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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Nebraska Press
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.
Holst (1758-1829), too, had little wiggle room. That she was a known figure in northern Germany can be discerned in the contemporary reviews of her treatise, as well as in lengthy obituaries that commend her dedication to the praxis and theory of women's education. The daughter of Heinrich von Justi, a controversial and prolific cameralist, she was reputedly one of a handful of eighteenth-century German women to be awarded a university degree. (6) Although 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. (7) Despite extensive efforts on the part of Holst researchers, little is known of her family upbringing and education. (8)
Holst's development as educationist, feminist, and feminist educationist can be discerned in her responses to pedagogical and literary writings of her day. In 1791, when she was 33, her name emerged in Hamburg as the author of Bemerkungen uber die Fehler unserer modernen Erziehung von einer praktischen Erzieherinn (Obervations on the Errors of Our Modern Education by a Practical Teacher). Here she severely critiqued the contemporary pedagogical literature, particularly that of the philanthropinists Campe and Basedow. Her focus was not on their regressive view of girls' education, however, but on fallacies in their theoretical assumptions about how young children learn. Her critical competence from the stance of a practitioner allowed readers to assume that she had been supporting herself as a teacher or governess. Also in 1791 she married Ludolf Holst, a lawyer with whom she had three children; in subsequent years she opened and closed three or four small schools (Erziehungsinstitute), in Hamburg, Wittenberg, and Boitzenberg. The reasons for the schools' closings are unknown. (9)
From her discussion of early childhood education in Bemerkungen, Holst moved into literary and feminist debates in 1799-1800, when A. Lindemann's Musarion published her "Briefe uber Elisa, oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte" (Letters on Elisa, or Woman as She Ought to Be), a critique of the immensely popular domestic novel attributed to Karoline von Wobeser (1795, in its fifth edition in 1799). (10) Here Hoist decried popular glorification of the character Elisa's self-renunciation and abnegation in an unhappy marriage and called for female autonomy. (11) In Uber die Bestimmung des Weibes zur hoheren Geistesbildung (On the Purpose of Woman's Advanced Intellectual Development), her third and presumed final publication, Holst's rejection of patriarchal ideology and her insights as a practicing educator converge in the recognition that advanced and ungendered education of women is key to women's--and to society's--transformation. (12)
Hoist's line of argument is refreshingly unfettered by the conflicts and contradictions confounding slightly earlier German women educationist writers such as Sophie von La Roche (1731-1807), who promoted improved education for women, yet tacitly accepted the notion of distinctly gendered spheres of learning endorsed by figures such as Herder, Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, and Schiller. (13) Hoist instead disentangled current prejudices against female learnedness from accepted beliefs about woman's role and destiny to construct an argument that accommodates both the highest degree of formal study and woman's role in the home. The title of her treatise, an arresting extension of the cliche "Bestimmung des Weibes" (woman's destiny, purpose), set the stage for her to advocate a gendered role enriched and expanded by an ungendered education. Also, she extended the word "Bestimmung" to include alternative destinies for exceptional and unmarried women.
Holst appeared fearless of stepping out on a limb, as she boldly exposed herself to critical censure of both her reputation and her cause. She did not write anonymously. She deployed the term "learned" (gelehrt) forthrightly at a time when other post-Enlightenment feminist educationists adopted...
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