The imagined Hausfrau: National identity, domesticity, and colonialism in Imperial Germany

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 73, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 54-86

  Reagin, Nancy ^a  

^a PACE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750558564     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/319879     Document Type: Article

References (165)

1. Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, Home Life in Germany (New York, 1908), p. 113.
2. My discussion of the imagined community of Hausfrauen is of course entirely indebted to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York, 1991), esp. pp. 25-26, 37-44, and 67-77. Anderson offers a working definition of such a community as "imagined because the members . . . will never know most of their fellow-members . . . yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (p. 6).
3. The literature on national identity and nationalism is too large to list here. Some of the most important works I have relied on include Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983);
4. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990);
5. Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge, 1985).
6. For Germany, see George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York, 1975);
7. Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997);
8. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990);
9. Roger Checkering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1866-1914 (Boston, 1984);
10. Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (London, 1980);
11. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
12. Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing, eds., Nationaler Mythen und Symbole in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Strukturen und Funktionen von Konzepten nationaler Identität (Stuttgart, 1991);
13. Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996),
14. and "Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality, and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Hapsburg Monarchy," Social Analysis 33 (1993): 47-67.
15. Most of the best-known writers in this field, such as Hroch, Hobsbawm, and John Breuilly, have excluded gender from their analyses. A few recent anthologies, however, have explored gendered national identities. See Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York, 1992);
16. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State (New York, 1989);
17. Jane Mackay and Pat Thane, "The Englishwoman," in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London, 1986), pp. 191-229. Several historians of German women, including Jean Quataert, Belinda Davis, and Karen Hagemann, are currently working on projects that will help remedy this shortcoming.
18. For women as Germania, see Mosse, p. i. For women in white, see Confino, pp. 40-41. Roger Chickering (in his article "Casting Their Gaze More Broadly: Women's Patriotic Activism in Imperial Germany," Past and Present, no. 118 [1988]: 156-85) and Judson (Exclusive Revolutionaries) go beyond this to consider women's membership in male-dominated nationalist associations, doing work as fund-raisers and organizers on behalf of "Germandom," etc. Chickering persuasively argues that the mere presence of women in such organizations undermined the separation between "public" and "private." But women made up only a small fraction of the members of these associations. Their role was generally cast as that of mothers, whose main nationalist contribution would be to raise "German" children.
19. Historians of gender have produced an enormous body of work showing that the distinction between "public" and "private" was more prescriptive than descriptive, since the household and public institutions constantly interacted with and influenced one another.
20. This article is part of a larger project that studies the connections between domesticity and German national identity between 1870 and 1945. In this article, I am concerned with the role that household management played in bourgeois class formation and the development of national identity in the Kaiserreich. In forthcoming work, I examine at greater length the role that women's housekeeping played in the depiction of Germany's imperial identity, the politicization of housekeeping styles after 1914, and how issues related to housekeeping, domesticity, and women's citizenship were racialized in German public policy after 1933.
21. The use of "domesticity" to create, define, and reproduce class identity and boundaries is well established for a number of nineteenth-century Western cultures, although the literature is much more extensive for England and the United States than for Germany. Notable contributions to this rich literature include Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago, 1987);
22. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981);
23. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990);
24. Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1984);
25. Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991);
26. Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia, 1989);
27. Sibylle Meyer, Das Theater mit der Hausarbeit: Bürgerliche Repräsentation in der Familie der wilhelminischen Zeit (Frankfurt, 1982);
28. Anne-Charlott Trepp, "Sanfte Männlichkeit und selbständige Weiblichkeit": Frauen und Männer im Hamburger Bürgertum (Göttingen, 1996);
29. Margarete Freudenthal, Gestaltwandel der städtischen, bürgerlichen, und proletarischen Hauswirtschaft zwischen, 1760 und 1910 (Frankfurt, 1986).
30. Hagemann and Bärbel Kühn have published studies of later cohorts of housewives who were born around or after the turn of the century. They persuasively argue that many housewives, from a variety of social backgrounds, did in fact internalize the high standards of cleanliness and thrift that I discuss here and strove to manage their households accordingly. See Karen Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 1990);
31. Bärbel Kuhn, Haus-Frauen-Arbeit, 1915-1965: Erinnerungen aus fünzig Jahren Haushaltsgeschichte (St. Ingbert, 1994).
32. See Anderson, pp. 42-44 and 77.
33. The literature on the formation and growth of the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century is substantial. Of particular interest for my work here are Kaplan, pp. 13-15; Konrad Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton, N.J., 1982), pp. 127-28;
34. Hans-Joachim Henning, Das westdeutsche Bürgertum in der Epoche der Hochindustrialisierung 1860-1914, Teil I: Das Bildungsbürgertum in den preussischen Westprovinzen (Wiesbaden, 1972);
35. Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880-1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), pp. 12-13;
36. Werner Conze and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Bildungsbürgetum im 19. Jahrhundert, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1985-1992).
37. Smith makes the same point about nineteenth-century French bourgeois housewives in Ladies of the Leisure Class.
38. The term "moral community" is taken from Koshar, pp. 12-13.
39. See Barbara Beuys, Familienleben in Deutschland: Neue Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980), p. 441;
40. Henning, pp. 274-75, 485-90; M. Rainer Lepsius, "Das Bildungsbürgertum als ständische Vergesellschaftung," in Conze and Kocka, eds., 3:8-13.
41. Eighteenth-century domestic advice literature, the so-called Hausväterliteratur, largely addressed itself to the Hausmutter, a woman who was assumed to run an agricultural estate or farm with her husband. Very little of this literature was concerned with housekeeping in its later sense, and most chapters addressed specifically to women discussed dairy management, gardening, the use of medicinal herbs, and perhaps included a section on cooking. This earlier genre imagined self-sufficient households, producing for their own use. Late nineteenth-century advice literature, by contrast, tended to address urban or small-town housewives, who were assumed to purchase (and further process) most of what their households needed. For a discussion of Hausvaterliteratur, see Inga Wiedemann, Herrin im Hause: Durch Koch- und Haushalts-bücher zur bürgerlichen Hausfrau (Pfaffenweiler, 1993), pp. 17-27;
42. Sabine Verk, Geschmacksache: Kochbücher aus dem Museum für Volkskunde (Berlin, 1995), pp. 8-12.
43. My discussion here is restricted to urban or small-town housewives. The overwhelming bulk of the advice literature I discuss below addressed itself to an urban audience, assuming that - at most - the reader might possess a small garden; rural housewives developed their own organizations and publications much later. See Renate Bridenthal, "Organized Rural Women in the Conservative Mobilization of the German Countryside in the Weimar Republic," in Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry E. Jones and James N. Retallack (New York, 1993), pp. 375-405;
44. "'Professional Housewives': Stepsisters of the Women's Movement," in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York, 1984), pp. 153-73;
45. "Class Struggle around the Hearth: Women and Domestic Service in the Weimar Republic," in Towards the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism and Fascism in Weimar Germany, ed. Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman (Westport, Conn., 1983), pp. 243-64.
46. Wiedemann, pp. 40-42.
47. Advice literature for housewives was addressed to bürgerliche housewives (women from the lower middle class and above) and assumed that the reader had at least one servant. An exception to this rule was the best-selling advice manual addressed to working-class women, Das häusliche Glück. See Bärbel Kuhn, "Und herrschet weise im häuslichen Kreise: Hausfrauenarbeit zwischen Disziplin und Eigensinn," in Verbrechen, Strafen, und soziale Kontrolle, ed. Richard van Duelmen (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 238-77.
48. See also Annabella Weismann, Froh erfülle deine Pflicht: Die Entwicklung des Hausfrauenleitbildes im Spiegel trivialer Massenmedian in der Zeit wischen Reichsgrundung und Weltwirtschaftskrise (Berlin, 1989);
49. Siegfried Bluth, Der Hausfrau gewidmet: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte der Hausfrau (Weil der Stadt, 1979);
50. Wiedemann; and Gisela Framke and Gisela Marenk, eds., Beruf der Jungfrau: Henriette Davidis und Bürgerliches Frauemerständnis im 19. Jahrhundert (Oberhausen, 1988).
51. Davidis (as an author) and Morgenstern (as an editor and organizer) were both key figures in the development of the imagined community of Hausfrauen. For Davidis, see Bluth, p. 57; Framke and Marenk, eds. For Morgenstern, see Kaplan (n. 8 above), pp. 206-8; see also Jutta Dick and Marina Sassenberg, eds., Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, s.v. "Morgenstern, Lina," pp. 283-86;
52. Heinz Knoblauch, Die Suppenlina: Wiederbelebung einer Menschenfreundin (Berlin, 1997).
53. Die Frau im Osten (which addressed bourgeois women in eastern Prussia) is another example of advice literature produced for housewives by bourgeois women activists. Hedwig Heyl, a leader in the Berlin housewives' association, who created one of the first model home economics schools in Berlin around the turn of the century, was also the author of one of the most widely read cookbooks and household Ratgeber, Das ABC der Küche (4th ed. [Berlin, 1897]).
54. For the early history of housewives' associations, see Kirsten Schlegel-Matthies, "Im Haus und am Herd": Der Wandel des Hausfrauenbildes und der Hausarbeit, 1880-1930 (Stuttgart, 1995).
55. See also Bridenthal, "'Professional Housewives'";
56. Nancy Reagin, A German Women's Movement: Gender and Class in Hanover, 1880-1933 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. 226-34. For the role played by publications in creating imagined communities and group identities, see Anderson (n. 2 above), pp. 37-44.
57. See Wiedemann, pp. 38-39, 54-55, 60, and 72; Verk, pp. 57-60. See also Henriette Davidis, Die Hausfrau: Praktische Anleitung zur selbständigen und sparsamen Führung von Stadt und Landhaushaltungen, 6th ed. (Leipzig, 1872); this edition was one of the first (and few) that had some sections addressing rural housewives. Women in all Western cultures had to be taught to "shop" rather than to self-provision. For the American case, see Boydston (n. 8 above), pp. 123-24.
58. See Schlegel-Matthies; for the argument by housewives' organizations that theirs was a "profession," see Bridenthal, "'Professional Housewives'";
59. Reagin, A German Women's Movement, pp. 226-34.
60. See also Brigitte Kerchner, Beruf und Geschlecht: Frauenberufsverbände in Deutschland, 1848-1908 (Göttingen, 1992), pp. 211-243.
61. See, e.g., letters to the editor that appeared in Die Frau im Osten between 1910 and 1913.
62. I am not aware of any leading domestic science work by a non-German author that was widely read within Germany before 1914. Authors sometimes referred to foreign works (such as Catherine Beecher's treatise), but their own works reflected local tastes. After 1918, the American trend toward translating Taylorism into the home via "scientific" household management (the chief American author here was Christine Fredericks) found a following in Germany, although the German disciples of Fredericks (e.g., Erna Meyer) were more widely read than Fredericks herself. See Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994), pp. 206-33;
63. Nancy Reagin, "Comparing Apples and Oranges: Housewives and the Politics of Consumption in Interwar Germany," in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Mathias Judt (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 241-62.
64. See Morgenstern's note in "Die Häuslichkeit und die Stellung der Frau in Holland," Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 14, no. 30 (1887): 368.
65. Quoted in Wiedemann (n. 15 above), p. 30; all translations in this article are my own.
66. The housewives who helped create the first housekeeping schools in late nineteenth-century cities tacitly acknowledged that most bourgeois advice literature was impractical for working-class housewives, and they created new Ratgeber explicitly addressed to working-class women, such as the Das häusliche Glück.
67. The genre of cookbooks and household manuals that addressed bourgeois Jewish women promoted a style of household management that (in its emphasis on thrift and cleanliness) largely resembled that of the German bourgeoisie as a whole; at the same time, these works tried to preserve Jewish religious and ethnic identity. German Jewish cookbooks are the subject of a forthcoming dissertation by Ruth Abusch-Magder. See also Kaplan (n. 8 above), pp. 72-74.
68. A few Catholic housewives' groups were founded before 1914, but it was not until after World War I that Catholic housewives created a separate Catholic housewives' league, which was affiliated with the Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund. See Reagin, "Comparing Apples and Oranges."
69. For the efforts of bourgeois women vis-à-vis working-class housewives, see the discussion below. For the SPD's refusal to permit the creation of a separate housewives' organization, see Hagemann (n. 9 above), pp. 133-38. During the Weimar period, working-class housewives did articulate their own concerns in a variety of SPD and German Communist Party publications.
70. For the attempt to establish uniform schedules, see Kuhn (n. 18 above), "Und herrschet weise." Boydston argues convincingly that the "standardization" of housework - which included the creation of regular schedules for cleaning, the establishment of precise mealtimes, and the expectation that housewives should keep precise household accounts - reflected the influence of industrialization within the home and represented the extension of industrial work methods to housework. See Boydston (n. 8 above), pp. 101-15.
71. For the ways that bourgeois housekeeping functioned to define class in other nations, see the works cited in n. 3 above. See also Jane Rendall, Women in an Industrializing Society: England, 1750-1880 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 44 ff.;
72. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982).
73. For German bourgeois women's attempts to remake working-class housewives in their own image, see Reagin, A German Women's Movement (n. 21 above), pp. 43-98;
74. Ute Frevert, "Fürsorgliche Belagerung: Hygienebewegung und Arbeiterfrauen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985): 420-46;
75. see also Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), pp. 300-307.
76. For discussions of nation building among the German bourgeoisie as a whole, see Mosse (n. 3 above); Confino (n. 3 above).
77. Harold James, A German Identity, 1770-1990 (New York, 1989), pp. 13-14, 31; Hobsbawm and Ranger (n. 3 above) argue that Germany was particularly notable for its tendency to rely on foreigners (esp. enemies) in creating a self-definition (p. 279).
78. See Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries (n. 3 above), p. 200.
79. The emphasis on extreme thriftiness, regardless of its cost in labor, is present throughout these publications. See Kuhn, "Und herrschet weise," pp. 257-60; Wiedemann(n. 15 above), pp. 118-21; and Bluth (n. 18 above), who comments that "home and cooking advice books were, above everything else, books on how to save money" (p. 78).
80. See Seminar der Koch- und Haushaltungsschule "Hedwig Heyl," ed., Lehrgang des Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Hauses 2 (Berlin, 1905), p. 89.
81. Quoted in Beuys (n. 14 above), pp. 440-41. For the economic position of civil servants, by contrast, see Beuys, p. 439; Henning (n. 11 above), pp. 487-90, 274-75.
82. Quoted in Wiedemann, p. 132.
83. See Kaplan (n. 8 above), pp. 29-30.
84. Quoted in Wiedemann, p. 118.
85. See Hagemann (n. 9 above); Kuhn, Haus-Frauen-Arbeit (n. 9 above).
86. From Clara Geissmar's memoir, in the Leo Baeck Institute Archive in New York. I am indebted to Marion Kaplan for calling this source to my attention.
87. Among the most popular such descriptions were "snow-white" and "sparkling-white." Indeed, there are adjectives for white (e.g., blühendweiss) that are impossible to translate. Reading these sources, one sometimes feels German housewives had as many adjectives for "white" in cleaning, as Eskimo are popularly (and erroneously) believed to have for snow. Extremely high standards for cleanliness, along with a constant round of cleaning, are discussed in Kuhn, "Und herrschet weise," pp. 244-52; Wiedemann, pp. 113-18; Bluth, pp. 75-78.
88. The instructions are reprinted in Framke and Marenk, eds. (n. 18 above), p. 77.
89. Sidgwick (n. 1 above), pp. 135-36. For additional discussions of the symbolic importance of "snow-white" linens, see Wiedemann (n. 15 above), pp. 76-77; Kuhn, Haus-Frauen-Arbeit, pp. 31-32.
90. For an emphasis on extreme cleanliness as a marker of upward mobility (common in Western cultures in this period), see Kuhn (n. 18 above), "Und herrschet weise";
91. Robert Frost, "Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France," French Historical Studies 18 (1993): 115.
92. Wiedemann, p. 77.
93. Ibid., p. 117. During World War II, when soap, bleach, etc., were in short supply (as was new fabric), officials in the housekeeping division of the National Socialist Deutsches Frauenwerk debated whether to urge housewives to omit bleaching, in order to spare the fabric. They concluded, however, that housewives would never accept such advice and that dingy linens would lead to bad morale. See my article, "Marktordnung and Autarkic Housekeeping: Housewives and Private Consumption under the Nazi Four Year Plan," German History (in press).
94. For examples of eighteenth-century treatises on sex roles (Geschlechtscharakter), which stress the domestic "bourgeois" virtues that later characterized housewives' advice literature, see Paul Münch, Ordnung, Fleiss, und Sparsamkeit: Texte und Dokumente zur Entstehung der "bürgerlichen Tugenden" (Munich, 1984), pp. 210-16, 260-71, and 341-43.
95. Münch argues that "order, industry, and thrift, which are closely linked to the ideals of cleanliness and purity, form the center of the . . . 'bourgeois' book of virtues. They have also long determined the self-image of Germans, and their stereotypes of foreigners in a peculiar fashion" (p. 12). Münch concludes that these "virtues" emerged in discussions of the "German" national character during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the late eighteenth century, this catalog of values (originally much broader) had narrowed down to the "domestic virtues" of orderliness, industriousness, and thrift. These norms then became the focus of treatises on girls' education (earlier works had tended to prioritize qualities such as chastity and obedience). For the development of gender roles and sexual stereotypes during the Enlightenment more generally, see Karin Hausen, "Family and Role Division: The Polarization of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century - An Aspect of the Disassociation of Work and Family Life," in The German Family, ed. Richard Evans and W. R. Lee (London, 1981), pp. 51-83.
96. For the popularization of these Enlightenment authors in nineteenth-century household advice manuals, see Weismann (n. 18 above), pp. 215-17. For the increasing emphasis on bodily cleanliness among the German bourgeoisie during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Manuel Frey, Der reinliche Bürger: Entstehung und Verbreitung bürgerlicher Tugenden in Deutschland, 1760-1860 (Göttingen, 1997).
97. "The Song of the Bell" (Das Lied der Glocke) is reprinted in G. Karpeles, ed., Schillers sämtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden, 3 vols. (Leipzig, n.d.), 2:244.
98. These sayings, translated in order, are: "One's own hearth is worth gold," "Dear home, source of all happiness," "Keep order, love it. Order saves you time and effort," "Purity is the kitchen's decoration," and "Cleanliness is an ornament."
99. Quoted in Weismann, p. 220. Weismann's collection of sayings embroidered on textiles includes a number of other references praising the "German housewife." Some editions of Davidis offered similar embroidery patterns.
100. The articles discussed in this article were taken from a survey of the following periodicals: Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung, Die Frau im Osten (which addressed women in the eastern provinces of the empire), Fürs Haus: Praktisches Wochenblatt für alle Hausfrauen, and Die Welt der Frau, the women's supplement to the enormously popular illustrated family magazine Gartenlaube. The first two magazines show the overlap between housewives' organizations and their advice literature, since both were put out by leaders of bourgeois women's associations. These two periodicals were edited by women, and almost all of their contributions came from women. The latter two publications were edited by men, although many of the pieces I cite from them were written by women. For each periodical, I selected at least five years from the period between 1885 and 1914 (depending on availability of sources) and read through all issues from the chosen volumes.
101. See James (n. 36 above), and the numerous articles on "national character" in Link and Wülfing, eds. (n. 3 above). See also Kirsten Belgum, "A Nation for the Masses: Production of the German Identity in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Popular Press," in A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997), pp. 163-80,
102. and Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853-1900 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1998).
103. Hermann Daniel, Handbuch der Geographie, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1865-68), quoted in Link and Wülfing, eds., p. 50.
104. See Henriette Jastrow, "Das Dienstbotenproblem in England," Die Welt der Frau no. 39 (1909), pp. 609-10, where the assertion about leaving all the work to servants is simply presented as an established fact.
105. See also "Kinderleben in England," Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 15, no. 1 (1888): 3-4; see also Sidgwick (n. 1 above). Sidgwick repeatedly stressed that English women supervised their servants less and did less housework themselves, and that German women maintained much higher standards of cleanliness and thrift.
106. See, e.g., Mathilde Weber, "Erlebnisse einer deutschen Erzieherin in Frankreich, 1870-1871," Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 13, no. 26 (1886): 311-12.
107. Quoted in Weismann, p. 229.
108. See Ute Gerhard and Jürgen Link, "Zum Anteil der Kollektivsymbolik an den Nationalstereotypen," in Link and Wülfing, eds., pp. 22-30.
109. See the multipart series on Dutch housewives that began in Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 14, no. 30 (1887): 355-56.
110. From "Italienische Dienstboten," Die Welt der Frau, no. 16 (1909), p. 253.
111. For the biblical passage on the lilies of the field, which was used to describe women as diverse as New York housewives and East African women, see "Unsere Schwestern in Deutsch-Ostafrika," Die Welt der Frau, no. 39 (1908), pp. 611-13;
112. C. de Barigny, "Daisys Budget," Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 22, no. 36 (1895), pp. 430-31. This metaphor was also invoked when discussing women who lived in harems. Writers invariably employed only the better-known, short version of this passage, "they labor not, nor do they spin," to evoke the concept of a beauty that is linked to leisure. The rest of this passage reads: "But I say to you, not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these. Now if God clothe in this manner the grass that is today in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more you, O ye of little faith?" (Luke 12:27-28). This would indicate that these writers were quoting out of context. The ideal "German" housewife, defined in contrast to the idle lilies, resembled instead the virtuous wife of the Old Testament, whose price is "far above rubies." "She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and tasks for her maiden. . . . She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. . . . She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness" (Prov. 31:15-27).
113. See Ernst Below, "Die Frau im Norden und die im Süden der neuen Welt," Die Deutsche Hausfrauen-Zeitung 23, no. 27 (1896): 321-22;
114. "Unsere Schwestern in Deutsch-Ostafrika," Die Welt der Frau, no. 39 (1908), pp. 611-13;
115. "Die Wanderzigeuner Siebenbürgens," Die Welt der Frau, ibid., no. 15 (1909), pp. 227-29;
116. "Von den Frauen des Ostens," Die Welt der Frau, ibid., no. 17 (1913), pp. 258-60.
117. See "Unsere Schwestern in Deutsch-Ostafrika," pp. 611-13.
118. For Africans as servants, see the discussion of German colonial homes below.
119. For discussions of how Germans perceived American society more generally, see James (n. 36 above), pp. 26-27; Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europäischen Vergleich (Berlin, 1997). Discussions about U.S. housewives increased substantially after 1918, which was related to the overall increase in interest in America and Taylorism during the 1920s. See Nolan (n. 25 above), pp. 109, 206-34.
120. Quoted in Schmidt, p. 195.
121. For descriptions of American housewives before World War I, see Below, pp. 321-22; de Barigny, pp. 430-31; "Will die Amerikanerin sich wirklich von Mann, Haushalt, und Kind losreissen?" Die Frau im Osten 8, no. 20 (1914): 173-74.
122. In Reisen in die Moderne, Schmidt argues that there was enormous continuity in European depictions of American culture and family life before and after World War I. Certainly this was true in the case of bourgeois German women's perceptions of American housework. See Lissy Sysemihl-Gliedemeister, "Über amerikanische Frauentätigkeit," Jahrbuch des Reichsverbandes Deutscher Hausfrauenvereine (1929), pp. 141-55;
123. "Hausfrau und Volkswirtschaft: Das Fiasko der Konsumfinanzierung in Amerika," Die Deutsche Hausfrau 12 (1927): 74;
124. Heinz Potthoff, "Erwerbstätigkeit und Hausfrauengeist," Die Deutsche Hausfrau ibid. 13 (1928): 50-52. A 1932 "Alphabet of Marriage," a series of couplets published in a housewives' magazine, illustrates the continuity in characterizations of American women as "undomestic": solving the difficult problem of how to find a domestic rhyme that began with X, the couplet observed that "Xanthippes are still found today, especially in Yankeeland." Quoted in Weismann (n. 18 above), p. 235.
125. See Schmidt, pp. 190-216.
126. For the popularity of Kolonie und Heimat, see Joachim Warmbold, Germania in Africa: Germany's Colonial Literature (New York, 1989), pp. 91, 241.
127. Bourgeois women of course also had access to other sources of information about Germans in Africa, such as the newspaper accounts and novels written by men for a broader bourgeois audience (e.g., Gustav Frenssen's best-selling novel Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest [Berlin, 1906]), but these publications paid comparatively little attention to questions of domesticity and housekeeping.
128. For memoirs and travel literature written by women who had been to Africa, see Clara Brockmann, Die deutsche Frau in Südwestafrika: Ein Beitrag zur Frauenfrage in unseren Kolonien (Berlin, 1910);
129. Eise Sonnenberg, Wie es am Waterberg zuging: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Hereroaufstandes (Berlin, 1905);
130. Ada Cramer, Weiss oder Schwarz: Lehr- und Leidensjahre eines Farmers in Südwest im Lichte des Rassenhasses (Berlin, 1913);
131. Margarethe von Eckenbrecher, Helene von Falkenhausen, Stabsarzt Dr. Kuhn, and Oberleutnant Stuhlmann, Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Kriegs- und Friedensbilder (Leipzig, 1907);
132. Helene von Falkenhausen, Ansiedlerschicksale: Elf Jahre in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1893-1904 (Berlin, 1905);
133. Margarethe von Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm: Erlebnisse einer deutschen Frau in Südwestafrika, rev. ed. (Berlin, 1940);
134. Maria Karow, Wo sonst der Fuss des Kriegers Trat: Farmerleben in Südwest nach dem Kriege (Berlin, 1909).
135. For a discussion of German colonists in popular Wilhelmine and Weimar fiction, see Warmbold; Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl, "'Ach Afrika! Wär ich zu Hause!' Gedanken zum Deutschen Kolonialroman der Jahrhundertwende," in Afrika und der Deutsche Kolonialismus: Zivilisierung zwischen Schnapshandel und Bibelstunde, ed. Renate Nestvogel and Rainer Tetzlaff (Berlin, 1987), pp. 83-100.
136. For a broader history of the migration of women to German Southwest Africa, see Krista E. O'Donnell, "The Colonial Woman Question: Gender, National Identity, and Empire in the German Colonial Society Female Emigration Program, 1896-1914" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1996);
137. see also Lora Wildenthal, "Colonizers and Citizens: Bourgeois Women and the Woman Question in the German Colonial Movement, 1886-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994);
138. Florence Hervé, ed., Namibia: Frauen mischen sich ein (Berlin, 1993).
139. In this article, I am more concerned with metropolitan perceptions of colonial housekeeping than with the reality of women's work in the German colonies. In a forthcoming article, I discuss and compare the ideological role of "German housekeeping" in Southwest Africa and in ethnic German communities in Eastern Europe, as depicted in nationalist literature directed at both metropolitan Germans and Germans abroad.
140. From Yuval-Davis and Anthias, eds. (n. 4 above), pp. 8-10.
141. Comments on the poor personal hygiene of Africans were ubiquitous in travel literature and memoirs. See, e.g., Karow, pp. 33-34; Brockmann, pp. 25-28. See Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men and Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C., 1996), pp. 24-25;
142. see also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Homemade Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa," in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen T. Hansen (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), pp. 37-74;
143. Nancy Rose Hunt, "Colonial Fairy Tales and the Knife and Fork Doctrine in the Heart of Africa," in Hansen, ed., pp. 143-71. The contrast of self with (imagined) African domestic disorder still reverberates within German popular culture today, as witnessed by the common saying "hier sieht es aus wie bei den Hottentotten" (it's as dirty here as among the Hottentots).
144. Karow, pp. 154, 33.
145. Eckenbrecher, pp. 27, 32. Eckenbrecher added later, however, that these homes were kept tolerably clean, an admission that sets her apart from other writers.
146. For a persuasive discussion of why German settlers might have in fact preferred to marry local women, see O'Donnell, pp. 46-49.
147. In Eckenbrecher et al., p. 27. See also the disparaging remarks about the housekeeping of African or Bastard women in Brockmann, pp. 25-28; see also "Die Frau und die Kolonien," Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (May 30, 1905), p. 122. Settlers who married local women were often referred to as verkaffert ("kaffirized"), because they adopted the allegedly poor standard of living and morals of their wives. See O'Donnell, pp. 39-40.
148. The "race" of individuals who came to German Southwest Africa from the Cape Colony, or the Bastard community, was sometimes the subject of heated controversy. Some colonists argued that Bastard women in particular were largely Europeanized in their appearance, morals, dress, etc. See O'Donnell, p. 48.
149. Brockmann, pp. 3-6.
150. Karow, (n. 74 above), p. 128.
151. Emmy Müller, "Die deutsche Frau in der Südsee," Kolonie und Heimat 3 (1910): 6-7. Other writers also noted how they hung white curtains and Andenken (framed sayings or proverbs) as one of their first acts after arriving; see Sonnenberg, Falkenhausen. Considering the difficulties of maintaining a metropolitan standard of hygiene in Southwest Africa (the lack of running water - or often any clean water - the extremely dusty conditions, the termites), one may be skeptical about such claims. But of the writers surveyed here, only Falkenhausen ever admitted to a less-than-German standard of cleanliness; the others all asserted that they were able to reproduce heimische standards of cleanliness and order.
152. Eckenbrecher (n. 74 above), p. 208.
153. For the thrifty management of German colonist housewives, see Brockmann (n. 74 above), pp. 14-15; Antonie Brandeis, "Die deutsche Hausfrau in den Kolonien," Kolonie und Heimat 1, no. 4 (November 10, 1907): 12;
154. Aus Südwestafrika (Leipzig, 1905), p. 53.
155. For the maintenance of the tradition of the Sunday cake and roast, see Karow, pp. 115-16; Brockmann, pp. 11-12. Kolonie und Heimat regularly featured proposed Küchenzettel for settler women, which incorporated some local ingredients but maintained the basic patterns and structure of German bourgeois cuisine. See, e.g., M. Rädnitzer, "Zwei unentbehrliche Freunde der Farmersfrau," Kolonie und Heimat 1, no. 19 (June 6, 1908).
156. Paul Kollmann, Auf deutschem Boden in Afrika: Ernste und heitere Erlebnisse (Berlin, 1900), quoted in Warmbold (n. 73 above), p. 158. See Warmbold, pp. 158-63, for other writers' descriptions of the exceptional cleanliness of German colonies.
157. See, e.g., Ann L. Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia," in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley, 1991);
158. Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997);
159. Margaret Strobel, Western Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, Ind., 1991);
160. Burke (n. 77 above); Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (n. 77 above);
161. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994).
162. Kuhn, "Und herrschet weise" (n. 18 above), p. 250. See also Hagemann (n. 9 above), pp. 90-98.
163. See Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German (n. 3 above), pp. 198-201,
164. "Casting Their Gaze More Broadly" (n. 5 above).
165. Sidgwick (n. 1 above), pp. 113-14.