Ann Taylor Allen, professor emerita of history at the University of Louisville, has produced a valuable work of both new research and synthesis that culminates decades of labor. She first published in the Autumn 1982 issue of the History of Education Quarterly with her article, “Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement, 1848–1911.” Her subsequent book, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (1991), placed a much higher valuation on “maternal feminism” or “social feminism” than had historians such as Richard Evans and Claudia Koonz, who had strongly criticized this aspect of the German women's movement. She later extended her research into comparative European topics with Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma (2005) and Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (2008).

With The Transatlantic Kindergarten, Allen has returned to her nineteenth-century interests with a broadly transnational perspective. The book draws on research in five German and eleven US archives, as well as perusal of sixteen periodicals from each country, some of them rather obscure. Although Allen admits that most histories of the development of kindergartens have been written from national contexts, she insists that the early advocates of Friedrich Fröbel “defined their mission as universal rather than national and legitimated it through international organizing” (p. 3). She does admit that the adoption and diffusion of the kindergarten in the two countries depended on national contexts: Germany had a largely male corps of elementary teachers that resisted female encroachment on the schools, sharper class divisions that made it difficult for bourgeois reformers to cooperate with separate working-class organizations associated with the Social Democratic Party, and greater acceptance of government intervention at the national and municipal level that brought public support to preschool education as a matter of social welfare. The United States had a less rigidly structured and less professionalized school system and less entrenched class divisions that facilitated the integration of kindergartens into schools; some American Protestants were also more open to Fröbel than their German counterparts. Massive immigration into the late nineteenth-century United States provided a task for kindergartens not present in Imperial Germany.

The book opens with discussion of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's emphasis (versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau) on the role of mothers in early education and Fröbel's development of the idea of the educational value of play. Allen then turns to the well-researched fate of the kindergarten in the German revolutions of 1848–1849, especially in the Free City of Hamburg, where Fröbel offered training courses for kindergartners and his nephew Karl headed the experimental “College for the Female Sex” (Hochschule für das weibliche Geschlecht). In the repressive political atmosphere after 1850, the taint of radicalism associated with these institutions led several participants to flee the German Confederation. The scandalously divorced and remarried Bertha Ronge carried Fröbel's message to London, whereas her sister Margarethe Schurz brought the gifts and games to Wisconsin. The latter ultimately introduced kindergarten pedagogy to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in Boston, who became its key American-born proponent.

For this reviewer, the third and fourth chapters form the core of the book. Allen emphasizes in the third the ongoing cross-fertilization of the German and American movements, including later immigrants to the United States, such as Emma Marwedel and Maria Kraus-Boelte; Americans who traveled to Germany for training, such as Susan Blow of St. Louis; and daughters of immigrants, such as Bertha Hofer, who studied at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House in Berlin. Chapter 4, “Who Is the Child? Science and Pedagogy,” examines how “child study” and the emergence of developmental psychology necessitated rethinking the methodology and even the possibilities of early childhood education. Allen makes a convincing case that “the modernization of the kindergarten, though often attributed to American reformers, actually began in Germany” (p. 95). Under the influence of Henriette Schrader-Breymann, “By 1900, the daily routine at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House deviated widely from the orthodox Fröbelian practices that were common in the 1880s” (p. 97). The United States, in fact, witnessed sharper confrontations than did Germany between “orthodox” Fröbelians and the more adaptable revisionists, epitomized by the contrasting figures of Susan Blow and Patty Smith Hill on the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia after 1905.

Allen then examines the differing fates of kindergartens in the two countries. She highlights the strong hostility of male teachers and both Protestant and Catholic churches to incorporating kindergartens into the denominational public schools of the Kaiserreich, although the views of misogynist male teachers receive much greater attention than those of church leaders. In the United States, both the much higher percentage of women teachers and the need to “Americanize” immigrant children as early as possible made for much more widespread incorporation of kindergartens in schools. In Allen's view, “The kindergarten movement must be counted among the most successful of all the social reform movements of the Progressive Era” (p. 134). Yet such success came at a high cost: “By 1914, the American kindergarten … had become what its founders had sworn it would never be—a school” (p. 135).

As was true with Americans studying at German universities, decline of the transnational links preceded World War I. Without kindergartens in the public schools, Germany no longer stood as a model for younger Americans. In Allen's view, when some seventy Americans took part in a “Fröbel Pilgrimage” to Germany in 1911, they “came less as humble ‘pilgrims’ than as missionaries” (p. 169). For people such as John Dewey and Patty Smith Hill, the kindergarten had found its true home in the democratic United States and could not thrive in authoritarian Germany. From the German side, Lili Droescher, director of the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House from 1913, saw much less value in foreign contacts and influences than had her predecessors; she stressed instead a nationally based education through familiarity with the Heimat (Homeland).

Despite the book's many strengths, it contains numerous minor errors relating to Germany that do not affect the main arguments. Schrader-Breymann was not Fröbel's niece (pp. 1, 38); her mother was Fröbel's cousin. Hamburg kindergarten supporter Johanna Goldschmidt was not “the daughter of a reform rabbi” (p. 42), but of a wholesale textile merchant who did support the reform temple. Julie Schwabe was not a “friend” (p. 51) of Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow when Peabody encountered both women in Florence in November 1871; they met there for the first time. Wilhelm Lette, founder of a major organization promoting female employment and a supporter of Marenholtz's Berlin kindergarten organization in the 1860s, was never a “Colonel” (p. 61). Imperial Germany did not have old age insurance “by 1884” (p. 63); it passed only five years later. Schrader-Breymann's hometown of Mahlum was not “in Saxony” (p. 67) but in the Duchy of Brunswick. Emperor Frederick III, who (with his wife, Victoria) championed kindergartens, did not reign in 1888 “for only six months before dying of cancer” (p. 72) but for ninety-nine days. His death did not deprive “kindergartners of the patronage of the Empress Victoria” (p. 165), who remained a loyal, if less powerful, supporter until her death thirteen years later.