Protect women from intellectualism!
Paul Julius Möbius, 1903Footnote 1
When Paul Robinson observed that Alfred Kinsey has “rarely been taken seriously as a thinker,” he meant that Kinsey has not been treated as a theorist worthy of the attention of intellectual historians.Footnote 2 This is also true of many early sexual scientists. Though the rich history of the sexual science movement now is being fleshed out, there remains a dearth of research on the historical intersection of the sexual science and feminist movements.Footnote 3 This essay attempts to remedy this deficiency by illuminating the historical dialogue between feminists and early sexual scientists.
To date, this dialogue has been absent from the historical record or pushed to the margins of scholarship in both fields. The significant contribution of feminists to sexual science can best be understood by illuminating their struggles against a largely misogynist discipline. Tracing the emergence of sexual science from the field of criminal science reveals the misogynist inflection of fin de siècle sexual theory. This misogynistic inflection not only conflicted with the spirit of feminism; it also set up roadblocks to theoretical cooperation. Nowhere was the evidence of the cultural incommensurability of early sexual science and feminism more vivid than in the intellectual collision of Oda Olberg (1872–1955) and Paul Möbius (1853–1907) or in the imaginative gender theory of Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938), which arose as a passionate polemic against misogynist sexology.
The dialectical encounter of feminism and sexual science presented here was fierce but fruitful, for it produced an anti-essentialist (or anti-naturalist) variant of feminism that was rare among first-wave feminists. (Most first-wave feminist philosophy presupposed an essentialist view of women's nature. Women's biological capacity for motherhood was treated as the source of an invariable feminine character or essence.Footnote 4) Thus this essay revises and complicates the category of first-wave feminism by chronicling the history of anti-essentialist feminism. The essay then concludes by offering new perspectives on Austrian intellectual history as a whole on the basis of this recovery of a lost dimension of first-wave feminism.
CRIMINOLOGY AND ANTI-FEMINISM
Prior to the twentieth century, the concerns of what was known at the turn of the twentieth century as the “woman question” surfaced in very few early works of sexual science. To the extent that female issues appeared in early sexological texts at all, they materialized in reference to so-called vices such as lesbianism (sometimes called tribaldism or sapphism), prostitution, and physiological discussions of orgasm and reproduction. There are several reasons for the absence of feminist themes, but one overriding reason can be located in the historical origins of the discipline of sexual science. The sexual science movement was disproportionately dominated by male medical doctors. Imagining that a woman of the nineteenth century developed feminist consciousness and sought to become a medical doctor, there was no chance of her expressing that consciousness in the academic discipline of sexual science, because, at least in Germany and Austria, women were excluded from the medical profession until the early twentieth century.Footnote 5
A less obvious explanation for the marginalization of women's issues within the history of sexual science can be gleaned from the criminological origins of sexology.Footnote 6 Mainstream sexual science disproportionately emerged in Europe from the subfield of forensic medical science. After 1850, medical doctors such as Johann Ludwig Casper (1796–1864) in Berlin and Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (1818–79) in Paris did pioneering work in medical criminology. Their research touched on important topics such as pederasty, zoophilia, rape, and the sexual identity of hermaphrodites, but these topics were investigated almost exclusively in terms of medical law. Casper seems to have been the more rigorously empirical natural scientist. He corrected Tardieu's unproven assumptions of anthropometry, which we now associate with the criminology of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909): according to anthropometry, criminal behavior corresponded to and could be identified by particular physiological marks. Tardieu's 1858 study of two hundred cases of pederasty concluded that pederasts could be identified by a tapered penis and, in some cases, by short teeth and thick lips. Casper disputed these anthropometric claims and similar assertions by other sexual scientists, like the claim that the vice of lesbianism was caused by an elongated clitoris.Footnote 7
Of greatest cultural importance, however, was the indelible mark criminal sexology left on the emerging discipline of sexual science. Casper's willingness to challenge presuppositions for which he could find no empirical evidence endeared him to early sexual scientist and social activist Karl Ulrichs (1825–95). Ulrichs often praised Casper's evidentiary rigor and interpreted it as a sign of the liberatory potential of empirical reason. However, Ulrichs generally rejected the civic competence of most forensic doctors:
Forensic doctors, with all of their “experience,” are not completely competent [to pass judgments about homosexuals]. Not even one percent of Urnings [homosexuals] pass through their hands. Once and for all, I must protest against their eternal idea that their experience enables them to pass judgment on Uranian [homosexual] love. In particular, I am referring to the work of Casper and Tardieu . . . Who would dare pass judgment on Dionian [heterosexual] love from books about prostitution, depraved women, and/or venereal disease? The research of both [Casper and Tardieu on homosexuality] runs parallel with such an approach.Footnote 8
Ulrichs, a pioneer of the homosexual rights movement, clearly understood the politico-judicial implications of a sexual science governed by traditional criminology.Footnote 9 He exposed the fallacious quality of judgments about homosexuals drawn from a research pool composed exclusively of criminals. More broadly, Ulrichs's work prefigured Michel Foucault's arguments about the symbiotic nature of the social sciences, criminal justice, and social control.Footnote 10 As we shall see below in our analysis of Lombroso's Criminal Woman (1893), the problematic methodology of criminological science produced equally specious conclusions about women.
Ulrichs, however, was an activist and outsider. The critical inflection of his work had little impact on the unfolding discipline of sexual science. Indeed, the criminological tradition of sexual science was distinguished not by social critique but disproportionately by what Foucauldian analyses have properly seen as a production of knowledge wedded to—if not identical with—matrices of social control. In fact, this Foucauldian character of sexual criminology was transcribed like a genetic signature onto the then-emerging discipline of sexual science proper. When in 1886 Dr Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902)—then a professor of psychiatry at Graz University—published Psychopathia Sexualis, this seminal text in the history of sexual science carried the subtitle “A Clinical–Forensic Study.” The “Foreword” referenced Tardieu's work on pederasty and public decency and described it as “serious research in the area of natural science and jurisprudence.”Footnote 11 Thus Krafft-Ebing viewed his pioneering work in the discipline of sexual science as an extension of criminological science.Footnote 12 Another important early text of sexual science was Contrary Sexual Feeling (1891) by Albert Moll (1862–1939). The interpretive inflection of this text can be gleaned from the fact that the “Foreword” was written by Krafft-Ebing and began with the following sentence:
When Casper made the refined observation in 1852 that so-called pederasty—which until then had been seen as a vicious aberration—most often derived from an in-born pathological anomaly, no one could have suspected that scarcely forty years later a formal pathology of the psychological side of Vita sexualis would be found in a comprehensive scientific work.Footnote 13
Krafft-Ebing validated Moll's etiologies of sexual pathology with the imprimatur of Casper's criminological research. According to Moll, homosexuals were pathological liars, and in his work, homosexual “perversion” was discussed alongside cases of sadism, masochism, and the sexual violation of corpses. One finds in the early works of Krafft-Ebing and Moll little sympathy for the sexual others who were the subjects of their pathbreaking studies. An empathetic treatment very likely would have produced a critical condemnation of certain laws and perhaps a plea for tolerance. In the absence of empathy, the emergence of sexual science resulted in the stigmatization and criminalization of sexual minorities.Footnote 14
No criminological scholarship possessed more prestige and credibility in the late nineteenth century than Lombroso's positivistic biometrics. A preeminent German criminologist heralded the Italian Lombroso an epochal genius of the scientific era.Footnote 15 While a military physician, Lombroso undertook extensive measurements of soldiers in the late 1850s, and in the 1860s he turned his attention to the anatomical measurement of those in insane asylums. Later, as a prison physician, he examined and measured thousands of criminals. Lombroso's lifework, then, depended on the measurement and examination of precisely those groups—soldiers, prisoners, and the so-called insane—who suffered systematic discipline and surveillance in modern society.Footnote 16 We can only speculate about the invasive nature of examinations that included the measurement of genitalia.Footnote 17 However, it is safe to say that it was probably humiliating and represented what Foucault called a normalizing gaze.
Lombroso's Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (1893) refined and extended the symbiotic relationship of criminology to traditional gender norms found in mainstream nineteenth-century sexual science.Footnote 18 Lombroso wielded scientific truth-discourses like a cudgel against any deviation from procreative marital sexuality. He condemned premarital sex, adultery, and masturbation by way of the most prestigious scientific theories of the era. He interpreted them alternatively as (1) hereditary degeneration, (2) the reversion to a primitive state of atavism (e.g. tattooing among prostitutes), and (3) the retardation of human evolution.Footnote 19 Furthermore, Lombroso asserted that female criminals and prostitutes could often be identified physiologically, through observation of physical anomalies which included (among other characteristics) enlarged inner labia, hypotrophy of the outer labia and clitoris, abnormalities of the nipples, profuse pubic hair, asymmetrical eyebrows, virile physiognomy, and cranial asymmetry.Footnote 20 Lombroso extended his physiological science of female criminality into a universal theory of women. Tellingly, his scientific interpretation of women replicated the conservative conceptions of gender dominating the nineteenth century. For example, he furnished a battery of modern scientific discourses to substantiate the normality of traditional gender conceptions of women as intellectually inferior and biologically evil: “women are big children; their evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied than men's.”Footnote 21 The implicit conclusions were clear. Big children never reach the age of majority and therefore must not be granted equal rights. In fact, Lombroso's research suggested that nature itself was violated by female erotic desire, and human progress was arrested by cultures that grant women equal rights.Footnote 22 Lombroso's influence on sexual criminology in Germany was enormous, but his influence on sexual science is difficult to ascertain, because few scholars devoted specific attention to female criminal behavior.Footnote 23
One exception was Paul Näcke's Crime and Insanity in Women: Perspectives on Criminal Anthropology (1894), which relied heavily, though not uncritically, on Lombroso's thought.Footnote 24 Here too, however, the direct influence of Lombroso's criminology on sexual politics is difficult to discern because issues related to the woman question are unexamined. Lombroso's most notable impact on cultural politics in central Europe manifested itself less overtly in the realm of sexual science per se than via Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892), which was not only dedicated to Lombroso but commenced with a declaratory letter of effusive admiration.Footnote 25Degeneration transcribed Lombroso's criminological thought into a theory intent on identifying atavistic and decadent forms of culture.
Nordau's chapter on “Ibsenism” encapsulated the cultural distillation of Lombroso's criminal science. Here Nordau dealt most directly with sexual degeneracy. In the realm of literature and the arts, Nordau concluded, Ibsen's egotistical viragos and termagants constituted the highest refinement of the degenerate imagination. Nordau diagnosed the feminist yearning for moral independence as an instinctual return to promiscuous sexuality, prostitution, and animalistic polygamy. Concerning Ibsen's critique of patriarchal marriage, he added, “Marriage is a higher form of progress than the free pairing of savages. To return to primitive promiscuity would be the profoundest atavism of degeneracy.”Footnote 26 In this manner, Nordau recalibrated the feminist critique of oppressive marriage as a war on evolutionary progress. The full measure of Lombroso's natural science as a cultural politics emerges from Nordau's comparison of feminism with sadism. Just as in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novella Venus in Furs (1870), Ibsen's “Nora-types” were described here as a “sub-species” of Krafft-Ebing's “contrary sexual feelings.”Footnote 27 Both male masochism and feminist sadism invert “the healthy and natural relationship between the sexes.”Footnote 28
Nordau's translation of Lombroso's natural science into an anti-feminist cultural politics symbolized larger trends within the sexual science movement. Lombroso's criminological natural science and Nordau's interpretation of it shared with early mainstream German sexual scientists a tendency to naturalize and thereby confer scientific validity upon patriarchal institutions. Their works reflected the ideological hegemony of male domination and thereby functioned to preserve the sexual unconscious of the established order.
Nevertheless, especially after the turn of the twentieth century, feminist themes began to make their way into the discipline of sexual science, in part thanks to coalitional ties. Most notable in this regard were Havelock Ellis's sponsorship of Ellen Key's feminist scholarship and Iwan Bloch's political ties to the Nietzschean feminist Helene Stöcker. In his most feminist work, Little Essays of Love and Virtue (Charleston, 2007; first published 1921), Ellis referred to Ellen Keys's work and largely replicated her ideals of egalitarian marriage and women's right to self-cultivation and erotic pleasure.Footnote 29 These ties to feminism were a marker of the distinction between mainline early sexual science charted above and a critical sexology. Critical sexual scientists, like Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, did not merely classify deviations from normality; they criticized the status quo when it reified systemic gender injustice, and they strengthened alliances with feminist organizations.
A SCIENCE OF SEXUAL INFERIORITY: MÖBIUS, OLBERG, AND THE MANNWEIB
countess orsina: A woman who thinks is just as disgusting as a man who uses makeup.
Gotthold Lessing, Emilia Galotti Footnote 30
Richard J. Evans has written cogently about the rise of anti-feminism in general and the founding of the League for Combating Women's Emancipation (Bund zur Bekämpfung der Frauenemanzipation) in 1912.Footnote 31 However, years before the foundation of the Anti-League, as it was known, cultural combat against feminism had commenced on the scientific front. Perhaps no monograph provided a more definitive scientific assessment of the turn-of-the-century woman question than Paul J. Möbius's Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women (1900), a text so popular that by 1908 a ninth edition was in print. Möbius, who had earned a PhD in philosophy and a second PhD in medicine by the age of twenty-three, published more than fifteen monographs on neuroanatomy. Many of his works were devoted exclusively to a science of sexuality. In addition to Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women, these included Sex and Sickness (1903), Sex and Degeneration (1903), Concerning the Effects of Castration (1903), Sex and Cranial Size (1903), Goethe and Sexuality (1903), Sex and the Love of Children (1904), and The Sexuality of Animals (three volumes, 1905–6).Footnote 32 Long forgotten today, Möbius was a major figure in fin de siècle intellectual life and his work was well known to leading sexual theorists like Hirschfeld, Emil Kraepelin, and Otto Weininger. According to Iwan Bloch, Möbius was the “German Lombroso” and thereby displayed, “on the one hand, unquestionable genius and, on the other hand, the superficiality and purely hypothetical nature of some scientific deductions.”Footnote 33 Like Lombroso, Möbius had earned an international reputation in the sciences, so his conclusions carried considerable weight. The most relevant similarities between Lombroso and Möbius were their positivistic methodologies and their socially relevant conclusions about sexual differentiation. As the provocative title of his work on the imbecility of women indicates, Möbius's style was polemical, and the object of his ire was feminism. Möbius was also ambitious. He desperately wanted to expand his readership from medical circles to the general public, so he wrote for a popular audience. His tone was authoritative without being academic or weighed down by the pedantry of footnotes.
Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women relied heavily upon Theodor Bischoff's The Weight of the Human Brain (1880) and referred frequently to Lombroso's phrenological studies. Möbius's central argument, which was reiterated in his Sex and Cranial Size (1903), was simple and was no less powerful for being so: the smaller weight of the female brain and circumference of the female skull were irrefutable physiological proof of the mental inferiority of women.Footnote 34 Moreover, these measurements were socially prescriptive. Anthropometric science functioned sociologically as corroboration of the theological, legal, and social propriety of women's inferiority.
In pursuing his thesis, Möbius added the scientific authority of Darwinism and embryology to the authority of phrenology. Both Darwinism and modern embryology agreed that the dimorphic reproduction of Homo sapiens was the highest expression of sexual evolution. The progress of the human species depended upon the polarity of sexual characteristics.
There were, then, two scientific schools—anthropometry and evolutionary biology—offering definite proof of Möbius's “physiological postulate”: women were intellectually inferior. Möbius clarified the social meaning of his science: “If we want a woman that completely fulfills her motherly profession, then she cannot have a male brain . . . the unnatural struggles of the feminists . . . corrupt the human race and culturally signify the beginning of the end.”Footnote 35 The cultured feminist brain was intellectual miscegenation. Feminism polluted the masculine bloodlines of civilization by arrogantly asserting women's right to participate in the male realm of erudition. Moreover, the feminist insistence on equality was a nightmare of sexual homogenization. Feminism threatened to destroy the dimorphic dissimilarity upon which the ascendency of human evolution rested. Proof of women's mental inferiority was irrefutable; feminists violated nature and promoted the cultural degeneration of European civilization.
According to Möbius, civilization—the great unquestionable bromide of late nineteenth-century cultural conservatives—was in great peril due to feminist demands. What exactly was the essence of the feminist threat? The threat of feminism had many dimensions. The first danger was political. According to Möbius, feminists were completely naive about the need for a militaristic realpolitik. Möbius asserted that feminist appeals for peace—best exemplified in Bertha von Suttner's critique of male militarism in Die Waffen nieder! (1889)—threatened the manly diplomacy of bloodshed upon which the survival of the modern nation state rested.Footnote 36 In short, feminist nonsense, as he called it, threatened the future of the German state: “a feminist Volk would be defeated by its neighbors” and, therefore, feminist politics were an example of “social suicide.”Footnote 37 The state must maintain its masculine character by denouncing the civic counterimages emerging from the women's movement.
Not only political survival but also social development was imperiled by feminism. Although Möbius was skeptical of degeneration as a psychological concept, anthroprometry certified an eternal biological order. Both the evolutionary character of motherhood and the smaller brain sizes of women proved that women were best suited for housework and that men were natural intellectuals. The greatest social threat to civilized society was the confusion of these fixed sexual characteristics, which produced social degeneration: “One of the essential signs of modern . . . degeneration is the blurring of sexual characters: i.e. feminine men and masculine women . . . The leaders of the women's movement are degenerates [Entartete]. They have (at least psychologically) a portion of men's sexual characteristics, i.e. special mental talents and a yearning for freedom.”Footnote 38
This argument—which cast feminist women as suffering from the degenerate condition of excessive virility, intelligence, and freedom—already had a long history in the sexual science movement. For example, in his attempt to explain the degeneracy of lesbianism, Krafft-Ebing used two neologisms: Viraginität and Mannweib.Footnote 39 Both terms designated a hyper-virilized female, but, in subsequent literature, the latter term, Mannweib or man-woman, became the most prominent idiom derogating lesbians and feminists.Footnote 40 Feminists as virilized deviants from nature were also a central theme of Weininger's Sex and Character (1903). Regardless of the variety of justifications for the concept of the masculine woman, it is important to recognize that this concept was both a mental framework for explaining a sexual minority and a pejorative term deployed to defend the hegemony of patriarchy.
Patriarchy was anchored by assumptions of a natural polarity of sexual character and social roles. By seeking occupational and educational positions previously reserved for men, feminists endangered the social harmony of this sexual duality. “The real misogynists,” Möbius concluded, “are the feminists who want to destroy the differences of the sexes.”Footnote 41 In a brilliant reversal of cultural meaning, Möbius rendered feminist criticisms of misogyny and inequality as the ultimate expression of misogyny. In effect, feminists were women-haters, because they derided the anti-intellectual nature of women. Möbius also drew pedagogical conclusions from his phrenological science of sexual differentiation. The obvious mental inferiority of women meant that coeducation and women's access to higher education must be rejected. Pedagogical equality would only ratify the cultural degeneration wrought by feminism. Educating women, Möbius asserted, could only lead them to acquire knowledge that they do not need and thereby receive a severe headache! Above all, Möbius's scientific authority punctuated the conclusion that feminism was unnatural and could only lead to the political destruction of the German state and the cultural decline of civilization.
However, by the turn of the century, the political implications of anti-feminist sexual science were no longer uncontested. In fact, the condescending and offensive tone of Möbius's Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women provoked the publication of a lucid and important cultural critique of misogynist sexual science, Woman and Intellectualism (1902), by the Austrian socialist feminist Oda Olberg.Footnote 42 Olberg was one of the finest socialist journalists of her era. Prior to World War I she wrote labor articles for the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung (Worker Paper) and other socialist newspapers; from 1929 to 1933 she served as the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Yet her earlier work on sexual science, discussed below, is less well known.
The first paragraph of Olberg's Woman and Intellectualism, a watershed in the development of a feminist philosophy of culture, read as follows:
The following book has been generated directly in response to Professor Möbius's work about the physiological feeble-mindedness of the woman. In the process of writing my response, polemic has been removed for the most part, and the text before you is—at least in its motivation—not simply a polemical text. The reader must hold the origin of the text [i.e. Möbius] responsible for places where the content and form are purely polemical. Perhaps one can reproach my short work for wanting to encompass too broad a sphere. The questions covered by me would be completely ineffable if one did not first examine fundamental questions about the life of society . . . because, in his fundamental arguments, Möbius reproduces a social ideology to which the arguments represented here are responding.Footnote 43
Olberg thus produced a text that made several references to Möbius and Lombroso, but invective was not her motivation. Rather, her intention, as the quote above suggests, was to supplant Möbius's “physiological postulate,” as he called it, and demand that the question of the inferiority of women be viewed as in fact a “social postulate.”Footnote 44
Olberg's social postulate had two parts. First, Möbius's thesis about the imbecility of women was faulty because it was derived from an empirical examination of the wrong object. Cranial measurements and brain weights proved little. To determine the intellectual capacity of women, Olberg argued, one must start with an examination of female intellectuals. Ultimately, Olberg reasoned, Möbius's thesis about the inferiority of women merely expressed the dominant ideology justifying the injustice of institutional inequality. In other words, Möbius's anti-feminist conclusions evinced ideological captivity, not empirical evidence. His conclusions were socially conditioned by a normative collective consciousness. Correlatively, the cause of women's inequality, Olberg contended, was not physiological but sociological. Social conservatives—whom Olberg alternatively designated “opponents of the women's movement” and “opponents of intellectualism”—produced cultural conditions injurious to the education of women, and then hypocritically claimed that women were mentally inferior and incapable of educational refinement.Footnote 45 Olberg exposed this hypocrisy. Sexual scientists like Möbius and Lombroso did not confront the institutional absurdity of this situation, because they were enemies of women's emancipation to begin with.
While the Enlightenment conferred a general legacy of empirical rationality, Olberg implicitly theorized a split in the European tradition of empiricism: the methodological and political divergence of the natural and social sciences.Footnote 46 Underlying the natural science of Möbius was a presupposition that it could explain and justify the lawful nature of the existing social order. Olberg rejected this proposition. In her mind, natural scientists like Möbius merely reified—and thereby deified—that which was in no way eternal: human culture. In natural-scientific analyses of society, there was no tension between rational science and conservative spheres of culture, such as patriarchy; Möbius's empirical science, for instance, treated the different mental aptitudes of men and women and the existence of separate spheres as fixed laws.
Over and against the conservative implications of this natural science, Olberg envisioned a social science that pivoted on the assumption that society and culture were historical and alterable.Footnote 47 This axial assumption of the modern social sciences was incommensurable with the fixed concepts of sexual identity found in the natural science of Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and Möbius. As Olberg put it, “woman as a pure expression of sexual nature does not exist.”Footnote 48 Olberg did not deny that biological factors influenced human lives, but she did reject the proposition, implicit in Möbius's work, that the biological and the social determinants of sexual identity could be easily disentangled from one another. If they cannot be disentangled, she reasoned, then why not focus on what we know and can control: the social production of gender inequality?
Möbius's physiological reductionism, then, symbolized opposition within the natural sciences to the first principle of social science: an understanding of human relations will arise not from an extrapolation of physiological laws but from a material analysis of the cultural and economic conditions of society itself. The postulate of the social sciences was that sexual culture as it currently existed did not reflect sacrosanct eternal laws. Social conventions were not timeless and inviolable expressions of natural providence. Rather, all aspects of culture, including sexual conventions, were historical and malleable.
Olberg, in effect, revealed the conservative implications of Möbius's natural science of society and connected this revelation to the theme of women's educational opportunities. As she explained in one of her strongest formulations,
We begin with the presupposition that an alternative education would enable women to fulfill their tasks more competently. And when we attribute many of the inadequacies of women to the lack of an existing intellectual culture, we have—in this theoretical consideration—the evidence of social experience on our side. Those who have had frequent opportunities to observe people of different social classes (who are excluded from access to modern intellectual culture) will easily convince themselves that pettiness, small-mindedness, the incapacity to assess the meaning of an event, rigidity in judgment, indignation towards social arrangements and other deficiencies, which one gladly stamps as specifically feminine, are generally attributable to lack of knowledge and education. The opponents of intellectualism disseminate these ideas in the same way that the opponents of philosophical materialism reproach the material realm: first they kill intellectualism, and then they say that it is dead.Footnote 49
Misogynist sexual scientists were not just adversaries of “philosophical materialism” or social science. Opposition to the methodology of “philosophical materialism” paralleled a hypocritical social logic: anti-feminists first supported a patriarchal culture denying women access to education, and then claimed to possess proof that women were intellectually inferior. In short, Möbius and Lombroso's natural science of sexuality functioned as a philosophy of political patriarchy which ignored the material underpinnings of sexual and class inequality, incorrectly postulated the eternal and unalterable nature of sexual identity, and naturalized institutional injustices that were completely remediable.
In addition to social and methodological tensions between the sexology of natural science and social science, Olberg discovered a faulty assumption in the logic of Möbius's Darwinian science. Möbius maintained that the smaller size of the feminine brain and skull were physiological proof of the evolutionary degeneration of the female brain. Olberg savaged the neo-Darwinian logic of anti-feminists and again revealed the conservative social function to which natural science was being put. She suggested that the development of intellect, whether in a male or a female, might best be understood from the Darwinian perspective of biological variation. Darwin had made it clear that some biological adaptations could be beneficial to human evolution. Olberg transferred this biological argument to the realm of culture. It is impossible and unscientific, Olberg reasoned, to preemptively dismiss all mental variations as degenerate. To Olberg's mind, Möbius's thesis about women's imbecility improperly prejudged all previous and future evolutionary contributions from women. To make a determination about the civic benefit of cranial and cultural variations, Olberg argued, one would first need to define human progress and make a practical determination as to the value of individual adaptations. This Möbius had not done.
Olberg's argument provides a reminder of the political indeterminacy of Darwinian science itself. The social logic of the Darwinian doctrines of “natural selection” and “the survival of the fittest” (a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer) often conservatively justified extant imperial, racial, class, and sexual hierarchies.Footnote 50 However, Darwin's assertion of the evolutionary benefits of biological variation was extremely useful for those, like Olberg, who rejected the assumption that difference signified inferiority. For example, Olberg praised Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman (1894), because it proposed a new valuation of physiological differences. Ellis, Olberg asserted, rejected the proposition that “what is different from the male is inferior” and thereby renounced the “tyranny” of Lombroso's and Möbius's “dominant ideas”:
The error, upon which the hierarchy of the male depends, is that judgment must be passed on woman as such, woman in general. When this error created a principle of rank, then the anatomist, the physiologist, and the psychologist were able to experience the accidental characteristics of woman emphasized in their discipline as proof of inferiority. However, women in the entirety of their life-expressions as biological and social beings logically can be neither superior nor inferior to men, because they are incommensurable in relation to their physiological function and their place in the life of society.Footnote 51
This line of thought recapitulated Ellis's argument that, since the purpose of evolution is reproduction and reproduction requires the participation of both men and women, the ranking of reproductive contributions makes no sense.Footnote 52 Men and women play different but equally important roles in reproduction.
Ellis's “different-but-equal” credo was an advance over patriarchal devaluations of women, but it carried a conservative residue. Ellis's thought was superficial in that it assumed a general feminine character and thereby denied the possibility of intellectual differentiation. Moreover, Ellis's reproductive analogy retained the assumption that men and women would always occupy different social spaces. Did not this assumption conflict with feminists’ desire to gain equal access to higher education and the professions? Olberg trimmed most of the conservative implications from Ellis's credo by treating it as an analogy for individual capacities. “Today women are pushing their way into almost all professions and will continue to do so until experience places in their hands the ability to demarcate the limits of their abilities. However, women carry their sexual essence in the performance of these professions in so far as they are granted space for individual particularity.”Footnote 53 Olberg made a powerful argument that the evolution of society would greatly benefit from the broad education of women.
Olberg masterfully put forth a cultural correlative of her critique of Möbius's and Lombroso's hierarchical view of evolution. She practiced an immanent critique of misogynist science, using critical science against conservative science. Just as women's biological differences could not be judged a priori inferior, cultural innovations—such as feminism—that challenge dominant social conventions should not be treated dismissively. After all, like some biological variations, intellectual innovations may constitute a beneficial social adaptation. Möbius was unable to theorize the potential contribution of female intellectuals to “modern cultural development,” because his natural science falsely assumed the existence of “women in general.”Footnote 54 Möbius's willingness to affirm neither the evolutionary indeterminacy of physiological differences nor the variety of women's intellectual and cultural accomplishments led Olberg to describe him as a reactionary enemy of cultural development.
In the foreword of the third edition of Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women, Möbius responded directly to Olberg – “I am really not that bad” – and he suggested that gender hierarchies were best understood through an analogy to the army. Armies protect the evolutionary achievements of civilization through a hierarchical social order. Women are the gender equivalent of foot soldiers. As mothers, they advance human evolution though their obedient sacrifice to the greater good. Most often, however, Möbius replied to his feminist critics not with military analogies but with smug sarcasm: “The lack of understanding, the numerous errors, and the spitefulness of my female critics only proves that I have properly judged the female mental capacity.”Footnote 55 True to form, Möbius read interpretive difference—in this case, Olberg's alternative social rendering of physiological differences and Darwinian variation—through the bifocals of immutable hierarchy.
Olberg's greatest accomplishment as a social scientist was her ability to dislodge questions of sexuality from the conservative clutches of scientists of sexuality like Möbius and Lombroso and connect feminism to broader cultural developments. In particular, she connected feminist culture to the growing class consciousness of workers, modern industry, and what she called the unfolding of individuality and intellectualism:
[Above all,] the social justness of women's demands arises in the same way that demands for democracy result from democratic principles. In view of this, one must recognize the great disparity between people's consciousness of rights and the current administration of justice, which nearly every verdict reveals . . . The fundamental idea of women's rights proceeds in the name of every general feeling of justice.Footnote 56
Critics of feminism often claimed that the increasing influence of women in social life represented a danger to civilization. By presenting the women's movement as a river contributing to the rising tide of modern culture, Olberg made the women question a referendum on modern liberal culture in general. Are equal rights and the expansion of educational opportunities beneficial to society? If so, then why should women not participate in these large historical transformations?
OLBERG, MAYREDER, AND THE CANON OF AUSTRIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
The movement for women's emancipation only wants men who are not very sexual, who have little need for love, and who are not very intelligent.
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character Footnote 57
How might the Olberg–Möbius encounter alter the historiography of Austrian intellectual culture? First, we should note the exclusion of Olberg from the historiography of Austrian intellectual history. While Möbius frequently turns up in canonical texts of Austrian intellectual history—like William Johnston's The Austrian Mind and Edward Timms's Karl Kraus—Olberg does not.Footnote 58 Nor is Olberg part of the canon of Austrian feminism. In part, this is due to the fact that the history of central European feminism is often divided by class politics.Footnote 59 Consequently, one finds references to Olberg's legacy in scholarship about women's labor in Germany and revolutionary intellectuals in Vienna but not in Harriet Anderson's Utopian Feminism: Women's Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.Footnote 60 Olberg's historiographical marginalization, while noteworthy, is far less significant than the revisionary consequences of Olberg's anti-essentialist philosophy as a new hermeneutic lens. This lens can facilitate important revisions of Austrian intellectual history in the era.
Olberg's anti-essentialist philosophy can help historians appreciate the complexity and diversity of first-wave feminism. In attempting to reconstruct Olberg's socialist feminist civic vision of modernity, it might even be necessary to avoid conceptual reifications such as “first-wave feminism.” As Harriet Anderson's Utopian Feminism deftly demonstrated, the era of first-wave feminism included a diversity of feminist philosophies. Many of those philosophies were theoretically and politically incompatible with one another.
One of the most important divisions was between feminists like the Viennese Irma Troll-Borostyani (1847–1912), who embraced the Enlightenment tradition and championed science, and those like Olberg whose feminist theory emerged from a critical encounter with misogynist sexual science. Reason was a key concept in Troll-Borostyani's feminist thought, and she extolled reason and nature as the path to human progress. This tradition did not challenge essentialist ideas about women's innate nature, however.Footnote 61 Encomia to rationality and optimism about the progressive potential of science were rare in the writings of anti-essentialists.
Another major division existed in first-wave feminism between bourgeois and socialist feminists.Footnote 62 Troll-Borostyani was explicitly antisocialist and extolled her version of feminism as a prophylaxis against sexual revolution. Olberg, conversely, was a socialist feminist. She linked feminist demands to an anticapitalist vision of structural change:
The era of charity as a collective undertaking has passed; the rising class movement of the workforce and the new social ethics [Sittlichkeit], about which they educate, includes a rebellion against institutions whose bread tastes of humiliation. Between people there will be a compassionate understanding that will exclude humiliation and bitterness.Footnote 63
Within the ranks of socialists, there was a split between leaders who sought to politicize workers through promises of economic gain and those who promised moral transformation. Olberg refused to proselytize on behalf of the economic advantages of socialism. Her patronage of a new socialist ethics—characterized by a phalanx of solidarity against all social suffering—exemplified what Anderson has called “moral feminism” as opposed to a “spiritual feminism.” Spiritual feminists tended to be bourgeois feminists. They spoke through the language of soul and character (Seele and Persönlichkeit). These concepts were not central to Olberg. Instead, she castigated bourgeois elements of the feminist movement because their call for the development of moral conscience was isolated from the everyday hardships facing proletarian women. In the absence of a sincere engagement with the social life of the most destitute, individual conscience facilitates a capricious continuation of the objective social order. For her part, Olberg was more likely to refer to women's material fight for existence than to the refinement of individual morality.
Beyond these important divisions within first-wave feminism, there has been little attention paid to the division between essentialists who practiced “conservative empowerment”—maintaining patriarchal forms like maternal compassion but giving them a different content—and anti-essentialists who rejected a reified notion of universal womanhood.Footnote 64 Feminists who developed their sexual philosophies through a critical engagment with misogynist sexual science, by contrast, came to see naturalized conceptions of femininity as a barrier to women's freedom.
The Olberg–Möbius encounter not only complicates the notion of first-wave feminism and places sexual science at the center of cultural debates; it also may illuminate important differences among anti-essentialist feminists. I will pursue this last point through a discussion of the feminist philosophy of Rosa Mayreder. The different social and cultural inflection of Olberg's and Mayreder's feminist philosophies must be emphasized, because it is crucial to understand that anti-essentialism was not a premise that inevitably led to the same political conclusions.
Both Olberg and Mayreder were public intellectuals. Like Olberg's devotion to socialism, Mayreder's historicization of gender relations emerged from a Promethean life of political activism. In 1893 she was vice president of the General Women's Union of Austria (Allgemeinen Oesterreichischen Frauenverein), the leading organization of bourgeois feminism in Austria; in 1921, she became vice president of the newly founded Austrian branch of the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom. Her life expressed a participatory social philosophy of life. She intended to make history, and she was a leading activist of her era. But, unlike the sociologically minded Olberg, Mayreder was a bourgeois feminist whose work orbited around the concepts of soul and individuated intellectual character (Seele and Persönlichkeit). Her early work made few references to capitalism or the huge economic and cultural barriers to freedom facing proletarian women. Instead, Mayreder's early work was most concerned with creative individualism, which she later described as “personal culture.” By personal culture, Mayreder meant an iconoclastic and individualist philosophy: the individual's “path of critical rebellion” against tradition.Footnote 65 In a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche, whose philosophy greatly influenced her work, Mayreder conceived of herself as a member of a moral and intellectual vanguard. Indeed, many of her early feminist essays were dedicated to proving the possibility of an intellectual Überfrau, “whose soul [Seele] is unburdened by sexual identity”:
What the perspective of natural science generally defines as normal is, in fact, the average human being, and it regards every deviation from this norm as a symptom of disease or degeneration. This confusion—between the normal individual as ordinary and the normal individual as the highest manifestation of the species—deprives the perspective of natural science of a proper standard for recognizing the highest and most uncommon individuals of the human race.Footnote 66
Female intellectuals, she insisted, were perceived as depraved because natural science lacked the capacity to recognize cultural individuation.
In Mayreder's case, it was not Möbius but Weininger (1880–1903) who served as the misogynistic grindstone against which her feminist philosophy was honed. Her Towards a Critique of Femininity (1905) responded directly to the undifferentiated conception of femininity found in leading texts of sexual science. Mayreder concluded that the concept of femininity was irrelevant, absolutely immaterial, to an understanding of diversity among women. In pursuing this argument, no sexual scientist received more scholarly attention than her fellow denizen of Vienna, Weininger, whose Sex and Character (1903) is a classic—and once extremely popular—text of misogynist sexual theory.Footnote 67 Mayreder encountered in Weininger the standard fin de siècle theory of dimorphic evolution. This theory, to recall, advanced the evolutionary view that the present state of gender development created an extreme polarization between men and women. Weininger referred to his psychological variant of this evolutionary theory alternatively as “empirical psychology” and “deep characterology” (Charakterologie). Central to Weininger's theory of mental morphology was the assertion that male and female psychologies constitute “a fixed unity of being.” Evolution had created “absolute males” and “absolute females.”Footnote 68
In Toward a Critique of Femininity Mayreder responded by emphasizing the analytical deficiency of these fixed conceptions of the sexes: “While one struggles to clarify the present form of masculinity and femininity by way of original and primitive organic conditions, one overlooks the fact that in many essential respects they are purely products of culture; there is nothing fixed, conclusive, or generally decisive about them.”Footnote 69 Further, she contended, scholars gripped by this conceptual bias had no way of evaluating the evolutionary variability of culturally progressive individuals:
From the standpoint of free intellectuality, it is a philistine achievement to erect a general norm of mental differences between the sexes and believe in it as a guiding principle which the individual has to follow and on the basis of which one must measure personal value . . . Through this principle deficiency and misunderstanding of the fundamental problem, Weininger's work shows that the problem of sexual psychology remains irresolvable as long as one grasps sexual antitheses as a thorough separation and essential difference determining the entire mental constitution of the personality [Persönlichkeit].Footnote 70
And, of course, the best contemporary examples of progressive intellect, Mayreder asserted, were to be found in the women's movement.
Thus the contrast between mainline sexual science and Mayreder's feminism could not have been sharper. The philistine generalizations of misogynist sexual scientists denied the possibility of women's intellectual development; Mayreder conversely celebrated and prescribed something that Weininger and other sexual scientists categorically denied was possible: the intellectual individuation of women. Consequently, she was keenly aware of intellectual diversity among women, and this awareness constituted an outlook that was incommensurable with the conclusions of mainline sexual science. If the fundamental objective of sexual science was the classificatory differentiation of individuals, then sexologists had failed completely to achieve this goal due to their coarse and superficial generalizations about sexual identity. In short, elemental concepts of sexual science, such as femininity, precluded a nuanced view of human diversity. Although Towards a Critique of Femininity is not well known today, its publication did not go unnoticed by leading Viennese intellectuals. Two years after its publication, Mayreder was invited to join the Sociological Society of Vienna, which included such renowned sociologists as Max Adler and Rudolf Goldscheid. She was the first female member of the organization. Her induction symbolized her reputation as a great sociologist of gender.
What does the Mayreder–Weininger exchange add to the tableau of Austrian intellectual history? References to Mayreder and Weininger often appear in the historiography of Austrian intellectual history; for example, references to Mayreder and Weininger can be found in Johnston's The Austrian Mind and Anderson's Utopian Feminism, as well as in Jacques Le Rider's Modernity and the Crisis of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Footnote 71 However, none of these texts defines Mayreder as an anti-essentialist and none of them grasps the emergence of anti-essentialism as unfolding from the dialectical history of sexual science and feminism. In his important book on Weininger, Chandak Sengoopta has perhaps come closest to recognizing the anti-essentialist foundations of Mayreder's philosophy, but only in a passing and somewhat denigrating reference. Mayreder's feminist theory emerged through a sophisticated and thorough engagement with sexist sexual scientists such as Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, and Möbius. No one can read her work closely and justly describe it as “simplistic.”Footnote 72
In fact, the intellectual intercourse between Mayreder and Weininger is very much illumated by a juxtaposition with the Olberg–Möbius encounter. From this perspective, it is obvious that Mayreder's philosophy, no less than Olberg's, gained its critical depth from a discriminating engagement with the canon of sexual science. Above all, Mayreder portrayed misogynist sexual science as a “tyranny of the norm,” and by this she intended to reveal how natural science reinforced a conservative herd mentality. The reified conceptions of women and men posited by sexual scientists left no room for the “equal possibility of an unlimited differentiation in the female psyche as in the masculine psyche.”Footnote 73 While Olberg's thought emphasized social transformation and Mayreder's theory of gender aimed at individual development, they shared an anti-essentialist philosophy of liberty: freedom was incompatible with essentialist views of humanity found in sexual science. From there, however, they drew very different political conclusions.
CONCLUSION: ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM AND MICROSCOPIC HISTORY
In a recent historiographical essay about Austrian intellectual history, Michael Gubser proselytized on behalf of a new approach to contextualization. Instead of interpreting Austrian intellectual history from the global perspective of modernity or modernism, like Carl Schorske, Gubser prescribed what might be called a microscopic approach: “Rather than presupposing the more or less stable edifice of a fin-de-siècle Viennese milieu, intellectual historians should build outward from their sources toward contextual insights that are not predetermined by a dominant disciplinary paradigm.”Footnote 74 This essay has attempted to do this in relation to first-wave feminism.
Our primary focus has been the criminological origins of sexology and feminist responses to sexual science. If one treats historical context as a great canvas that is always incomplete, then this essay adds layers of paint to that canvas with the intention of altering our overall perspective of intellectual developments. What has been missing from the global interpretation of Vienna as the birthplace of modernism is an understanding of how the cultural forces of criminology, sexual science, and feminism became locked in intellectual engagement and how this dialectical encounter produced a new form of feminism.
This neglected form of feminism supplements not simply accounts of fin de siècle Vienna but also treatments of the European-wide emergence of feminism. First-wave feminism was very diverse. A now canonical typology, reflected in the comparison of Olberg and Mayreder, insists on the division between bourgeois feminism—mostly devoted to the expansion of individual rights, education, and employment opportunities—and socialist feminism, which sought to articulate women's freedom as part of a larger institutional and cultural politics of anticapitalist transformation. Together with Anderson's contrast between moral and spiritual materialism, a study of Olberg and Mayreder also suggests an additional distinction between feminisms based on reason and on love. The one prized the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, where the other drew on a faith in the ethical power of an emotion: love. Troll-Borostyani, for instance, placed her feminist hopes in the promise of science and reason. Reason was not a key concept for Helene Stöcker, however. She envisioned feminist transformation of culture via the civics of love.
The personages that make up the history of feminism are, of course, more complex than these helpful but simplifying analytical distinctions. Their philosophies were often matrices of thought that included several influences. Meisel-Hess and Key are a case in point. They were as intellectually devoted to evolutionary science as to the civics of love. Reductive distinctions are also problematic, because the inflection of feminist philosophies often changed radically over time. Lily Braun and Rosa Mayreder, for instance, exemplify the transformation of feminist philosophy from a concentration on individual rights to focus on sociology. In Gender and Culture (1923), Mayreder described this change in civic inflection as a movement from “personal culture” to “social culture.”Footnote 75 Yet even this distinction is problematic, because Braun and Mayreder never abandoned their devotion to equal individual rights.
In any case, to date, the typology of first-wave feminism generally has not included the differentiation of essentialist and anti-essentialist strains. Ann Taylor Allen, for instance, has written extensively on the centrality of motherhood to first-wave feminism.Footnote 76 Motherhood was associated with emotions like love and values such as caring that most first-wave feminists assumed were natural and permanent constituents of female biology and psychology. Nowhere does Allen describe the anti-essentialist variant of first-wave feminism that occupies the focus of this essay. Anti-essentialists not only took aim at misogynist sexual science, but they were also equally critical of their essentializing sisters. In Mayreder's trenchant words, “The newest danger of once again offering room to conventional [sexual] norms rests in the heralded tendency of the women's movement to recognize a fundamental difference of the sexes. This is done by raising motherhood to the decisive factor and thereby limiting the role of women in the culture of the future.”Footnote 77 Mayreder viewed motherhood ideology not as a vehicle for progressive social transformation but as the reinscription of a conservative conceptual trousseau. By parroting conventional sexual norms, the idea of woman as mother constrained women's self-fashioning. There was no theoretical consensus in the first-wave women's movement.
Anti-essentialist feminism derived from an aesthetic philosophy of self-creation and the articulation of this philosophy certainly pre-dated the feminist philosophies of Olberg and Mayreder. Marx's early manuscripts and Dilthey's subsequent theory of cultural science rested upon the aesthetic belief that humans were essentially creative and social. For Marx and Dilthey, human creativity was the “highest expression of social existence.”Footnote 78 Human beings could create society anew. Nietzsche's philosophy derived less from an aesthetic philosophy of a social-self (species being) capable of creating the world anew than from an aestheticist individualism. Noble human beings had the fortitude to reject the accumulated store of consciousness of tradition and create themselves independently from enslavement to socially imposed identities. These aesthetic philosophies informed Olberg's socialist feminism and Mayreder's individualist theory of freedom respectively. Olberg and Mayreder deserve historical credit for extending aesthetic philosophy to the realm of sexuality and gender.
It should be noted, however, that the prior existence of aestheticist philosophies of freedom does not help us understand why some feminists sought liberation through a naturalizing or essentialist philosophy such as motherhood and others did not. Nor does the availability of Marxist and Nietzschean critiques of reification explain why some feminists were decidedly more anti-essentialist than others. This essay offers a contextual interpretation. Olberg and Mayreder developed a decidedly anti-essentialist first-wave feminism because their philosophies developed most pointedly as a reaction to a naturalizing and misogynist sexual science. Sexual theorists like Lombroso, Möbius, and Weininger consistently returned to the principle of nature in order to justify anti-egalitarian and anti-feminist conclusions. In response, Olberg and Mayreder developed an anti-essentialist philosophy of freedom that denied the scientific viability of conceptual naturalizations such as woman and femininity.
One might even claim that this anti-essentialist feminism preceded and prefigured the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). De Beauvoir's Second Sex (1949), canonically understood as the advent of second-wave feminism, asserted that too often women accepted their social roles as wives and mothers and thereby internalized the biological essentialism of patriarchal society. She emboldened women to free themselves from traditional roles and naturalized identities, thereby jettisoning the feminine mystique of first-wave motherhood feminism.Footnote 79 Nietzschean elements of second-wave feminism already existed, however, in the first-wave philosophies of some Viennese feminists.
Olberg and Mayreder revealed the conceptual fallacies of anti-feminist sexual science and concomitantly encouraged women to reject concepts like femininity. This rejection would, they hoped, facilitate the individuation of women's intellects. Ultimately, Olberg and Mayreder contributed mightily to a foundational revision of sexual science. Sexual scientists were most concerned with sexual differentiation. Olberg and Mayreder explained why an essentialist a priori—whereby women as a biological genus exhibited mental and emotional uniformity—categorically precluded the realization of the primary goal of sexual science: classificatory differentiation and psychological individuation. This feminist hermeneutic was an epoch-making revision of shibboleths of sexual science and simultaneously a philosophy of liberation. Women could only become who they wanted to be by freeing themselves from conceptual traditions that stifled their intellectual capacity to promote social justice and develop unique characters.
