The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women's Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865-1914 (review)

Katharina Rowold's monograph builds upon over thirty years of historical research on women in higher education. There is a particularly rich foundation of critical work in English on this topic for Britain and Germany, including that of Ann Taylor Allen, James Albisetti, Patricia Mazón, and Carol Dyhouse. Rowold's comparative study stands out with the inclusion of Spain, thereby making a number of important Spanish sources accessible for an English-speaking audience. Although Mary Nash, for example, has written extensively in English on related issues in Spain, her work might be unfamiliar to those who have previously limited themselves to studies on Britain and Germany. Rowold's study thus opens up new territory for that audience.

In this work, Rowold returns to old debates and well-known works about women in higher education to argue that positions on both sides were more complex than they have been portrayed in earlier studies. Focusing on changing discourses about women's minds and bodies, she provides examples of how science and religion were embraced and manipulated by both opponents and supporters of women in higher education. The numerous subheadings in each chapter help to guide the reader through Rowold's subtle analyses of all aspects of a given debate. In these debates, feminists frequently showed up where the reader would most expect them, arguing for individual rights with wit and verve. The section on Britain contains clever quotes from the novelist and journalist Mona Caird, as well as from a writer, Minnie Taylor, who argued: “If the welfare of the species is inimical to the welfare of the individual, then the species had far better die out” (61). This section also contains an insightful and nuanced analysis of the positions on higher education and sexual difference held by Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, three of the great pioneers in medicine.

In contrast to those feminists calling for women's higher education as an individual right, other feminists, particularly in Britain and Germany, embraced the new theories of evolution and racial hygiene to support women's access to higher education. The section on Germany includes a useful overview of ongoing debates among historians about the degree of continuity between concepts of racial hygiene promoted by feminists during the period before World War I and later National Socialist policies. Rowold confronts this legacy among feminists with directness, noting the irony that more British feminists than German feminists concerned themselves with racial hygiene.

The chapters on Germany add depth to previous work because Rowold has taken the time to read extensively in sources often mentioned elsewhere only in passing, such as Magnus Hirschfeld's Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899-1923) and Arthur Kirchhoff's Die akademische Frau (Berlin, 1897). Chapter 4 is particularly useful for its comparison of arguments espoused by moderate feminists and antifeminists. There is a welcome inclusion in Chapter 3 of less famous but influential feminists of the period, such as Hedwig Dohm. Rowold does not, however, cite any recent work on Dohm, and fails to mention that Dohm herself audited classes at the University of Berlin.

The section on Spain examines how feminists drew on both Catholicism and scientific discourses, the same sources used by the antifeminists, to argue for women's access to higher education. Chapter 6 provides an enlightening comparison of three feminists, Bertha Wilhelmi de Dávila, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, and Emilia Pardo Bazán, and their varying positions on religion and science. This same chapter includes an insightful treatment of arguments about women's nature and education within the anarchist movement and also among Krausists, members of a non-Catholic, progressive Christian movement inspired by the work of the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. A weakness of the discussion of women's higher...