maternal educative function, Holst depicts society as an extension of the family, drawing on domestic ideology metaphorically to justify "world citizenship." Such a woman, she writes, "muß ganz Weltbürgerin sein. Dies kann sie nur durch Kenntnisse werden. Sie betrachtet die gesamte Menschheit als ihre Familie . . . die anvertraute Kinder werden die ihrigen. Verdanken sie ihr nicht die physische, so doch die moralische Existenz" (135). Meaningful mental and social engagement is critical for all women, both married and single: "Der Mensch…sehnt sich nach Beschäftigung" (136). Further, such engagement has the power to transform society at large. For example, women of enlightened spirit and genuinely cultivated humanity employed as governesses in aristocratic households will there find the opportunity, "viele Vorurteile des Geburtsadels und des Geldadels zu bestreiten, und einen so heilsamen Nutzen zu stiften, der sich noch auf ferne Generationen erstreckt" (94). To what extent Holst might have more openly addressed women’s role as subversive agents of reason and republicanism, had she not been writing in the era of conservative reaction, cannot be known. As it was, she could not avoid the kinds of ad hominem condemnations launched against a "scandalous" individual. As one reviewer remarks,

And, from another review,

Holst’s dismissal as an intellectual virago and inadequate woman underscores the fear of woman’s subversive potential in the post-Revolutionary era and assists us in contextualizing the notion of "scandalous woman."

1. The limited scholarship on Holst includes Bertha Rahm in the preface and appendix to her 1984 edition of Holst’s treatise (Zürich: ALA) ; Pia Schmid, "Weib oder Mensch, Wesen oder Wissen? Bürgerliche Theorien zur weiblichen Bildung um 1800," 340-41; Claudia Honegger, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Weib 1750-1850, 29-30; Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Science, Harvard UP, 1989, 265-66. (return)

2. On von Justi’s Vorschlag von Errichtung einer Akademie für das Frauenzimmer and Vorschlag von Errichtung eines weiblichen Schöpfenstuhls in Ergetzungen der Vernünftigen Seele aus der Sittenlehre und der Gelehrsamkeit überhaupt (1765-68) see Peter Petschauer, The Education of Women in Eighteenth-Century Germany 264-67 and Bertha Rahm 160-63. (return)

3. Rahm includes three obituaries in her preface. (return)

4. By the time of Holst’s writing, the utilitarian thrust of the philanthropinist movement was losing currency to the neohumanist movement. Educationists writing in the wake of the French Terror and during the Napoleonic occupation rejected the notion of universal education as training for citizenship. Humanitarians who had enthusiastically embraced the ideals of the Revolution de-emphasized man’s social role as citizen and turned to questions of cultivating individual potential and acknowledgement of difference. In his influential Briefen über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), Schiller weaves his argument around the assumption that the ethical development of character springs from the well-rounded cultivation of aesthetic sensibility. Societal transformation will succeed the gradual transformation of its members; sudden political changes for which immature humanity is unprepared lead only to the violent chaos and repression that undermine the goal of democratic participation in governance.

Neohumanist Bildung was inspired above all by the classical scholarship of Winckelmann, the ethical imperatives of Kantian Idealist philosophy, and fear of the French Revolution. The aim of such education is to form the autonomous, wise and worldly individual, not the productive citizen. The word Bildung took on new shades of meaning when posed against mere instruction or training, and against mere education or upbringing (Erziehung) in the rationalist sense imposed by the philanthropinists. To prepare children to assume social and civic identities as "citizens" (Bürger) was now viewed as an intrusion on their "ennoblement" as individual human beings. Neohumanist pedagogical writings gender the ideal human being as male and postulate males as both recipients and purveyors of their educational program. Those who also authored works on gender differences, such as Wilhelm Humboldt, drew on essentialist notions in line with Idealist and Romantic thought and assigned woman’s essence to her maternal spirit (Muttergeist) and to a receptive, emotional nature that complements male activity and intellect. Consequently neohumanist theorists who considered woman’s intellectual development to be inconsequential omitted women from their plans of education. This Holst would contest. (return)

5. For example, Betty Gleim in her Erziehung und Unterricht des weiblichen Geschlechts (1810)and Marianne Ehrmann in her periodical Amaliens Erhohlungsstunden 1790-92). (return)

6. Holst directed these three schools following her publication. No records of the curriculum have been found. See Rahm 9-10. (return)

7. Rahm writes, "Ich bin überzeugt, dass Amalia Holst die Bücher, mindestens den Namen der Engländering kannte (aus den Büchern von Meiners, Pockels, usw.). Dass sie ihn in ihrem Werk nicht nennt, beruht wohl eher darauf , weil sie die Damen und Herren nicht reizen wollte oder der Verleger ihn strich" (158). (return)

8. Meiners, Christoph. Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts. Hannover: Helwing, 1788: 243. (return)

9. Zantop, Suzanne. "Crossing the Border: The French Revolution in the German Imagination." Representing the French Revolution. Ed. James Heffernan. Hanover, NH: Upress of New England, 1992. 213-36: 219. (return)

10. It should be noted that German early Enlightenment feminists did not, however, seek a role for women in the public sphere that would upset the patriarchal structure. Gottsched, for example, promoted woman's full participation in the study and production of high literature, a short-lived project that did not lead to an overall enhanced status for women. See Bovenschen 110-138. As Susan Cocalis points out, the early Enlightenment emancipatory discourses that theorized woman’s equal capacity for learning did not translate into the opening of university doors or professions ("Der Vormund will Vormund sein"). (return)

11. On mysticism Holst writes: "Das gelehrte Weib] nimmt den lebhaftesten Anteil an den Fortschritten der Kultur, an dem Wachsen oder Sinken der gesamten Menschheit. Wenn man die verjährte Mystik als die größte Antipode der wahren Aufklärung wieder empor bringen will, so sieht sie dies einen Auswuchs überspannter Phantasie und überverfeinerter Sinnlichkeit an. Sie beobachtet mit bangem Herzen, ob diese Schwärmer das Obergewicht über die gesunde Vernunft davon tragen, oder ob ihr besserer Genius sie von diesen Verirrungen zurückbringen werde" (129-30). (return)

12. See Friedrich Schlegel, "Was ist progressive Universalpoesie?" (Das Athenäum, Fragmente (1798). (return)

13. Salons were run, for example, by Sophie Mereau, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Dorothea Veit, Henriette Herz. Mereau attended Fichte’s university lectures. (return)

14. Although Holst elides discussion of great male thinkers who had wives and children, she suggests that scholarly genius precludes childrearing for both sexes. (return)

15. "Wie ist es dann möglich, daß Schriftsteller, welche über die weibliche Bestimmung geschrieben haben, weit mehr gegen die seltene Ausnahme eifern, daß ein gelehrtes Weib, ihrer Bestimmung ungetreu, ihre Pflichten als Mutter vernachläßigt, als gegen die tausende, welche dies wegen der oben erwähnten Fälle der Unwissenheiten und der nicht unter dem Zepter einer gebildeten Vernunft stehenden Leidenschaften tun. Woher mag dies wohl kommen?" (112-13). (return)

16. For example, Herder wrote in a letter to his fiancée Caroline Flachsland, "ich [habe] für keiner Creatur in der Welt mehr Abscheu, als für einem gelehrten Frauenzimmer" (Scharer 19). (return)

17. A brief example of one of her responses suffices: "Mit welchen aftergelehrten Weibern, mag denn ein Unstern der Verfasser zusammengeführt hat, mir est eine solche nie bekannt worden" (70). (return)