Based on more than thirty years of research, Ann Taylor Allen's account of the development of the kindergarten movement in Germany and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a major contribution to scholarship on the history of early childhood education. The strength of this work lies in Allen's transnational perspective and the depth of her knowledge about the history of the kindergarten in both countries. The book begins with a perceptive analysis of the educational philosophy and gender psychology of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel and the reception of their ideas in the German-speaking lands. They placed women's capacity for empathy and inclinations to child-nurturing at the center of their theories on teaching children up to school age. Allen contends that women, many of whom were “the well-educated daughters of men in business and the learned professions” (37), used the new pedagogy to their advantage in seeking professional opportunities outside the home and in striving for personal autonomy.

The author of earlier historical studies on feminism and motherhood in nineteenth-century Germany, Allen avoids the rhetoric of a German Sonderweg and American exceptionalism in her book and highlights instead the contacts between German and American kindergarten teachers and advocates, as well as their shared ideas and aspirations. She traces the transmigration of the kindergarten to the United States to the arrival of German exiles following the failure of the 1848 revolution. Among the German immigrants of that era were followers of Fröbel's progressive pedagogical philosophy and the founders of some of the earliest kindergartens in the New World. The transatlantic exchange intensified after 1860, when American women of middle-class background travelled to Germany to study kindergarten teaching methods and to confer with women who had been trained by Fröbel. What bound these women together was their reverence for Fröbel and their aspirations to personal autonomy, professional employment, and a broadened sphere of responsibility and influence. Kindergartens that were founded in German and American cities were private institutions, financially sustained by women's associations and the patronage of wealthy women who wanted to support a form of assistance to children of the poor.

Allen's comparative approach is very rewarding and provides an extensive analysis that shows why the kindergarten found a more favorable environment for growth in the United States than it did in the land of its origins. In Germany, clergymen in the Protestant and Catholic churches were critical of Fröbel's educational philosophy. From the predominantly male elementary school teaching profession came objections to the idea of adding kindergarten classes to public schools. Support for this educational innovation among kindergarten teachers and advocates was not strong. Henriette Schrader and other members of the Fröbel Society rejected the integration of the kindergarten into the public-school system in the 1890s and argued that “subordination to school bureaucracies would deprive women of the limited power that they held in the kindergarten movement” (126). Believing that children should remain at home under their mothers’ supervision until school age, Lili Droescher declared in 1909 that it was “not desirable to encourage the founding of kindergartens for children of well-to-do families” (128). Droescher implicitly defined the kindergarten as an institution serving mainly the needs of lower-class children. Kindergarten teachers found a route to public support for their work in municipal and state welfare systems. Allen contends that “the German kindergarten became more identified as a social-welfare institution,” and that its development was “limited by requiring a narrow focus on children defined as poor or neglected” (136).

Allen states that the more successful expansion of the kindergarten movement in the United States owed “largely to the difference in the demographic structures of German and American cities.” In contrast to the “still culturally homogeneous” German cities, the population of those in America grew rapidly with the influx of non-English-speaking immigrants. American kindergarten teachers could rally public support for their work “by pointing to the urgent necessity of educating children of immigrants in their early years when they were most open to learning a new language and adapting to a new culture” (73). Women who constituted the majority in the schoolteaching profession, and the Protestant clergy who were trained in the theology of the Social Gospel, responded sympathetically when kindergarten teachers, women's clubs, and female civic leaders in the 1880s began to lobby school boards to integrate kindergarten classes into the public schools. The National Kindergarten Association, founded in 1909, emphasized “the benefits of the kindergarten to ‘the absorption and amalgamation of our foreign element’ and the cultivation of ‘citizen virtues’” (133). The kindergarten became part of the public school system, and its educational mission was extended to children of all social classes.

Allen's conception of the historical actors in the book includes some inflated claims. She connects kindergarten teaching with many other kinds of activism, and refers to the German and American women in this occupation as “kindergarten activists.” In the introduction, she states that the kindergarten was “linked” to “the broader movements for women's rights, educational innovation, and social reform” (2–3). She adds that “kindergarten activists could enter broader debates … on issues that engaged reformers on both sides of the Atlantic” (3). These statements, as well as similar assertions that link kindergarten teachers “to broader campaigns for women's rights” (6) and to other reformers in “a broadened area of social activity and influence” (2), are not substantiated with evidence. The reform agenda of kindergarten teachers was more narrowly focused than Allen acknowledges. In a seemingly apologetic comment on “a leading kindergarten advocate” in Germany, she writes that Lili Droescher “probably wished to protect herself and her cause from any taint of radicalism” (128). Allen's account does not examine the extent to which this political posture prevailed among German kindergarten teachers and affected their public activity.

Allen's book nevertheless adds immensely to our knowledge of the transatlantic contacts of women who taught in kindergartens and were public advocates for this institution. Its comparative approach deepens our understanding of how social and cultural environments shaped the different evolution of the kindergarten movement in Germany and the United States. Her book enhances our appreciation of the organizational power of women who not only took up the cause of promoting early childhood education, but also sought to open professional opportunities for women that would provide the possibility for “autonomy, imagined most basically as freedom from degrading dependence on male relatives or a loveless marriage of convenience” (7).