This book presents a new angle on the history of the women's movement in Imperial Germany by examining the discourse about the surplus of unmarried middle-class women. Dollard contends that the perception of a demographic crisis and the plight of the daughters of bourgeois families without marital prospects played a powerful role in creating the vision, practical work, and reform proposals of female activists. Ute Frevert and other scholars in the field of women's history have pointed out that demographic facts and the statistics on marriage in the late nineteenth century do not support the claims of a female surplus, and they have treated such a notion as inconsequential to the origins of the German women's movement. Dollard acknowledges that demographic studies provide no evidence of an oversupply of women. She states that the female surplus (Frauenüberschuss) was a product of “imagined demography” (p. 71) and that the characterization of unmarried women as a social pariah and an economic encumbrance gained a deeper urgency in the Kaiserreich, when consumer industries made redundant many of the traditional domestic activities that single daughters had performed in bourgeois households in earlier times. The less useful single women were believed to be, the more intense was the prejudice against them. Moderates and radicals alike in the women's movement shared the conviction that the surplus women, who could not count on the likelihood of establishing their own homes in marriage, were a problem in need of solving.

Dollard maintains that the leaders of the Federation of German Women's Associations embraced the female surplus as a central element of their program of social reform. It served as the catalyst for their demands for the access of women to institutions of higher education and to professional employment that had been closed to them. In her analysis, the female surplus was, furthermore, linked to an explanation of middle-class bias in the German women's movement and to a belief in “the transformative power of spiritual motherhood” (p. 93) that permeated all aspects of their reform agenda. Contemporaries did not discuss the Frauenüberschuss as a working-class phenomenon. Since male factory workers married generally at an earlier age than men in the professions and civil service did, and young working-class women could find jobs as domestic servants or in industry until the anticipated marriage, Helene Lange and other moderate activists in the women's movement did not think that working-class women experienced “the travails of a cultural malaise like that of the bourgeois old maid” (p. 87). In articulating a vision of the innate power of women to renew culture, they promoted a metamorphosis of the negatively stereotyped, unmarried woman into a being whose specific female, nurturing gifts could be applied in vocations for the benefit of the greater German society.

Dollard's assessment of the impact of the Frauenüberschuss, a perceived population crisis and “a product of imagined demography” (p. 213), on the development of the women's movement and on the discussion of women's rights in Imperial Germany is inflated and unconvincing. Her interpretation of casual references to unmarried women in the discourse of female activists is in some instances overdrawn. As the works by Ann Taylor Allen and other historians indicate, the motives and arguments of German feminists were more wide-ranging than this account suggests. Dollard states that the milieu of Imperial Germany created “an acute experience of the female surplus for bourgeois women” (p. 87), but her analysis is not sufficiently grounded in social history to substantiate this statement. Her assessment of the significance of the notion of a surplus of unmarried women to the vision and activism of the women's movement at the turn of the century is open to question again when she comes to World War I and points out that the casualties of the battlefield led to a big decrease in the number of marriages in Germany. And yet, as she states, “the surplus single woman disappeared from the rhetoric of the German women's movement just when reason dictated her real arrival” (p. 200).