Criteria for Selecting the Subjects and Defining the Parameters of the Study

Our study focuses on women with life experiences in the second half of the nineteenth century (1850–1900). They could be included in our study if they were still alive in 1850 or were born before 1900. Our initial data collection suggested that most highly successful women born after 1900 (whether of Jewish descent or not) did in fact combine marriage with their career. In contrast, data about women born before 1900 revealed significant differences between women of Jewish descent and other women, which makes comparing these two groups of women, Jewish and non-Jewish, more interesting and the findings clearer than if we also included women who were born later. Also, because many professionally successful women married in their thirties, including women of Jewish descent born after 1900 would have resulted in including women displaced and murdered by the National Socialists at the very age that they would have considered marriage, thus skewing our results. Therefore, we decided to include only women born before 1900 in our study. This study does include, however, women who spent substantial time outside of German-speaking central Europe (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) if National Socialists forced them out or if they continued primarily to produce work in the German language. It does not include women such as Therese Tietjens (1831–1877), an opera singer who made England her home after the 1850s.

Our selection of the women who should be included was guided by our study of key reference works and encyclopedias. Women in science became part of our study if they held positions, won prizes, or made discoveries recognized as significant to their field. Women in politics were included if they held positions or produced work that shaped their political communities. Women in the arts and letters were for the most part included if their works were popular, such as Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867–1950), whose 1912 novel Die wilde Ursula sold 1 million copies, or if despite living in obscurity during their lives, their writing or art is now studied and remembered. For opera singers, stage actresses, and film stars, we relied on the secondary source literature and reference works to determine the final group of each woman. For example, the wildly successful performances of Marie Geistinger (1833–1903) played an important role in gaining new attention for Johann Strauss's works. Core reference works and lexicons consulted for this study are listed in the appendix. Additional references that we consulted can be found in the footnotes.

It was often difficult to uncover if our subjects had officially left the Jewish community or if they merely lived secular lives distant from religion. We did find concrete information about eight subjects whose parents had converted to Christianity, ten women who had only one Jewish parent, and fifty-three women who were baptized, converted to Christianity, or officially registered as konfessionslos (without confession). As is common in the histories of European Jewish communities, we include apostates in our study together with women who identified as Jewish.Footnote ¹⁶ Apostates are listed in the Leo Baeck Archives, the Jewish Women's Encyclopedia, and in Dick and Sassenberg's Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Moreover, as was the case in avant-garde circles, many of our subjects disdained the respectability conferred upon those who identified with a religious community. Scientists, socialists, poets, actresses, and artists were among those central Europeans most likely to embrace a secular perspective from ideological, intellectual, professional, or cultural reasons; as a result, it would be surprising if many of our subjects of Jewish descent were not also secular.

Among our study subjects of Jewish descent, we found considerable diversity in attitudes toward their Jewish heritage. Certainly, some of our subjects proudly self-identified as Jewish ethnically and religiously. Jenny Apolant, a women's activist in Frankfurt, claimed, “I possess the most beautiful thing that a person can have; I am a German and a Jew.”Footnote ¹⁷ For others, their Jewish identity might have been primarily an ethnic identity or may have only emerged at certain points in time. Till van Rahden's description of Jewish “situational ethnicity” in Germany is a useful frame for understanding the diverse perspectives of these women.Footnote ¹⁸ Even Jewish-born converts to Christianity might still see themselves as ethnically Jewish because of their family backgrounds and the social circles in which they moved. The historian Fritz Stern, whose mother Catherine Stern (1894–1973) was an important figure in psychology and education as well as one of our study subjects, describes the complicated Christian and Jewish identities of his grandparents. They were part of circles of Jewish Germans in Breslau who had baptized their children or converted, and they tended to continue to socialize primarily with others of Jewish descent who had converted or been baptized. His paternal grandparents did convert but remained, in Stern's view, “more conscious of their Jewishness” than his maternal grandparents, who did not officially convert but whose correspondence “expresses their affinity to a Christian outlook.”Footnote ¹⁹ For others, it is difficult to determine if they saw themselves as Jewish. The scientist Charlotte Auerbach (1899–1994), for example, describes herself as being raised in a secular home and declared herself “Nichtgläubige,” a nonbeliever, although we do not have specific evidence that she converted to Christianity or became officially konfessionslos. At the same time, she found herself particularly moved at her first Seder in Israel with friends when she was almost eighty.Footnote ²⁰ To truly understand the extent to which the women in our study saw themselves as Jewish, we would need much more information than has been passed down to us. For this comparative research project, it makes sense to consider Jews together with apostates because a matrix of difficult to pin down factors influenced the women who sought success as professors, politicians, activists, scientists, or artists. Those factors could include family cultures, social circles, ideological perspectives, and gendered models that would influence apostates as well as women who remained within the Jewish community.

Harriet Freidenreich's quantitative and qualitative study of women academics of Jewish descent, Female, Jewish, and Educated, is the research most similar to our own, and she also includes women with a wide range of attitudes toward Judaism. Her fine and convincing study draws from memoirs, autobiographies, and interviews from 460 university-educated women. Freidenreich estimates that these women made up approximately 10 percent of the women of Jewish descent who studied in Germany and Austria before 1933. Her project differs from ours in that she focuses on women of Jewish descent instead of comparing women of Jewish descent and other central European women as we do. Our research includes women who were university educated as well as successful writers, musicians, artists, activists, actors, and others who did not attend university. Although we only consider women born before 1900, she examines a later period with 225 of her subjects being born before 1900, and 235 born after 1900.Footnote ²¹

Freidenreich's sample of university-educated women of Jewish descent includes a ratio of married to unmarried women of Jewish descent that is similar to our findings: 72 percent married and 28 percent never married. Like our research, “Former Jews” made up a large number of Freidenreich's sample, 126 of 460, or 27.4 percent. Of these women, 57 percent married, and 37 percent remained single. Of the Jews, 75 percent married, and 25 percent remained single. The higher marriage rate of Jews over “former Jews” in Freidenreich's work is consistent with our findings that women of Jewish descent were more likely to marry than other central European women. Of her study subjects, 46.7 percent came from families with one or two children, a contrast with the average family size in Imperial Germany of 4.7 children per family for marriages before 1905. This data point provides suggestive evidence for the possibility that family investment in daughters—as a result of small family size—helped make possible the later work of highly successful women. Overall, Freidenreich's data on women of Jewish descent are consistent with and complementary to our comparative research.Footnote ²²

A second small study by Ute Gerhard focuses on forty German women leaders active in the moderate women's movement around the turn of the century.Footnote ²³ She finds that 85 percent of this group came from middle-class families and describes as “surprising” that a “high percentage” of her study subjects were married, 40 percent; she also lists 20 percent as living in a long-term relationship with a woman. Like Gerhard, we were surprised by the contrast between the well-known single women at the head of the women's movement and the large number of married women that we found in our research. At this time when approximately 1 percent of Germans were Jewish, a large number of these women leaders were Jewish (one-fourth of her sample), a finding that she describes as “remarkable.”Footnote ²⁴

What Accounts for the Differences between the Marriage Patterns of Central European Women of Jewish Descent and Other Highly Successful Women?

Now we face the difficult challenge of connecting the life stories of the five hundred study subjects with the factors that help explain this data. Our study includes Zionists and socialists, Orthodox, Reform, secular Jewish women, women who declared themselves konfessionlos, as well as women who converted to Catholicism and became nuns. The project includes women who considered themselves outcasts or iconoclasts, as well as celebrated stage stars or scientists. Some women wrote multiple memoirs; others left no records of their lives; in some cases, National Socialists deliberately destroyed the documents that might tell these women's stories. This article draws on secondary sources and the ego documents that we have from these women to try to piece together some of the factors that shaped these marriage patterns. The next part of this article describes circumstances that helped to shape these patterns, especially traditional religious interpretations of marriage and celibacy.

Celibacy, Marriage, and Divorce

We start with the differences between Jews and Christians in religious proscriptions and cultural leanings toward celibacy or marriage. Certainly, Jewish traditional attitudes toward marriage played a more important role in the lives of the subjects who were rabbis’ wives than they would among more secular women. At the same time, the stark differences in historical attitudes toward marriage and celibacy between Judaism and Christianity suggest that these aspects of religious culture should be considered as part of the explanation for the differences in marriage rates between pioneering women of Jewish descent and other women. As we will discuss at the end of the section, however, demographic data about marriage rates overall among Jews and Christians in central Europe complicate this story.

Jewish religious texts describe marriage as a religious duty. In Genesis 1:28, the first words that God spoke to man were “be fruitful and multiply,” and Jewish religious interpretations direct that all Jews should follow this command by marrying and bearing children. In his article on remarriage, Shaul Stampfer states flatly: “Marriage in Judaism is a universal ideal. Jewish law obligates all males to procreate, therefore to marry. A man who does not marry and have children is committing a sin of omission.”Footnote ²⁵ Marriage is not only a religious requirement but, in Jewish interpretations, a key to happiness. In his examination of marriage and Judaism, David Feldman describes how in Jewish tradition, “an unmarried man is only half a man, abiding without joy, without peace, without good.”Footnote ²⁶

In the modern period, homogenously Jewish communities have seen very high marriage rates. Demographers have described how the eastern European Jews of the nineteenth century almost uniformly married, and if their spouses died, they remarried at high rates.Footnote ²⁷ For eastern European Jews, the religious and cultural norms that encouraged male widowers and female widows to marry each other (as opposed to male widowers marrying never-married women) also helped to create a marriage market that allowed almost all individuals a chance to marry, the “lid for every pot.” Cultural norms within eastern European Jewish communities reinforced these religious duties: in literature from the period, the adult unmarried man could still be called a “na‘ar” (boy/servant in Hebrew and Yiddish), and the unmarried man did not wear a prayer shawl in religious service, which marked him as different from other men.Footnote ²⁸ Like the world of eastern European Jewry, but also because of the legacy of the Holocaust, marriage patterns in post-1945 Israel also exhibit very high marriage rates, so high to make Israel unique among wealthy nations in universal marriage, surprisingly young ages at marriage, and low rates of divorce.Footnote ²⁹

Although early Christians followed Jewish practice and tradition, by the fourth century Christian leaders and missionaries began to require celibacy of priests, a spiritual discipline that was also found in other religions in the Greek and Roman worlds. The tenth and eleventh centuries with the restructuring and reform of Christianity led by leaders of monastic orders gave rise to a new emphasis on celibacy. The New Testament's Matthew 19:10–12 and Corinthians 7:7 32–33 praise celibacy as a part of a special calling. Although celibacy has been required of priests and the members of Roman Catholic orders, celibacy is in twentieth-century Pope Paul VI's words a “precious jewel,” a form of perfection, and a spiritual union with Jesus Christ to which all Roman Catholics may strive. Corinthians 7:7 34 specifically references women: “An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord's affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband.”Footnote ³⁰ Both Christian leaders and lowly servants of the faith could focus their entire efforts on their faith (as opposed to spouses or children), especially if they joined religious orders. Increasing numbers of nineteenth-century women did choose to dedicate their lives to their faith and serving their communities. According to one count, in Germany in 1866, 7,794 women were members of religious orders; by 1908, that number had reached almost fifty thousand. Catholic sisters and women who made careers as celibate teachers made up large numbers of the teaching personnel of Catholic schools exposing students to the celibate ideal throughout their education.Footnote ³¹

Striking examples of the possibilities for personal growth, professional responsibility, deep piety, and a celibate life can be found in the lives of Christian women missionaries and leaders of international assistance organizations such as the Protestant Anna Harnack (1859–1924), who managed the Deutsche Orient Mission in Persia from 1902 and published translations from Armenian poetry as well as scholarly work. Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany awarded her the Frauenverdienstkreuz (Women's Merit Cross) for her work with orphans and refugees. Other women who did similar work in these kinds of international organizations published scientific studies, managed staff and budgets, networked with fundraisers, gave speeches, and drafted materials that would bring in money to support their operations.Footnote ³²

Now, however, we should pause and be reminded that after the Reformation, Protestants, who made up about two-thirds of Germans, more than half of the Swiss, and a small minority of Austrians, did embrace marriage and abandon clerical celibacy, even if they often remained suspicious of sex. Because of social and economic factors, however, for most secular-leaning middle-class central Europeans, there was no socially appropriate position for these women outside of marriage. Secular-leaning middle-class Protestant women faced special pressure to marry and, as Catherine Dollard in The Surplus Woman has powerfully described, faced stigma for remaining unmarried. Even in the nineteenth century, however, for religious Protestants as well as Roman Catholics, a celibate life of service to others was a path that had status and support.

In contrast, because of the importance of marriage within Jewish cultures, individuals faced pressure to marry from their entire social network: from parents, extended family, friends, and the Jewish community or local Jewish subculture. As a result, even intellectually ambitious Jewish women would be pushed to marry, and given similar pressures on them, Jewish men were not going to rule out a woman just because she was ambitious. Of course, many Jewish middle-class men as well as their families did prefer that wives and mothers stay at home and care primarily for home and hearth. A revealing story from the memoir of the Zionist and medical doctor Rahel Straus (1880–1963) sheds light on this dynamic. She remembered a conversation with her future husband, Eli, as follows:

Although Jewish tradition supported marriage for all individuals (as opposed to the possibilities of celibacy and a life of service for religious Protestant and Catholic circles), this support for marriage did not necessarily mean support for a married woman pursuing a profession. Research on middle-class Jewish families of the pre-1914 period also emphasizes middle-class expectations that required women to relinquish their profession when they married. In her study of university-educated women, Harriet Freidenreich describes how the “norm for both Jewish and non-Jewish women was to marry by their mid-twenties and then stay home and raise their children.” In The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, Marion Kaplan argues: “Bourgeois marriage depended on both parties’ putting the husband's career first. A potential two-career household implied serious conflicts or compromises.” Although women in Jewish families also worked without pay inside the home in family small businesses and were responsible for duties such as running shops, keeping accounts, handling correspondence, organizing inventory, as well as myriad other tasks that women could do discretely behind the scenes, most Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant middle-class men and women believed, in Marion Kaplan's words, that gainful employment outside the home was “unladylike and improper for their daughters.” Even worse, sending a daughter to be trained or to work for pay might lead to gossip that perhaps the family had fallen on hard times or that no dowry was available to secure her a comfortable marriage.Footnote ³⁴ To summarize: cultural support for marriage among Jews does not provide a full explanation for these diverging marriage patterns among highly successful women because it does not help us understand why these women continued to embrace their profession after they married. We return to the factors that help explain Jewish women's striking rates of professional success in the following section.

An additional complicating factor comes with the demographic marriage data from modern central Europe. In contrast to Jewish religious cultures that provide such strong support for marriage, in central Europe fewer Jewish women than Christian women married.Footnote ³⁵ In 1905 in Germany, demographers counted more marriages among Christians (86 among 10,000 Christians) than Jews (74 among 10,000 Jews).Footnote ³⁶ A “snapshot” of women ages forty to forty-nine is imperfect in that these women could include divorced and widowed women, along with the never married. But at a minimum, this data point does give a sense of the different rates of marriage between Jews and non-Jews: in 1925, among Prussian women between the ages of forty-five and forty-nine, demographers counted 15.5 percent of Jewish women as unmarried in contrast to 10.5 percent of non-Jewish women. Statistical material from the period before 1914 suggests that Jews were also less likely than non-Jews to marry a second or third time. Causes for this lower marriage rate include the larger number of Jewish men than Jewish women who married Christians (reducing the number of Jewish partners for Jewish women), the gender imbalance in central European small towns with more Jewish women than Jewish men, and the importance of dowries within central European Jewish marriage cultures.Footnote ³⁷ A Jewish family whose members could not provide financial resources for a dowry or had too many daughters for dowries for their girls might not be able to find marriage partners for their daughters. This context of marriage patterns in Europe creates an important contrast for our research. If among the general population, Jewish women were less likely to marry than non-Jewish women, our findings, two-thirds of pioneering women of Jewish descent married (67.6 percent) whereas half of the other women married (51.6 percent), are even more surprising.

In European history going back to the sixteenth century, 15 percent of the population never married, a pattern that set Europe apart from other societies past and present in which, in general, most people married. Using census numbers in the 1930s and 1940s, John Hajnal reports that in Japan in 1920, 2 percent of women age forty-five to forty-nine were single; in Turkey in 1935, 3 percent of women ages forty-five to forty-nine were single, and in India in 1931, 1 percent of women were single. In Germany, by contrast, in the second half of the nineteenth century, 8 percent of men and 11 percent of women never married.Footnote ³⁸ The data in our study show that many more highly successful women never married in comparison to other women. In German-speaking central Europe among our study subjects, 32.4 percent of high-achieving women of Jewish descent and 48.4 percent of other high-achieving women never married.Footnote ³⁹

In this same period, overall divorce rates were also relatively low. Numbers from Germany in 1905 show 2.4 percent of marriages between two Catholics, 4.1 percent of marriages between two Protestants, and 4.7 percent of marriages between two Jews had ended in divorce. Here as well, we might consider the role of religious teachings. As opposed to Jewish tradition, which explicitly allowed for divorce and remarriage, in the New Testament Jesus teaches that “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matthew 19:5–6). The lower rates of divorce are among Catholics as opposed to Protestants and Jews related in part to the interpretations of religious texts, with the Catholic interpretation as the most opposed to divorce.

Just as these rates differed among religious groups, they also differed quite dramatically between rural and urban areas. People who lived in cities, as did most of the women of Jewish descent in our study, were much more likely to divorce than people who lived in rural areas. Between 1900 and 1906, Hamburg statistics reveal thirteen marriages to every divorce, and, in contrast, in the state of Bavaria, eighty-three marriages to every divorce. These statistics mean that in Hamburg, said to be the state with the lowest church attendance in Germany, divorce was six times more common than in the predominantly Catholic state of Bavaria.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the Weimar Republic, when the divorce rates increased approximately 2.5 times, the rates per 100,000 of the population was 1.79 in rural Prussia, 9.85 in Prussian towns, and 14.26 in Prussian cities. In addition to the prevalence of traditional perspectives against divorce in rural areas, the lack of economic opportunities for women in sparsely populated areas may have made it difficult for some women to leave unhappy marriages.Footnote ⁴¹

The highly successful women in our study divorced at significantly higher rates than other women in German-speaking central Europe. At the same time, the data reveal that marriages that included a woman of Jewish descent were more likely to be “successful” (that is, not end in divorce) than the marriages of other pioneering central European women. In contrast to the data described here—more Jewish women divorced than non-Jewish women; more urban people divorced than rural people—among our study subjects, fewer of the highly successful women of Jewish descent divorced than the other central European women. Of the women we researched, 22.9 percent of women of Jewish descent experienced at least one divorce, and, in contrast, 29.5 percent of other women experienced at least one divorce.

Image 2.

Divorced women among married study subjects.

Image 3.

Married, divorced, and never-married women of Jewish descent and other central European women.

These data provide nuance that enhance the literature that discusses high divorce rates among Jews as stemming from arranged marriages among Jews, the difficulties of urban living, or the emotional upheaval of preserving a marriage under National Socialist rule or exile. As opposed to the literature that emphasizes the prevalence of divorce among Jewish central Europeans, these data show that divorce was slightly less common in the marriages of highly successful women of Jewish descent than the marriages of other highly successful women.Footnote ⁴²

Factors that Help Explain Success among Married Women of Jewish Descent: Left-Leaning Politics, Women's Education, Family Size, Class Background, Urban Jewish Subcultures, Outsider Status

Thus far, we have presented suggestive evidence for the significance of marriage within central European Jewish subcultures. Other factors will be important in helping to understand the ambition and the creative activities of these married Jewish women. Of first importance must be the centrality of learning and education within middle-class German Jewish circles, primarily for men and boys. At the same time, girls too would hear the guests who talked about ideas, read the books laying around a middle-class home, and thus learn about the world of ideas. Our findings make sense in light of other research, for example, that details the large number of Jewish women among the first generation of women to enter the university and the important role of education for Jewish girls. Left-leaning politics and openness to steps toward equality between men and women within Jewish circles might have allowed for some women to move beyond middle-class norms. Many Jews voted for left liberal parties, whose leaders favored the opening of professional opportunities for women and new political rights for women. Connected to both of these trends, we found, as Freidenreich did with her university women, that Jewish families were some of the first to adopt modern family forms of one to three children.Footnote ⁴³ Smaller families also allowed for modern forms of parenting with intensive investment in each child and emotional connections between parents and children. In a period when most middle-class people assumed raising children fell in the women's sphere, small families allowed more autonomy and independence for mothers than larger families would. Although Marion Kaplan's scholarship shows most middle-class Jewish families followed class norms for proper women's roles requiring women to leave paid employment when they married, our survey of memoir literature of the high achieving Jewish women in our study suggests instead that study subjects’ Jewish families often supported the aspirations of their daughters and helped to pave the way for their later success.Footnote ⁴⁴ The actress Ida Ehre (1900–1989), for example, writes movingly about the role that her mother played in supporting all her achievements:

Unlike many of the non-Jewish women's families that will be described later in this article, Ehre's mother provided tremendous support for her efforts to make a career in the theatre. Ida Ehre, whose accomplishments were recognized when she became the first female honorary citizen of Hamburg, had in her mother a mentor, coach, and loving partner for Ehre's efforts.

Similarly, Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1880–1967) describes the support that she received from her father. Her father initially opposed her desire to become a painter because he feared that she would become an “old maid.” She told him that she was determined to pursue painting, and at that point, as she remembers, he put his head in his hands. When he brought his head up again, his eyes were red and teary, and “he looked at me with such an expression of deep and naked love that I am deeply affected when I think of it.” He then told her slowly and quietly, “You want it so much. It will be difficult for me, more difficult than you understand. Child! I will not stand in the way of your happiness. Follow your ideals. I acquiesce.”Footnote ⁴⁶ A form of modern intensive parenting that was adopted early by Jewish families and eventually would be adopted by most elite and upper-middle class families played a role in the successes of many of the women in our study.Footnote ⁴⁷

Selma Kurz (1874–1933) found a version of Berend-Corinth's family support at her synagogue and in the Jewish community. For Kurz, a Jewish network helped to pave the way for her to grow her talent. Unlike most of our study subjects, who were children of elite urban or academic families, Selma Kurz grew up in a poor family, one of eleven children of an umbrella repairman in Galicia, and she started an apprenticeship as a seamstress. The cantor at her synagogue discovered her beautiful singing voice and collected money from the Jewish community to pay for a train ticket to Vienna, where her voice could be heard. A patron paid for her lessons, which then allowed her to develop her voice and become an opera singer who performed across Europe and the world in the most diverse of roles, with 992 performances at the Vienna opera alone. Selma Kurz had many suitors, but she held them off, especially those who wished that she follow what was often seen as convention and retire from the stage. In 1910, at the age of thirty-six, she married Dr. Josef Halban, a professor at Vienna University and medical specialist, and, as she wished, continued to perform. Her love of music, her tremendous success, and her skill led her to insist on continuing her work. Even her fellow soprano Maria Jeritza described how, standing next to Selma on stage, “I did not know if I should keep singing or applaud.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The same forces that led diverse men and women of Jewish descent to strive toward their goals, to hone their skills, and to insist on recognition shaped decisions like those of Selma Kurz to continue performing after she had married and had a child.

In The Jewish Century, perhaps the most important recent work that aims to understand Jewish striking success in the modern world, Yuri Slezkine connects the experiences of Jews to other mobile, trade-oriented, insular minorities like the Inadan of the Sahara, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Roma in Europe, the Parsis of India, the Old Believers in Russia, Southeast Asians in the United States, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese in Latin America, among others. The combination of strong group ties, faith in education, and a far-flung diaspora network can increase chances of success even despite discrimination. Slezkine emphasizes how “strangeness could be an asset” because of the ways that it could cement group ties. Gender and sex roles offer an area that minorities could solidify their contrast with majority cultures; Slezkine describes the examples of Roma and eastern European Jewish women who were “often considered sexually provocative or socially aggressive—a perception that they occasionally reinforce by deliberate displays.” A provocative “display” might well be offensive to the middle-class women who made up most of our study subjects and were strongly influenced by middle-class expectations about proper women's roles. At the same time, Slezkine's point also suggests that for Jewish women, moves beyond cultural norms, for example to take up a profession, might have been just one more way that Jewish women would be perceived as different or even “strange.” Perhaps the leap to the professional world was a shorter distance for women of Jewish descent than for other women more strongly and securely ensconced in the middle class.Footnote ⁴⁹

Slezkine explains how a sense of difference and strangeness was set within a matrix of “universal and mutually complementary opposites: mind versus body, head versus heart, outsider versus insider, nomadic versus settled.” In another thread of Slezkine's rich analysis, he describes how the mutual stereotypes of majorities and minorities shaped perception of the “other.” What majorities might view as cunning and greed, minorities might see instead as smart, future-oriented, successful, and sophisticated. From the Pale of Settlement, Slezkine quotes Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, who interviewed former shtetl residents and found that even children knew the distinctions between Jews and non-Jews,

Certainly, these are stereotypes. And yet, these are just the kind of values that if cultivated and assumed to be one's own could support a combination of family and professional or creative work for women.

One striking example of the lengths to which a family might go to educate daughters comes from the memoir of the writer and art critic Berta Zuckerkandl (1864–1945). When she grew up in 1880s Vienna, academic girls’ schools were not yet available. As a result, her father, the editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, arranged to have his reporters among the tutors for his two daughters.Footnote ⁵¹ This expectation that daughters would gain an in-depth education shaped the milieu of Viennese elite Jewish families within which Zuckerkandl moved. Of course, living in Vienna created opportunities that women in rural Austria would not have had. Simply living in cities, as more Jewish central Europeans did than non-Jews, allowed for more contact with educational institutions than if one lived in the countryside. The high numbers of Jewish men and women who studied at universities might, in part, be explained by the access of these individuals to institutions of higher education. Also, Jewish families’ over-representation within the upper middle class, among urban central Europeans, and among academic families helps provide an explanation for the overrepresentation of women of Jewish descent among highly successful women. These families had the resources and the connections to support not only their sons but their daughters in pursuing work outside the home.

These factors created a dynamic in which, for at least some families, women could pursue their work and still have the potential to marry and build a family. Within Jewish tradition, the great value placed on marriage and family, as well as the importance of education and “intellect,” combined to craft a different model of marriage for women of Jewish descent that, in the right circumstances, could allow women to depart from expected roles. Just as Jewish men overcame obstacles of antisemitism and class prejudice to gain professional and creative success, Jewish women, too, went beyond the bounds of behavior considered expected and appropriate. The willingness to risk failure, to be open to the new, stemmed from Jewish outsider status and could trump cultural norms, including the proper roles for women. Many of the women of Jewish descent in this study displayed a commitment to education, achievement, and family that channeled a form of Jewish tradition and created a model that would help them achieve success.

Illustrating Our Findings: Stories of Women of Jewish Descent and Other Highly Successful Central European Women

The large number of non-Jewish women in our study who completed their most important work after their husbands’ deaths, divorced after brief marriages, or stopped working after they married point to the challenges that women experienced in combining work and an ambitious career. Social norms put stress on middle-class marriages that included a woman who sought success in her profession; even feminist leaders believed that women must make a choice between a highly successful professional life and marriage. In the words of the historian Dietlinde Peters, “For the majority of the members of the moderate women's movement, gainful employment meant eschewal of marriage; the women were faced with the (voluntary, conscious?) choice between two life paths.”Footnote ⁵² These cases, which suggest the fate of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish women, reveal parental, cultural, institutional, and legal barriers to professional success for women in the period before 1914. Some examples from non-Jewish women's lives help to illustrate these women's life trajectories. Grete Wiesenthal (1885–1970), who created innovative choreography and was an international dancing star, even the “ambassador of waltz,” married Nils Sifverskjold in 1923 but divorced in 1927. The Neue Sachlichkeit painter Gerta Overbeck (1898–1977) had a son with the photographer Gustav Schenk (1905–1969), then married him in 1937, and divorced him in 1940. The writer Ida Hahn-Hahn (1805–1880) married her cousin in 1826 and divorced in 1829. Luise Kiesselbach (1863–1929) was widowed at age thirty-nine in 1902, and her most important political accomplishments occurred after her husband's death, including serving in the Munich city council between 1919–1927. Agnes Neuhaus (1854–1944) led Catholic women's organizations and served as a member of the constitutional assembly of the Weimar Republic for the Center Party and as a Reichstag representative for the Center Party from 1920–1930—all after her husband's 1905 death. Minna Cauer (1841–1922) led the left wing of the middle-class women's movement from the end of the nineteenth century. During her marriage she moved in intellectual circles and came into contact with leading liberals, even Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm and his wife, Victoria. Only after she was widowed for the second time in 1881 did she enter politics and play leadership roles in women's organizations. Agnes Günther (1863–1911) married the Protestant pastor Rudolf Günther and worked as a pastor's wife between 1891 and 1906. She wrote religiously inspired and melodramatic poetry and stories primarily for herself in her periods of sickness. Her most popular novel, Die Heilige und ihr Narr—which sold more than a million copies and went through more than 150 editions—was published only after her death. Sophie Cruvelli (1826–1907) had such a beautiful voice that Verdi composed operas with her in mind for the leading parts. She married Baron George Vigier in 1856 and, like many opera singers, then retired from performing. To summarize, the large number of divorced and widowed among highly successful women provides evidence for the challenges of combining work and marriage.

Our research has also uncovered dramatic accounts of the difficulties these women faced in pursuing their careers. Grete Albrecht (b. 1893) studied medicine, played a leading role in medical organizations including the Hamburg Medical Board, and was vice president of the German Medical Women's International Association (1958–1963). From an early age, Albrecht had determined that she wished to study medicine, but “her father flatly forbade her to think of such a profession.” The family physician once struck her for being a “silly brat” who would not settle into the notion that “a girl like you gets married.” Only after the death of her father in 1908 could she pursue her wish to become a medical doctor.Footnote ⁵³ Fanny Moser (1872–1953) enrolled as the first woman student at Freiburg University and remained the only woman student until 1901. Her studies in zoology led the Prussian Royal Academy to send her to collect specimens in France and Italy before 1914. Her later works in the fields of parapsychology are still studied today, but her desire to pursue her work in science led to “violent conflict” with her mother.Footnote ⁵⁴ The pioneering writer and explorer Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858) so hated the needlework and piano practice forced on her by her wealthy parents that she cut her fingers as a form of protest.Footnote ⁵⁵ Ruth Beutler (1897–1959) collaborated closely with her mentor, Karl von Frisch, who directed her work in zoology. He also published some of her findings on bees and bee communication under his own name.Footnote ⁵⁶

The first German woman professor in botany, Rose Stoppel (1874–1970), spent twelve years working as a domestic servant in East Prussia. Her father had died when she was young, and she was only able to extract her mother's blessing to study when her mother was on her deathbed. Although facing many challenges, including poor pay and the opposition of many professors in her field—she was once even thrown out of a university physics class—she was finally able to complete her studies with the second dissertation necessary for a German academic position, the habilitation, at age fifty with the University of Hamburg.Footnote ⁵⁷ The pilot Thea Rasche was pressed into marriage by her parents. After the death of her two brothers in World War I, her parents were determined that she marry and produce an heir. Rasche ran away to enter a professional training program in agriculture and only returned to her parents’ home because of her mother's poor health. Her father then insisted she marry. After much persuasion, Rasche agreed, only to refuse to follow through half an hour before the wedding was to begin. Later she sold her jewelry in order to put together enough money to rent an apartment and find a position as a secretary. Rasche would become the first woman in Germany to obtain a pilot's license.Footnote ⁵⁸

Together with Franziska Tiburtius (1843–1927), Emilie Lehmus (1841–1932) began a medical practice and eventually opened a clinic for women in 1887. There women could receive care, even if they could not pay. For fifteen years, Tiburtius and Lehmus were the only women medical doctors in Berlin, despite the fact that middle-class norms for women's modest behavior made health discussions difficult, especially for almost anything related to sexual systems or the digestive tract. Lehmus and Tiburtius had to battle long and hard to win permission to practice medicine in Berlin. Initially, in 1876, they were not allowed to take the exam for midwives. Even after they began their practices, they were not allowed to prescribe medicine. Lehmus was one of six sisters and came from a long line of theologians. Lehmus's parents, having no sons, gave their daughters an unusually broad education for girls in this period; her father supported her plans and began to teach her Latin after she expressed interest in university study. Her family supported her in other ways as well; she lived with her sister and her sister's family in Berlin and often spent time with her extended family, who all loved music and played passionately. In addition to her close family relationships, her partnership with Tiburtius played an essential role in her success. In her diary, Tiburtius wrote that she and Lehmus knew that they could and should rely on each other absolutely.Footnote ⁵⁹

Like Emilie Lehmus and Franziska Tiburtius, many pioneering women's most important relationships were outside of the marriage bond. Faced with a choice between marriage or a fulfilling medical practice, Tiburtius and Lehmus chose their practice and their patients. The high number of single women among non-Jewish accomplished women suggests that Tiburtius and Lehmus were not alone. Our quantitative data reveal that among pioneering women like Tiburtius and Lehmus, many women in German-speaking central Europe were not able to find a path for themselves that combined a career and marriage.

Appendix

This study focuses on five hundred high-achieving women from German-speaking central Europe; half of the study subjects are of Jewish descent. In central Europe at birth children were declared Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, or without confession. Individuals who wished to change their religious identification, to convert, or to become “konfessionslos” (without confession) filed government documents to declare their intentions.Footnote ⁶¹

As we studied these women's stories, we were mindful that many of these women had class privileges, elite status, and educational opportunities that put them in a position to pursue their careers in ways that were not open to the vast majority of German-speaking central European women. In some cases, access to cultural capital and educational opportunities, combined with a climate of antisemitic prejudice, spurred Jewish women to want to prove their abilities and thus motivated them to seek achievement in the arts, science, or politics.

Because many women moved between Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, we included women from all three countries. Over the course of our research, we gathered the names of 294 women of Jewish descent and 391 other women from German-speaking central Europe. The list of women included in our study follows below. We welcome readers’ comments about women whom we missed or suggestions for women who should not be included. We drew from the selection criteria of Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933 to choose the women who would be part of our study. Selection criteria included 1) position of responsibility in organizations or institutions, 2) publications, performances, or other creative or research product, 3) prizes and public recognition, 4) innovations in research or creative work. The following sources were particularly important for the project: Anne Commire ed., Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia 17 volumes (1999–2002); Ursula Köhler-Lutterbeck and Monika Siedentopf, Lexikon der 1000 Frauen (2000); Luise F. Pusch and Susanne Gretter, Berühmte Frauen: Dreihundert Porträts (2001); Maya Irmgard Fassmann, Jüdinnen in der deutschen Frauenbewegung (1996); Jutta Dick and Maria Sassenberg, Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1993); Walter Tetzlaff, 2000 Kurzbiographien bedeutender deutscher Juden des 20. Jahrhunderts (1982); and the Jewish Women's Archive. Finally, as Jews made up about 1 percent of German society in 1900, between 4 and 5 percent of Austria-Hungary in 1900, and less than .5 percent of the population in Switzerland in 1900, our study subjects of Jewish descent may well be less well-known than our non-Jewish study subjects. Our goal overall was to create equal numbers of women of Jewish descent and non-Jewish women.

In a small number of cases, we did not have enough information to determine if a subject had married or if she was of Jewish descent. For example, rumors circulated about the Jewish origins of Renée Sintenis (1888–1965), the first woman sculptor to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1931. Because we were not able to locate definitive information about her background, she was not included in our study. We did not include women who had only one grandparent who was Jewish in either list. For example, we also did not include the feminist Marie Baum (1874–1964), whose baptized maternal grandmother, Rebekka Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, came from a prominent Jewish family in Germany. After the National Socialists took power in 1933, Baum lost her position as a professor at Heidelberg and had no opportunity to publish because of her grandmother, the only one of her four grandparents who had Jewish roots.Footnote ⁶²

Our research turned up a number of pioneering and highly successful non-Jewish women who married Jewish men. We debated whether to include them in our study. Two prominent examples include the SPD activists and journalists Lily Braun (1865–1916) in Germany and Emmy Freundlich (1878–1948) in Austria. One of the first women composers, Ilse Fromm-Michaels (1888–1986), married the Jewish judge Walter Michaels. The writer Clara Viebig (1860–1952), whose works were translated into twelve languages and who produced a novel or collection of stories almost every year between 1898 and 1934, married Jewish publisher Fritz Cohn. Silent film star Henny Porten (1890–1960) married Dr. Wilhelm von Kaufmann-Asser, who was of Jewish descent. Elena Gerhardt (1883–1961), an accomplished Lieder singer, married the Jewish radio director in Leipzig Fritz Kohl. The following women in addition, as far as we could tell, were of not of Jewish descent and married Jewish men: Rahel Sanzara, actress, dancer, novelist (1894–1936); Alma Seidler, actress (1899–1977), Hertha Sponer, scientist (1895–1968), Helene Thimig, actress (1889–1974). Aspects of central European Jewish culture favorable to women's careers may well have led some of these husbands to encourage their wives to follow their career ambitions or at least not to stand in their way. The family and personal contacts of these Jewish husbands might also have been supportive to their wives, enabling them to continue to work after they married. The non-Jewish women who married these Jewish men might have received backing for continuing to pursue their profession from supportive in-laws. As a result, non-Jewish women who married Jewish men were not included in this study.Footnote ⁶³

Because we drew names from lexicons, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, study subjects who were well known are overrepresented as opposed to women who worked quietly behind the scenes. One particular group who may well have been overlooked are religious women, who as nuns or Protestant deaconesses directed social service work, missionary efforts, and schools. These women would have the same types of skills and strengths as some of the women who entered academia, business, or government service. As these nuns and deaconesses would be overwhelmingly unmarried, including them would seem to make the differences between women of Jewish descent and other women more stark than the differences we found. As is, our study includes six Catholic and Protestant women who founded or joined religious orders as well as Edith Stein, of Jewish descent, who became a Discalced Carmelite nun.Footnote ⁶⁴

As we evaluated our results, we took into consideration the distinctive marriage patterns within the different professions. We divided our sample into the following groups: academia, arts, letters, politics, science, and stage and screen. Women in the arts, especially stage and screen, were much more likely to be married than highly successful women in other fields (of forty-four women, thirty-nine married, five did not marry). Women in science were less likely to be married (of forty-eight women, sixteen married, thirty-two did not marry). We also separated out a few groups that have distinctive marriage patterns: medicine, psychology, social work, and socialism. Our sample did not allow us to have equal numbers for each category because in some fields, women of Jewish descent were overrepresented, as in social work or psychology, and in other fields, women of Jewish descent were underrepresented, as in politics. Our analysis of our samples divided by profession, however, does not suggest that the variable of profession was determinative in our findings. The list of women in the “socialism” category, with twenty-four married women and thirteen unmarried women, included fewer women of Jewish descent than other women. The “humanities and social sciences” category, with fourteen married women and twenty unmarried, included more women of Jewish descent than other women.

Of our study subjects, one hundred women of Jewish descent and forty-six other women were born after 1890.

Accomplished Married, Never-Married, and Divorced Women of Jewish Descent

Other Accomplished Married, Never-Married, and Divorced Women

Did the proportionally larger group of women of Jewish descent who were born after 1890 (as opposed to those born before 1890) determine the differences we found in the divergent marriage rates of accomplished women of Jewish descent versus other accomplished women? Our evidence shows that marriage rates did not seem to differ between those born before and after 1890. Divorce rates did go up for women of Jewish descent born after 1890 and go down for other women born after 1890. The small sample sizes of divorced women and the relatively small differences in the changes, however, would suggest that we should be cautious about drawing conclusions about larger trends based on these numbers.

Although the increasing acceptance of women's ambitions in the Weimar Republic might have opened opportunities for a marriage and career for women born after 1890, for Jewish women the possibilities for marriage in the 1920s might have decreased. Steven Lowenstein even sees a “Jewish marriage crisis” in the Weimar Republic with decreasing numbers of marriages overall, increased Jewish-Christian marriage by men (but not women), and a Jewish male-to-female ratio of 100 to 109.3. The financial crises that wiped out the wealth that many families used for their daughters’ dowries, Lowenstein suggests, may have played a role in decreased marriage rates and increased Jewish-Christian marriages among men.