In the aftermath of World War I, a similar cry was heard all over the world—what happened to all the women? Seemingly without warning, the demure, decorous, and shapely woman of the prewar era had been replaced by a creature with short hair, narrow hips, and no breasts who recklessly romped through city streets, drinking martinis and trailing cigarette ash. To many observers, this creature (known in Austria as the New Woman) was not a woman at all but a being that transcended (or perhaps destroyed) gender.
Despite her ubiquity, the modern woman has been a tricky topic for historians. “She” has been easiest to analyze as a media representation—a bogey(wo)man who crystalized debates over the upheavals of modernity and inspired an array of political movements that aimed to temper her supposedly pernicious influence. But what is the relationship between this discursive construction and the real women who inspired it? If the media representation of the New Woman was indeed a reflection of changing gender norms, how were those changes enacted by actual women?
This is the subject Katya Motyl tackles in her brilliant new book. Embodied Histories aims to help us understand how new forms of gendered subjectivities come into being and how they are enacted in the world. It does this by examining the everyday embodied practices of ordinary women in fin de siècle Vienna. Motyl argues that these bodily practices “constituted a form of gender subversion” (1) and ultimately enabled new forms of womanhood that radically diverged from the established gender norms of the nineteenth century. The book’s five chapters are each a history of a different form of embodied practice: the culture of urban walking; the work of creating a slim bodily silhouette; the embodied expression of emotion as a form of self-expression; a woman’s recognition, experience, and acceptance of her own sexual desire; and the internalization of the “medical gaze” (191) as a way of viewing one’s own body.
Like the New Woman herself, many of the embodied practices Motyl investigates—such as languidly strolling around the city or dieting to conform to new fashion norms—were not unique to Vienna. Embodied Histories, however, argues that the Austrian capital had its own practices of new womanhood that developed in tandem with the city itself. Motyl considers Vienna as a physical space and as a distinctive culture, both of which existed in a dialectical relationship with the women who inhabited it. Her analysis is grounded in an impressively deep knowledge of the city and everything that happened within it. Thus, the chapter that examines new gendered practices of embodied emotional expression considers how women developed new, subversive body languages through exposure to the iconography of hysteria, the idiom of “Temperament” in the theater and modern dance, and the body language of silent film actors. It looks at theatrical works that are particularly associated with Vienna, such as Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, the operetta Ein Waltzertraum by Oscar Strauss, and the silent film Varieté, and considers them as works of performance that took place in the city and resonated in particular ways with spectators there.
One of the reasons that historians have most often analyzed the modern woman through her representations is that this is where “she” most often enters into the historical record. Dealing with the relative paucity of sources about the lives of real women requires Motyl to be tenacious and creative. She casts a wide net, looking at women across class, ethnicity, and confession and cleverly combining archival materials with periodicals, photographs, films, advertisements, ego documents, and more. One of her strategies is to center each chapter around a case of something that was perceived as an act of gendered deviance: women who were arrested on suspicion of prostitution, a woman suspected of being a man impersonating a woman, a woman who entered a mental institution, or a woman who rejected her cold marriage. She then analyzes what made their behavior subversive and investigates the larger cultural and social context that enabled it.
The outstanding final chapter revolves around the case of a young woman, Julianne Schneeberger, convicted of abortion in 1927. In her testimony, Schneeberger admitted that she had actively sought to terminate a pregnancy. Motyl contrasts Schneeberger’s confession with an earlier case that went very differently. In 1899, Elisabeth Töpfel told the court she went to a midwife to unblock her menstrual flow. She claimed she did not realize what the midwife had done was an abortion. Under the terms of Austrian law, she was acquitted. What, Motyl asks, changed between these two cases? While admitting that it is impossible to know what Töpfel actually believed, Motyl shows how the two cases illustrated a shift in how women viewed and experienced their own bodies. Schneeberger, she argues, saw her body through the diagnostic “medical gaze” (193) that redefined what women had seen as techniques to restore menstruation as abortion. The chapter places the two court cases within the context of larger changes in thinking about health and hygiene, including the development of professional medicine in Vienna, the fin de siècle movement against “quack” midwives, the development of municipal public health initiatives about hygiene and disease, changing attitudes toward menstruation, and socialist-led efforts to reform Austria’s abortion laws. Motyl’s kaleidoscopic analysis of the context in which these two women gave their testimonies illuminates the complicated process through which new gendered subjectivities became imaginable.
Embodied Histories resists coming to easy conclusions. As the book makes clear, change did not necessarily mean emancipation: women who threw out their corsets may have breathed more easily, but they also found themselves under a new pressure to be thin. What Motyl’s book does provide is an unparalleled analysis of how new forms of womanhood arose in fin de siècle Vienna. Theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written, and impressively researched, Embodied Histories is a stellar example of what gender history can be.
