Like all anthologies, this one is a mixed bag of interesting and stimulating materials and some less-convincing curiosities. Some of the articles bear upon gender, others upon identity, and only a few focus closely upon gender and modernity together. Fourteen essays are collected under the general rubrics “Constructing Gender in Vienna and Beyond,” “the Impact of Viennese Modernity in Literature,” “the Contribution of Jewish Women to Viennese Modernity,” “Early Psychoanalysis and its Legacy,” and (somewhat confusingly) “The Historical and Cultural Legacy of Austria-Hungary.” The latter section in fact contains substantial essays on the internment of political suspects during World War I and the Austro-Yugoslav border conflict and the 1920 plebiscite as well as a contribution on the changing character of the cult of Empress Elizabeth in the last hundred years. Other essays in the volume treat a novella by the pioneer feminist Grete Meisel-Hess; a revisionist interpretation of Klimt's “The Kiss” as a political painting; cycling in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century; competing Habsburgian (sic!) presences at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; a comparison between Italo Svevo's character Zeno with Robert Musil's Ulrich; misogyny (and misandry: the homme fatal turns out to be a sort of stock character in fin de siècle Czech literature) in fin de siècle Czech modernist poetry; the remarkable Jewish salons of Vienna; the trials and tribulations of the first female students at Vienna University (the fascinating trio Elise Richter, Käthe Leichter, and Helene Deutsch); the place of women in early psychoanalytical theory as well as women analysts such as Karen Horney, Anna Freud, and Deutsch in the early psychoanalytical movement; and, finally, the theoretical and therapeutic ideas of Sándor Ferenczi bearing upon such themes as sexual difference and war neurosis.

As far as the essays treat the problem of gender differences, they focus upon women's changing role in urban life in the Dual Monarchy and the challenges it presented to men. They are less focused upon Vienna as the cursory description of the book's contents above might lead one to think. Indeed, it is a strength of the collection that both its themes and its contributors are far from being exclusively Viennese. It contains an important reminder of the enormous cultural diversity and creativity within all of the Habsburg lands around 1900. It is also a reminder that there are (to my knowledge at least) no scholars, such as the venerable R. J. W. Evans, working on turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture who possess facility in all of the languages of the monarchy. That clearly imposes strict limitations on the way that cultural history has to be handled.

Invariably in any collection some essays are bound to impress a given reader more strongly than others. That is also the case here. Particularly impressive are the two chapters on Sándor Ferenczi; the discussion of the experiences of the trio of female students in Vienna; the discussion of the treatment of Italian-speaking Austrians in World War I; and the Austro-Yugoslav border conflict after the war. Ferenczi's open-mindedness, sometimes bordering upon skepticism with regard to pyschoanalytic theory itself, especially as regards women; his sensitivity to suffering human beings; his investigative spirit being confronted with the conundrums of war neurosis (post-traumatic stress disorder in today's terms); and his agonic conception of life are all as relevant to understanding human behavior today as they were during his lifetime. Reading the story of the discipline, intelligence, and courageous good sense of the three pioneer female university students combined with the horrible fate of two of them in the concentration camps is an experience as sobering as it is enlightening. The cruel fate of Italian-speaking Austrians interned as potential traitors is a reminder that Italian demands for a border on the Brenner Pass as protection after the war were not entirely fanciful in the light of the treatment that group met with during the war. Similarly, the role of women and established gender norms in the war and later in the Carinthian plebiscite in 1920 is an eye-opener.

On a less positive note, the sections on Vienna would be clearer had the authors taken Harriet Anderson's injunction to distinguish sharply between bourgeois and working-class feminism, the former being a morally based movement for an improved society without the demand for suffrage. The discussion of the significance of cycling in Hungary would have profited by comparison with Roman Sandgruber's studies of the significance of the bicycle in the western part of the monarchy. Rolling out Otto Weininger as a misogynist whipping boy can be counterproductive. For example, in the otherwise excellent discussion of the situation of the first female students in Vienna, he turns up as a defender of the idea that women's intellectual inferiority was a disqualification for university studies. In fact, Weininger did consider women intellectually inferior to men but he had no objections to their pursuing university studies. The essay on Klimt is an interpretation based upon an unpublished iconographic study and summarized in one page. It is difficult for the critical reader to know what to make of the argument that Jill Scott bases upon it.

All in all, Gender and Modernity represents more of a suggestion of the kinds of things that a feminist or masculinist perspective in the fin de siècle might offer to students of the culture and politics of that era than a full-fledged breakthrough to a new explanatory paradigm.