Review of Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865-1914

Abstract

Chapter I examines how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, academic citizenship and the right to Bildung continued to be firmly placed in the male domain. As her sources, [Maz]ón uses three contemporary handbooks that introduce prospective and new students to university life. These guides aspired to the neo-humanist ideal of Bildung and articulated very specific views of masculinity thus reinforcing academic citizenship as an exclusive privilege for men. Chapter II provides the counterpoint by tracing how the German middle-class women's movement worked towards the reform of female education. From 1865 onwards, the Frauenstudium (university education of women) became the focus of those reformers who favoured participation of women in higher education as a contribution to solving the woman question, i.e., the social problems caused by industrialization, especially the very limited employment options faced by a rapidly increasing number of single women. Mazón offers a detailed analysis of the ideas and writings of four of the leading reformers, namely Louise Otto-Peters, Hedwig Dohm, Hedwig Kettler, and Helene Lange, all of whom made strong arguments for higher education for females by emphasizing the woman question as a means to subvert the masculine concept of academic citizenship. Chapter III further explores the tension between the rhetoric of the woman question and academic citizenship and situates this conceptual conflict within the well-known nineteenth-century debates about women's perceived physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority. Women eventually gained access to university education with the understanding that they would choose only "suitable" careers, e.g., become physicians or teachers, and would not compete with men in exclusively male professions such as law. In Chapter IV, Mazón focuses on the policies and regulations brought forward by universities and state governments in an attempt to control the access of women to higher education.