Celebrate Women's History Month

Essays by feminist scholars of German Studies looking at how women-particularly women of color-have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship.

In Germany and in Western culture more broadly, women experience anger in response to misogyny, racism, and other injustice, but open expression of that anger is often considered unwomanly. Yet a rich tradition of feminist thinkers of color-including Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, Amia Srinivasan, and Sara Ahmed-understands anger as energizing and imperative for structural change. How might we cultivate an anger that is affirming, inclusive, legitimate, creative, animating, and most of all, feminist?


This volume of essays by feminist scholars of German Studies-writing in dialogue with such thinkers while acknowledging their own largely white, privileged positionalities-looks at how women have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship. The eleven contributions approach the topic of female anger intersectionally and transnationally. They examine angry women in the contexts of politics, activism, philosophy, economics, race, nationality, sexuality, illness, and humour. Covering a wide array of genres and discussing works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they explore creators including writers, filmmakers, comedian/activists, musicians, and journalists. They investigate the tensions between the emotion of anger and the practice of being an angry woman, global responses to anger, and artistic representations of angry women in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Analyzes the role of emotions in the religious lives of women from across Germany and Europe from the nineteenth century to the 1970s.


Scholarship on women and religion has focused primarily on the intersection between women's religious engagement and their emancipation. This volume goes beyond that to examine the vital role religion has played in the private and public lives of German and European women. Because emotions are central to the expression of religiosity, it draws on approaches from the history of emotions to examine how women understood, felt and practiced religion in their search for meaning.

Spanning from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the volume's essays show how religion helped women make sense of their lives. It also illuminates the degree to which women used religion and its attendant emotional scripts to shape modern society and how religious discourses in turn shaped women's emotions and comportment in the public sphere. The volume builds on recent research that shows that religion-especially the religiosity of women-remained a pressing public concern in modern Europe. From anxieties over the religiosity of Bavarian servants to restrictive norms imposed on Jewish widows, from the interfaith commitments of kindergarten teachers to the autobiographical narratives of aspiring Protestant deaconesses, from the suffering of stigmatics in Germany and Belgium to Irish women's public narratives of their religiosity, this book reveals how women's faith and attendant religious emotions have been central to their public and private lives.

An overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of Women's Studies within the area of peninsular Hispanism.

After an introductory survey of the development of women's studies in the context of Spain, twenty-one chronologically ordered essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, Spain and Mexico explore women's roles in the cultural production of their time from the Middle Ages to the present.
The essays of the first half examine the work of the earliest women writers and artists - memoirs and meditations, novellas and plays - and the representationor self-representation of women in a broad sweep of texts including medieval folksong, hagiography, and painting of the Baroque era.
The modern section focuses on women's participation in politics and culture from the eighteenth century onwards: as translators and essayists, as consumers of visual ephemera and conduct books, as writers and artists, film directors and performers.
An alternative and supplement to standard literary histories, thisvolume offers new insights into women's agency and representation in the cultural heritage of Spain. It will prove a useful and stimulating resource for students at all levels, and an accessible guide for the general reader.

XON DE ROS and GERALDINE HAZBUN lecture in Spanish literature at the University of Oxford.
CONTRIBUTORS: Nieves Baranda, Andrew M. Beresford, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Helena Buffery, Rosanna Cantavella, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Georgina Dopico-Black, Joanna Evans, Carmen Fracchia, Margaret R. Greer, Jessamy Harvey, Louise M. Haywood, Geraldine Hazbun, Susan Kirkpatrick, Frances Lannon, Laura Lonsdale, María Ana Masera Cerutti, Roberta Quance, Xon de Ros, Alexander Samson, Alison Sinclair, Joyce Tolliver.

An overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of Women's Studies within the area of peninsular Hispanism.

After an introductory survey of the development of women's studies in the context of Spain, twenty-one chronologically ordered essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, Spain and Mexico explore women's roles in the cultural production of their time from the Middle Ages to the present.
The essays of the first half examine the work of the earliest women writers and artists - memoirs and meditations, novellas and plays - and the representationor self-representation of women in a broad sweep of texts including medieval folksong, hagiography, and painting of the Baroque era.
The modern section focuses on women's participation in politics and culture from the eighteenth century onwards: as translators and essayists, as consumers of visual ephemera and conduct books, as writers and artists, film directors and performers.
An alternative and supplement to standard literary histories, thisvolume offers new insights into women's agency and representation in the cultural heritage of Spain. It will prove a useful and stimulating resource for students at all levels, and an accessible guide for the general reader.

XON DE ROS and GERALDINE HAZBUN lecture in Spanish literature at the University of Oxford.
CONTRIBUTORS: Nieves Baranda, Andrew M. Beresford, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Helena Buffery, Rosanna Cantavella, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Georgina Dopico-Black, Joanna Evans, Carmen Fracchia, Margaret F. Greer, Jessamy Harvey, Louise M. Haywood, Geraldine Hazbun, Susan Kirkpatrick, Frances Lannon, Laura Lonsdale, María Ana Masera Cerutti, Roberta Quance, Xonde Ros, Alexander Samson, Alison Sinclair, Joyce Tolliver.

A reappraisal of the business enterprises of women in the `long' eighteenth century, showing them to be more flourishing than previously thought.

Orthodox opinion is that in the `long' eighteenth century women, especially of the middle classes, had very little involvement with business affairs and enterprises, and that as a group they were more usually characterised by their domestic roles. This book takes issue with this view, arguing that the major factors which supposedly prevented women's economic activity in this period had much less impact than has previously been thought. It demonstrates thatdespite the pressure of gendered cultural expectations, financial barriers and legal disabilities, many women participated extensively in entrepreneurial activity as integrated members of trading networks, exchanging money, credit, property and goods with male traders on a regular basis throughout the period. The author examines how women in business engaged with the tangled legal systems of common law, borough customs and equity, showing that the legal doctrine of coverture did not in practice curtail married women's ability to trade on their own account; she goes on to look at women's business practices, partnerships and credit networks, including their involvement in the insurance business and newspaper advertising. Finally, she considers the impact of domestic ideology, particularly on women in the feminine trades of millinery and dressmaking, and the languages women used to express their commercial interests.

This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #MeToo movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that "rape cultures" persist.

Responding to the worldwide impact of the #MeToo movement, this volume investigates not only the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexual violence but also the transhistorical and transnational failure to hold perpetrators accountable. From a range of disciplines, the collected essays engage current cultural and political discourses about systemic sexism, feminist theory and practice, and gender-based discrimination from an academic and activist perspective. The focus on national cultures of German-speaking Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the present captures the persistence of normalized and institutionalized sexism, reframed through the lens of a contemporary political and social movement.
German #MeToo argues that sexual violence is not a universal human constant. Rather, it is nurtured and sustained by the social, political, cultural, legal, and economic fabric of specific societies. The authors sustain and vary their exploration of #MeToo-related issues through considerations of rape, prostitution, sexual murder, the politics of consent, and victim-blaming as enacted in literary works by canonical and marginalized authors, the visual arts, the graphic novel, film, television, and theater. The analysis of rape myths - of discourses and practices in German history and culture that subtend and indemnify sexual violence - is a central subject of this edited volume. Throughout, German #MeToo challenges narratives of sex-based discrimination while emphasizing the strategies of resistance and the importance of telling one's own story.

Uncovers the life of Jane Cumming, who scandalized her contemporaries with tales of sexual deviancy but also defied cultural norms, standing up to male authority figures and showing resilience.

In 1810 Edinburgh, the orphaned Scottish-Indian schoolgirl Jane Cumming alleged that her two schoolmistresses were sexually intimate. The allegation spawned a defamation suit that pitted Jane's grandmother, a member of the Scottish landed gentry, against two young professional women who were romantic friends. During the trial, the boundary between passion and friendship among women was debated and Jane was viewed "orientally," as morally corrupt and hypersexual. Located at the intersection of race, sex, and class, the case has long been a lightning rod for scholars of cultural studies, women's and gender history, and, given Lillian Hellman's appropriation of Jane's story in her 1934 play The Children's Hour, theater history as well. Frances B. Singh's wide-ranging biography, however, takes a new, psychological approach, putting the notorious case in the context of a life that was marked by loss, separation, abandonment--and resilience.

Grounded in archival and genealogical sources never before consulted, Singh's narrative reconstructs Cumming's life from its inauspicious beginnings in a Calcutta orphanage through her schooling in Elgin and Edinburgh, an abusive marriage, her adherence to the Free Church at the time of the Scottish Disruption, and her posthumous life in Hellman's Broadway play. Singh provides a detailed analysis not only of the case itself, but of how both Jane's and her teachers' lives were affected in the aftermath.

Uncovers the life of Jane Cumming, who scandalized her contemporaries with tales of sexual deviancy but also defied cultural norms, standing up to male authority figures and showing resilience.

In 1810 Edinburgh, the orphaned Scottish-Indian schoolgirl Jane Cumming alleged that her two schoolmistresses were sexually intimate. The allegation spawned a defamation suit that pitted Jane's grandmother, a member of the Scottish landed gentry, against two young professional women who were romantic friends. During the trial, the boundary between passion and friendship among women was debated and Jane was viewed "orientally," as morally corrupt and hypersexual. Located at the intersection of race, sex, and class, the case has long been a lightning rod for scholars of cultural studies, women's and gender history, and, given Lillian Hellman's appropriation of Jane's story in her 1934 play The Children's Hour, theater history as well. Frances B. Singh's wide-ranging biography, however, takes a new, psychological approach, putting the notorious case in the context of a life that was marked by loss, separation, abandonment--and resilience.

Grounded in archival and genealogical sources never before consulted, Singh's narrative reconstructs Cumming's life from its inauspicious beginnings in a Calcutta orphanage through her schooling in Elgin and Edinburgh, an abusive marriage, her adherence to the Free Church at the time of the Scottish Disruption, and her posthumous life in Hellman's Broadway play. Singh provides a detailed analysis not only of the case itself, but of how both Jane's and her teachers' lives were affected in the aftermath.

First book to explore print-media representations of 1970s German terrorism from an explicitly gendered perspective, while also examining media coverage of other violent women.

As the controversy surrounding the release of Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger's 2008 feature film The Baader Meinhof Complex demonstrates, West Germany's terrorist period, which reached its height in the "German autumn" of 1977, is still a fascinating -- and troubling -- subject. One of the most provocative aspects, still today, is the high proportion of women involved in terrorism, most notoriously Ulrike Meinhof. That the film concentrates on the trajectory of Meinhof's life and mobilizes established and hence reassuring paradigms of femininity in its representation of her (as "mother" and "hysterical woman") suggests that the combination of women and violence is still threatening and that there is still mileage to be had from feminizing the discourse. The present study returns to the West German print media of the 1960s and 1970s and raises questions about the continuing preoccupation with this period. Looking at publications from the right-wing Bild to the liberal Der Spiegel, it explores how violent women -- not only terrorists but also others such as the convicted murderer and media femme fatale Vera Brühne -- were represented in text and image. This is the first book to explore print-media representations of German terrorism from an explicitly gendered perspective, and one of very few books in English to address the period in Germanyat all, despite steadily increasing interest in the UK and the US.

Clare Bielby is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Hull.

Examines the role of women -- particularly Luise Gottsched and Christiane von Ziegler -- in the Gottsched circle's early 18th-century efforts to reform and revitalize German intellectual life.

For a brief time in the eighteenth century, Johann Christoph Gottsched and his circle -- including prominently his wife, Luise Adelgunde Victoria Gottsched, née Kulmus -- dominated efforts to construct a German culture sophisticated enough to rival the French. In the 1730s they attempted to codify the grammar and spelling of written German, elevate German literature, refine cultural practices and taste, and introduce enlightened ideas. Gottsched's effortsto involve women in this process have been noted, but in Amazons and Apprentices, Katherine Goodman examines for the first time the Gottsched circle's intitiatives regarding intellectual women in the context of the broaderdiscourse of which they were an important part. She presents an array of voices and texts from 1715 to 1740, including dictionaries, moral weeklies, letters, translations and literature. The book focuses mainly on two women -- Christiane Mariane von Ziegler and Luise Gottsched -- and the web of cultural meaning each of them activated through her deeds and words.
Katherine R. Goodman is professor of German at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.She is the author of Dis/Closures: Women's Autobiography in Germany 1790-1914, and has edited a number of books on German women writers.

A study of poor women in 19c Northumberland, showing how their poverty was exacerbated by their gender and by prevailing attitudes towards women.

In what ways did gender influence the shape of poverty, and of poor women's work, in Victorian England? This book explores the issue in the context of nineteenth-century Northumberland, examining urban and rural conditions for women, poor relief debates and practices, philanthropic activity, working-class cultures, and `protective' intervention in women's employment. The way in which cultural codes were constructed around women, both by those who observedand imagined them and by the women themselves, is investigated, together with other related contemporary discourses. While looking closely at the north-eastern context, the book's broader themes have important implications for debates within feminist history and theory. The author argues throughout that close attention to the links between material conditions and cultural representations of women both illuminates the intricate dynamics of working-class femininity and forces a reappraisal of the gendered nature of poverty itself in Victorian life and imagination.
JANE LONG is currently lecturer in women's studies at the University of Western Australia.

The range of women's work and its contribution to the family economy studied here for the first time.

Despite the growth of women's history and rural social history in the past thirty years, the work performed by women who lived in the nineteenth-century English countryside is still an under-researched issue. Verdon directly addresses this gap in the historiography, placing the rural female labourer centre stage for the first time. The involvement of women in the rural labour market as farm servants, as day labourers in agriculture, and as domestic workers, are all examined using a wide range of printed and unpublished sources from across England. The roles village women performed in the informal rural economy (household labour, gathering resources and exploiting systems of barterand exchange) are also assessed. Changes in women's economic opportunities are explored, alongside the implications of region, age, marital status, number of children in the family and local custom; women's economic contribution to the rural labouring household is established as a critical part of family subsistence, despite criticism of such work and the rise in male wages after 1850.

NICOLA VERDON is a Research Fellow in the Rural History Centre, University of Reading.

Did the expanding economic life of England after the Black Death improve the lot of women, as is commonly thought? This study argues not.

It has long been thought that the post Black Death period offered unparallelled opportunities for women. However, through a careful consideration of economic and legal changes affecting women of all social classes and conditions,the author shows that this was not the case, taking issue with orthodox opinion. She argues that marriage at a late age was not customary for women, and that the ability of wives to supplement their income with intermittent paid labour (at harvest time, for example) was not so great as has been supposed: rather, most married women spent more time on unpaid agricultural labour on their own land than their peers had done in the pre-plague economy. ProfessorMate also demonstrates that there is little evidence to support the current belief that widowhood was the period in a woman's life when she enjoyed most power, freedom, and independence; moreover, legal changes were a mixed blessing for women, leaving some widows with a larger portion and a more secure title to land, but totally depriving others. Throughout, the book pays much attention to class as well as gender, showing how many things were determined byit, from what a woman wore or ate to the age at which she married, her power within the household, and even her vulnerability to rape.

The late MAVIS E. MATE was Professor of History Emerita, University of Oregon.

First English translation of the memoirs of Austrian Romani Holocaust survivor, writer, visual artist, musician, and activist Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), along with poems, an interview, historical photos, and reproductions of her artworks.

"Is this the whole world?" This question begins the first of three memoirs by Austrian Romani writer, visual artist, musician, and activist Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), told from her perspective as a child interned in three Nazi concentration camps from age nine to twelve. Written by a child survivor much later in life, the memoirs offer insights into the nexus of narrative and extreme trauma, expressing the full spectrum of human emotions: fear and sorrow at losing loved ones; joy and relief when reconnecting with family and friends; desire to preserve some memories while attempting to erase others; horror at acts of genocide, and hope arising from dreams of survival.
In addition to annotated translations of the three memoirs, the book includes two of Stojka's poems and an interview by Karin Berger, editor of the original editions of Stojka's memoirs, as well as color reproductions of several of her artworks and historical photographs. An introduction contextualizes her works within Romani history and culture, and a glossary informs the reader about the "concentrationary universe." Because the memoirs show how Stojka navigated male-dominated postwar Austrian culture, generally discriminatory to Roma, and the patriarchal aspects of Romani culture itself, the book is a contribution not only to Holocaust Studies but also to Austrian Studies, Romani Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

A modern English version of the Middle English text of Birgitta's Revelations made at the Birgittine Syon Abbey in England, in which the scribes extracted their favourite episodes from the longer Latin version.

Saint Birgitta of Sweden (canonised in 1391) is one of the most important female figures of medieval Europe. She participated vigorously in its political life, attempting through her writings to end the Hundred Years War between England and France, and to strengthen the Papacy against the Schism; she also influenced other mystics, such as Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Chiara Gambacorta, Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Barton, leading a tradition in which women, despite being forbidden to preach, could act through writing visionary books. Birgitta was helped by cardinals, bishops, priors and masters in her task, speaking to Popes, Emperors and all Europe. For this work she is now proclaimed, with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein, Patron of Europe.
This book presents in modern English her medieval biography, excerpts from her massive book, the Revelationes, from a translation into MiddleEnglish made at Brigittine Syon Abbey in England. This is accompanied by an interpretive essay and an introduction tracing her life.

This biography of writer, translator, teacher, and feminist Ada Gobetti, the first in English or Italian, frames her activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance.

By the time Turin was liberated in April 1945, writer, translator, teacher, and women's rights activist Ada Gobetti had been fighting fascism for almost twenty-five years. This biography frames her wartime activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance. Gobetti participated in the underground Giustizia e Libertà movement, and helped to found the Partito d'Azione, a political party whose members asked her to represent them as vice mayor of Turin after the war. For Gobetti, the Resistenza also brought an awareness of the specific talents, needs, and rights of Italian women. This led her to organize other Italian women against German occupiers and Fascist oppressors, found an underground women's newspaper, and solidify her views regarding women as a political force. After 1945, resistance meant espousing a set of ideals exemplified by the best that came out of the Resistenza, ideals of grassroots democracy, women's rights, and democratic education for which Gobetti would fight for the rest of her life.

Jomarie Alano is a visiting scholar at Cornell University's Institute for European Studies. She is the translator and editor of Ada Gobetti's Diario partigiano, published by Oxford University Press in 2014 as Partisan Diary: A Woman's Life in the Italian Resistance.