Did women really read differently? A historical-empirical contribution to gender-oriented reading research.

Do women read differently? My article pursues this question from a historical perspective for the period around 1800. On the one hand, in a reflection that is methodical and source-based, it attempts to explain which requirements should be fulfilled by a reading research approach that is historically and empirically gender-oriented. On the other, it offers an exemplary implementation of the suggested research approach. In the process, what becomes clear is that an investigation that takes into account primarily the self-utterances of readers and proceeds in gender-comparative fashion will emerge with different results than previous work that was based on the reading craze around 1800 and ignored a firmly established gender-comparative approach. Instead of striking gender polarities, a picture emerges in which other factors, for example poetological concepts, appear as more influential than the category of gender. (SS)

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"Women read differently." This thesis, which Ruth Kluger first published in 1994 in the feature pages of Die Zeit (1994a) and has subsequently advocated in at least four other publications (Kluger 1994b, 1996a, 1996b, 2000), assumes, without offering proof, the effect not only of social, but also of biological gender; in other words, it clearly contains a strand of essentialistic reasoning that uses ahistorical arguments. Astonishingly, in spite of concurrent debates about the category of gender in gender-oriented reading research, Kluger's view has in the meantime become almost a commonplace--perhaps not least because it is so seductively catchy and also because of its inherent "feministically correct ethos" (Dieckmann). Do/did women actually read differently, as she asserts, and if so, to what extent? So far, at least from a historical perspective, this question has hardly been examined; similarly, the methodological presuppositions for postulating gender-differentiating theses in this context have rarely been explicitly discussed.

It is precisely this dual epistemological interest that I intend to pursue: have women read differently, and how can one find out? I plan to focus on the turn of the eighteenth century--that historical phase, in other words, during which, it is widely assumed, a first consolidation of the so-called two-gender model took place. The model posits a socio-cultural distinction between a masculine and a feminine gender character based on contradictory opposites (see, for example, Hausen; Honegger; Laqueur). In shaping this model of polarity, literature played an important role. First, the development of gender characters, particularly of the female gender character, was, implicitly, and often explicitly as well, a central literary theme. Second, reading itself is supposed to have been both the means of practicing, and the expression of enforcing, distinct gender characters. Accordingly, women read emotionally, with identification, and focusing on content, while male reading was rational and distanced, and prioritized the formal, aesthetic dimension--that, at any rate, is the tenor of the research.

State and Critique of the Research

This consensus is surprising in that studies of the history of readers for the above period that take into account ways of reading from the perspective of gender have been rare up to now. It is true that there has been analysis based on empirical material (books from lending libraries, letters, diaries, preparatory instruction in reading, etc.), dealing with gender-specific reading preferences and recommendations, that is, preferred or requested reading material (for instance, Martens; Raabe; Becher). (1) But with this focus on what was being read, the question of how reading was taking place, from a perspective that compared the genders--which is certainly harder to answer--has been, to a large extent, not considered.

Erich Schon and Friedrich A. Kittler are among the few who have directly addressed this topic. Of course, they give priority to feminine reading, and by this special treatment already present woman as a deviation from the norm (= man), as did the arguments used around 1800. Something else that is problematic about Schon's article is that his reconstruction of ways of reading is based solely on material that documents the debates on the reading craze and gender characteristics during the period in question. He thus chooses a genre of source material that includes primarily programmatic statements penned almost exclusively by men. The information contained in them regarding reading practices at that point in history should at least be viewed with the utmost caution. Thus, one will look in vain in his article for texts documenting the reading habits of real male and female readers that will corroborate the conclusions he draws based on this material: compared to men, he claims, women have less literary competence, read more atavistically, and satisfy their needs for fantasy more openly through reading. In my opinion, Schon's approach runs the risk of uncritically reproducing the contemporary discourse around the reading craze and gender, whose effectiveness for the social practice of reading first needs to be examined.