"Das Weib soll nicht gehlehrt seyn." Konfessionell geprägte Frauenbilder, Frauenbildung und weibliche Lebensentwürfe by Maria Anna Zumholz (review)

Maria Anna Zumholz's book meticulously examines the educational opportunities and professional preparations available to young women and girls in both of the denominationally divided sections of Oldenburg, a region of northwestern Germany located in the state of Lower Saxony. This comparative study of an area split between a Protestant north and Catholic south permits an investigation into how confession shaped pedagogical practices for women over the course of three centuries. Ambitious in its claims and chronological breadth, this monograph contributes to the under-represented field of gender and religion in modern Germany.

Zumholz pursues two central arguments in this book. First, she joins American scholar Jeffrey Zalar and others in complicating the stereotype that Catholics remained less educated than their Protestant counterparts throughout German history. Second, she rejects notions from earlier academic studies that women from Catholic areas suffered greater repression than elsewhere in Germany. Zumholz maintains that such attitudes emerged from post-1945 developments when Lutheran women gained access to the priesthood. Therefore, these past viewpoints overlook the centuries between the mid-1600s and the early twentieth century when women from the Catholic portions of Lower Saxony received access to more power, education, and opportunity in comparison to those in northern Oldenburg. She contends that Lutheran traditions constrained women while Catholic theology and educational practice offered them more avenues to professional and scholarly fulfillment.

Zumholz amasses a prodigious amount of historical data to support such a revisionist thesis. She analyzes the long line of Catholic education reformers from territories with historic roots in the diocese of Münster and richly describes the male elites of the early modern era, such as Bishop Christoph Bernard von Galen, Franz von Fürstenberg, and Bernard Overberg, who expanded the subjects studied by young women (97–126). These leaders also advocated that women rather than men instruct girls. The focus on such policies creates a sharp contrast with Protestant institutions characterized by male teachers and limited pathways for girls. Furthermore, Zumholz's examination of Amalie von Gallitzin's prominent intellectual salon known as the Münstersche Kreis and the thinker's rejection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's restrictive ideas about female domesticity illustrate a critical example of agency by eighteenth-century Catholic women (127–137).

Carrying her story into the nineteenth century, Zumholz illustrates the increasing professional opportunities for women in higher education, teaching, and health care. The narrative of the book relies on personal stories of academically accomplished Catholic women, such as Wilhelmine Janssen and Elizabeth Denis, both of whom became active in the Catholic women's movement, confessional organizations for women at universities, and Christian politics in the twentieth century (240–249). Furthermore, she supports the thesis of Relinde Meiwes that women frequently joined convents in these eras to pursue otherwise unavailable vocational opportunities and exclusively female companionship (365–420). This book convincingly shows that the uniquely Catholic insistence on same-sex teachers for girls' education benefitted pupils much more than Protestant methods that relied on male instruction. It also successfully contrasts the Catholic belief that feminine sexuality could be controlled through abstinence with the Lutheran standpoint that women needed marriage due to innate human sinfulness. This theological divergence led to more career opportunities for Catholic women and more educational tracks separate from domesticity, marriage, and children than among their Protestant counterparts.

This otherwise outstanding study might have been improved in two ways. While the book injects narratives about modern German Catholic women with much-needed dynamism, it remains very static in its depiction of its Protestant subjects. Given the comparative nature of the study, the conclusions of the monograph would be even more forceful if the fragile balance between emancipatory impulses and religious hierarchy were presented with same amount of nuance and sophistication in both confessional contexts. Furthermore, the applicability of this case study to other parts...