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