Scandal writ large in the wake of the French Revolution: the case of Amalia Holst.

If feminist hopes during the French Revolution were betrayed by the wide gap between egalitarian rhetoric and actual gains for women, they were all but quashed following the Terror, when a pan-European conservative backlash snuffed out public debate over improving woman's status and social conditions. Amalia Holst was one of few women willing to put her reputation at stake to rekindle this debate. In her book-length treatise on advancing women's education, Holst traverses a precarious tightrope between feisty rhetoric and cultural accommodation. To walk with her is to witness a dazzling display of innovative strategies that would, she hoped, both inspire contemporaries to take action and deflect those quick to censure her as scandalous. (CSS)

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The decades following the French Revolution were a particularly fertile and yet puzzlingly frustrating moment for champions of women's education. On the one hand, eighteenth-century economic, philosophic, socio-cultural, and political currents had given rise to expectations of formal education for women. The Revolution can itself be contextualized as a moment of recognition crystallizing universal demands for access to political and civic rights. On the other hand, these jumps forward in consciousness failed to result in major advances in women's social conditions: included in the Revolution's legacy of stinging ironies is its failure to advance either woman's political status or her education.

In the years following the Terror, the fears of social upheaval that extended across Europe narrowed the space in which feminist educational reformists could propose changes and at the same time avoid being judged as scandalous. Few tried. In France, apart from occasional outbursts by partisans of women's rights such as Charles Theremin and Germaine de Stael, Olympe de Gouges' executioners succeeded in silencing feminist reformists for four decades. In England, Mary Hays and Mary Robinson were vilified in reviews of their treatises. And in Germany, between 1794, the year Marianne Ehrmann's second women's periodical folded, and 1802, the year Amalia Hoist published her treatise Uber die Bestimmung des Weibes zur hoheren Geistesbildung (On the Purpose of Woman's Advanced Intellectual Development), not a single voice dared publicly argue for the improvement of women's education. (1) Clearly cognizant of the narrow space within which she worked, Hoist deployed novel rhetorical tactics to negotiate the tension between respectable reformist and scandalous revolutionary. By taking a close look at her creative and resourceful strategies, we can better understand the operative challenges facing feminist reformist writers of the day.

While the reprinting of Amalia Hoist's treatise in 1984 has elicited discussion among scholars of early feminism, it has received less attention among researchers of education history, a field that has traditionally concentrated almost exclusively on the narrative of male learning. (2) Hoist's text invites us to interrogate how early feminist educationists deployed the rhetoric and forms of pedagogical writing to contest the conduct-book literature that substituted for a girl's education, as well as to tell the story of a woman's life beyond marriage.

In the reactionary climate following the French Terror, German humanitarians who had enthusiastically embraced revolutionary ideals downplayed man's social role as citizen and emphasized the cultivation of individual potential. In his influential Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, 1795), Schiller argued that 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. Similarly, in pedagogical circles neohumanist theoreticians contested the philanthropinist ideology of education as training for citizenship, and articulated the imperative of Bildung to mold the well-rounded individual. (3) Advanced education for women was excluded from this debate; indeed, neohumanists elided discussion of women's education entirely, while the most influential philanthropinists relegated a young girl's education to training for domestic life and rudimentary literacy.

The theme of revolution as female transgression permeates both literary writings and educational texts of this period. (4) Schiller's lengthy poem Das Lied von der Glocke (The Song of the Bell, 1799), for example, operates dually to instantiate the danger of female destabilizing impulses and to intimate how best to curb them: the core metaphors of revolution as female perfidy dominate one verse, while the figure of the good woman quietly celebrating her place in the domestic sphere frames another. (5) Lines of the latter, routinely memorized by girls as a staple of their education diet (Dauzenroth 98), offer a glimpse into girls' indoctrination into patriarchal norms. Letters of Caroline Michaelis Schlegel-Schelling (1763-1809) suggest the pressure brought to bear on female "transgressors." Politically and intellectually active in republican Mainz in the revolutionary years, she subsequently took care to mitigate any potentially damaging effects of her participation, writing that she had never been "an unnatural heroine, rather just a woman" (Schmidt I, 296, qtd. in Tewarson 114). The post-Revolution feminists, determined not to be reviled or dismissed as "scandalous," walked an exceedingly narrow tightrope between affirmation of rights and accommodation to norms.