If, in the early periods of his life, Max Weber often sounded like a male club type, and if he also paid special attention to brotherhoods in the history of human socialization, female networks acquired growing significance for him after the Eranos years and even made a decisive contribution to his new social environment.* The principle force behind this was undoubtedly Marianne and her involvement in the women’s movement. Already at the onset of his illness, Weber -in complete agreement with his mother, who was an independent, emancipated woman by the bourgeois standards of the time –encouraged her to engage in such activities outside the home. Aware that people need a purpose in life, he had no illusions that marriage alone could adequately fulfil this need.
Marianne’s entry into the women’s movement was part of a more general educational idealism. Soon after the Weber’s moved to Heidelberg in 1897, she brought to life a branch of the ‘Frauenstudium- Frauenbilding’ association and called it an ‘Association to Disseminate the Ideal of Modern Women’. To open every path into the world of the intellect was a goal that fired her with enthusiasm, and behind it lay a whole middle-class ideology of education. Her husband, as she put it ‘was soon more a feminist than she. He eagerly followed the pros and cons of public opinion, helped wherever he could, and stood by with sword drawn when it was a matter of fighting off hostile acts of the old guard.’ Nor did the ‘old guard’ consist only of men. At one public debate on women’s rights, at which Max drew everyone’s attention to himself, he hit out at ‘old-fashioned women’, who he said were ‘much more vehement opponents of the entire movement than men’. ‘He compared them to hens that mercilessly peck away with their beaks at a strange hen that has strayed into their barnyard’, Marianne and her friends, far from being irritated by the metaphor, found the scene ‘wonderful’.
In the early years of their marriage, Marianne made a move to slip into the role of her husband’s academic assistant, when she undertook some petty statistical work for a continuation of Max’s study of agricultural workers; but then he lost interest in the subject. He did not think it a good idea in the long term that she should work in his field. When he advised her in 1889 to study the physiocrats for her work on Fichte, he added “Unfortunately I’m quite well up on them myself.’ But by then he was already at the Konstannzer Hof clinic. His illness was certainly a trying time for Marianne too, but the ending of her everyday routine opened up a new space and sometimes gave her a feeling of euphoria. She had ‘big ideas, she noted joyfully on 17 November 1898 in a letter to Helene, Max’s mother. Around that time her handwriting lost all schoolgirl touches and became faster and more spidery; the letters slanted to the right. It must have been soon thereafter that she began work on her history of women and the law. For some years her capacity for reading and writing exceeded her husband’s, and even afterwards she had a much greater tolerance for public speaking. Sometimes Max presented himself as ‘the husband of Marianne Weber.’ At first her public involvement developed entirely in the framework of the National-Socials, who were receptive to women’s issues even at a time when exclusively male suffrage meant that they had little to gain from it electorally. Gertrud Baumer (1873-1954), chairperson from 1910 of the Bund Deitscher Frauenvereine- League of German Women’s Associations, was a close friend of Friedrich Naumann, for whom Marie Baum (1874-1964) was also full of enthusiasm. Both women were on close terms with the Webers: see how a network of relations was coming together.
Marianne’s rise to become a scholarly authority of the women’s movement
At the National-Social meeting in December 1903, Marianne found herself for the first time having to ‘chirp a bit for a crowd of men’, as she put it to Helene. ‘It later struck me as an irony of fate that I, poor little Snouty, was at a political meeting until one in the morning, whereas our big boy had to be in bed by ten.’ We should not take this self-belittlement too seriously, by the way; Marianne could play with her own shyness because, in reality, her confidence was growing by leaps and bounds as she learned how to speak in public, to engage in political tactics and to write polished prose.
Not being a legal expert herself, she took advise from her husband for much of the historical material that she worked on in her Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung. But it was unquestionably her book, and anyway during those years Max Weber would have been incapable of drafting and outline, let alone a detailed plan, for a work on that scale. When Marianne complained in 1906 that Max was so ‘dreadfully demanding’ in relation to the book, and that she was sometimes ‘quite livid’ about it, we obviously cannot infer that he more or less wrote it for her. Even the word ‘development’ in the title of the book did not go well with the struggle that Max was then waging against ‘naturalism.’ Moreover, her geography of the history of women’s rights looked different from his geography: it was precisely in English common law that a woman was ‘not regarded as a subject in her own right’, whereas Russia of all places was more advanced in the division of matrimonial property and ‘Prussian women were granted legal claim to their spouses fidelity approximately one hundred years before their English and French counterparts.’ ‘As we see’, she concluded, ‘the political freedoms of Western Europe was a freedom for men.’ When the proofs arrive, ‘my clever little Max smuggled in a few of his ideas; but then his wife started to ‘scream’. Evidently the couple did not always handle each other with the kid gloves we see in their surviving letters.
The spur to engage in this work came from feminist disappointment over the place of the family in the Civil Code. As Marianne’s friend Marie Bernays** put it ‘Despite energetic protests, women achieved neither the legal division of matrimonial property, nor the necessity for children born out of wedlock.’ Here Marianne came up against the hard core of patriarchy, which often remained hidden in social gatherings. Not in every respect was she one of the moderate feminists who avoided the conflict-ridden issues. Through discussions with Max, her confrontation with the Civil Code acquired a world-historical dimension. Even if she did not believe in a happy bygone age of matriarchy, the development of civilization was for her bound up not only with progress but also with many retrograde steps in the legal position of women. To be sure, her approach to the women’s question was very bourgeois and typical of a wealthy heiress; poor women had different priorities. We sense the pain of her own marriage when she complains that the husband’s control over all the money creates ‘harrowing situation’ for any wife ‘with a sensitive nature’, since she ‘has to keep asking him for small sums’ for the housekeeping, while he keeps being unpleasantly surprised that the sum he has ‘only just’ given her has ‘already been used up’. Something like that used to happen in the Weber household.
When Marianne admitted in 1906 that scholarly work has ‘really turned her into a slave in recent years’, but that the slavery had been joyful and the work burden ‘infinitely exhilarating , we are reminded of Max Weber’s earlier craving to ‘succumb to the burden of work’. With her magnum opus Marianne became a scholarly authority of the women’s movement, much as Likely Braun had been with her Die Frauenfrage (1901), an equally extensive work that had also traced its subject back to antiquity. Lily Braun was friendly with Sombart and could fall back on his knowledge of world history, but she was ignored by Marianne Weber. In the last few years before the war, Marianne came under consideration for the national presidency of the League of German Women’s Association (BDF), but she felt that such a top position would be too much for her. However, she could see the ay when she would no longer be able to say ‘no’, ‘then heaven help me!’ And in 1919 the day did indeed come.
If Marianne had pursued a university career, her work on Fichte and her legal history of woman would have added up to a considerable qualification. But, for all her historical knowledge, she lacked a training in the law, and does not seem to have thought herself capable of giving practical legal advise to women. For decades that was the job of Camilla Jellinek (1860-1940), the wife of the constitutional theorist Georg Jellinek. In this case, there was no equivalent on the wives’ side to the friendship between the two husbands; a rivalry soon developed between them, although their skills were such that they could have complimented each other nicely. In 1902 Marianne complained that a ‘conflict with the very, very ambitious and unidealistic Frau Jellinek’ was causing her sleepless nights’.
Shortly afterwards, the two formed what now seems a rather curious action group against the Heidelberg brothel. Marianne called for ‘unrelenting struggle against male licentiousness’, drawing a parallel with slavery, described their campaign as ‘abolitionist’ in line with international feminist usage. The campaign against officially supervised and therefore legitimate prostitution – her first public campaign, in which she drew on a whole register of moral revulsion – was for her a struggle against a certain doctrine of natural law: ‘Above all, we must drop the scientifically obsolete theory derived from the doctrine of natural law, according to which a distinction between ‘crime’; and ‘vice’; means that prostitution, corresponding as it does to male nature, is a vice but not a crime’.
Camilla Jellinek waged a campaign over many years against the employment of women as waitresses, on the grounds that it was often a cover for prostitution. In a town such as Heidelberg, where waitresses were often very popular among students, this must have seemed an odd idea; and, much to Camilla Jellinek’s disappointment, the waitresses were not at all in favor of it. This would hardly have surprised Max Weber, who noted in Economy and Society that ‘professional prostitution of both the heterosexual and homosexual types (noting the training of tribades) is found even at the most primitive levels of culture; it was thus something natural, not the product of certain social conditions. When the writer Anna Pappritz, chairman of the German section of the International Abolitionist Federation, resumed the campaign against brothels in the middle of the war and looked to Marianne for support, Max Weber flared up: ‘The devil take this Pappritz woman What does she think she’s playing at?’
Abstract
respect and practical ambivalence: The Weber’s and the woman’s movement.
Commitment to the emancipated woman of the future did not necessarily go together with strong sympathy for actually existing women- nor did it in reality in the case of Max Weber. As Ingrid Gilcher Holtey has written: ‘Without a sensual-erotic component, the relationship to woman becomes for Max Weber the abstract women’s question.’ In fact, Max Weber felt a degree of distaste for the female world characteristic of the upper classes of his time: the lavish spending on toiletries, the typical female conversation and dances. In France and Spain in 1897, the female elegance does not seem to have had the slightest attraction for him, so that he could write of the women out for a stroll in San Sebastion: ‘Their hats are a meter high, and although their faces rise above the horrifying emptiness of French women they too are on the whole chattering silk and flower stalls . . .a creature that can make you feel quite sick’. But many feminists shared his abhorrence of this female type, who preferred to look in the mirror rather than a serious books.
Max Weber had a higher regard for the feminist movement at the abstract level than he did for most feminist women. ‘Furies’ became his standard term for feminists, even if he sometimes put it between inverted commas. ‘My wife is with the other ‘furies’ in Berlin visiting the culture minister,’ he wrote in 1907 to Rickert, when a delegation from a congress on higher education for women was invited to the ministry. In 1910, speaking to Sophie Rickert, he referred to a BDF meeting in Heidelberg as a ‘furies’ ‘ congress’, and at the thought of the women congregating there, he wanted to ‘put his tail between his legs and take it as far away as possible’. Marianne ‘quite often conceded ‘ that ‘male feminists’- which include him- ‘were not basically seen by women as altogether of the male sex.
But, however highly she thought of feminists, Marianne did not feel comfortable at large women’s congresses; more often than not, they were a test of nerves rather than a source of strength. Women who attended them, she wrote to Helene in 1894, were ‘rather poorly endowed in corpore’; they had not been ‘brought up to feel solidarity with one another’ or to discuss ‘in a logical and parliamentary manner’. In July 1900 she spoke dismissively of a ‘long-winded women’s meeting’; in 1905 she described a meeting of the BDF presidency, to which she had allowed herself to be elected, as an ‘awful sacrifice’ that caused her several days of migraine; and in early 1911 she noted in her diary that a ‘low-grade public’ had assembled in Karlsruhe for the founding conference of the Baden Women’s League.
Sometimes she endured women’s meetings with better humor and treated them as a necessary stage for hitherto non-political women, where they ‘rabbit on about the purest nonsense’. Occasionally – and, one might say, forgivably for a woman living by the side of Max Weber – she felt the intellectual superiority of men. ‘I covet the wisdom of men’, she wrote in 1908 to Helene. Such slips are probably one of the reasons why, despite the many books by women about women, Marianne has still not found a thorough female biographer. But we should bear in mind that she was not alone in experiencing large women’s meetings as a chore rather than a joy. Even Gertrude Baumer, who was elected BDF chairperson in 1910 and appeared to be the archetypal political woman, confessed to her in early 1909 ‘that the world of objectivity’- that is of politics and supra-individual interests – was ‘a pretty feeble affair’, although she wanted this ‘female admission to remain confidential, as otherwise ‘men will look down on us’. Even for her, then, the women’s movement was not a tightly fitting reality. Her friend Ika Freudenberg wrote to her around that time: ‘Let’s forget about the whole women’s movement and find a nest for ourselves somewhere in the bosom of nature’.
When Alice Salomon was elected to the BDF presidency in 1900 she found herself on a committee where the youngest person until then had been ‘not less than sixty’; she quoted without comment a male writer who described the women at BDF meetings as ‘black widows’. Marianne’s first impressions of the women’s movement were similar. Evidently, man-hating and pleasure-hating old spinsters were not a bogey invented by anti-feminists. Marie Stritt, chairperson of the BDF from 1899 to 1910, placed a pointed remark at the front of a book on contraception (1908): ‘The women’s question is not the spinsters’ question.’
The generational change in the women’s movement after the turn of the century brought new tensions, in which personal rivalries were combined with disputes on substantive issues such as the extent to which common cause should be made with social democratic women. In a letter to Max, who was then at the establishment in Urach, Marianne raged against the ‘radicals’ who spent two whole days ‘scribbling at a women’s congress and ‘talking everyone else half-dead’ in order to make a ‘declaration of love to the social democratesses (Sozialdemokrateusen)’.’ Your little Snouty shot off her mouth off a few times. Against the declaration of love, of course.’ Other controversies touched on more intimate issues. Should marriage – or celibacy in the unmarried –remain the ideal for women, or should the movement make unmarried mothers and contraception one of its special concerns? Should it demand equal right as in every respect or, basing itself on women’s special nature, call for special measures to protect them? Marianne held that later view, and Max Weber too, in arguing with his mother, condemned doctrinaire notions of equality that refused to recognize any particularities: ‘Of course, this whole opposition on the part of women is out of touch with the reality of life and is a source of of amusement for factory-owners who profit from it. As far as women were concerned, life does seem to have been a fount of law.***
Weber’s fury with the ‘motherhood protection’ mob
The seemingly innocuous question of the employment rights of expectant and nursing mothers was a delicate matter in those days, for it applied mainly to unmarried women; even Alice Salomon, who remained single all her life, thought that it ‘threatened to leave married women out of consideration’. In 1905 a League for the Protection of Motherhood was founded; its leading light was Helene Stocker (1869-1943), publisher since 1903 of the Frauen-Rundschau, who had done a doctorate in philosophy, admired Nietzsche and actively promoted not only women’s rights but also pacifism, greater sexual freedoms and eugenics. The league expanded rapidly in its first few years: two-thirds of its members were women, but the proportion of doctors was also conspicuously high.
Both Max Weber and Werner Sombart signed the funding appeal, but Weber withdrew before the end of the first year. For, under the aegis of Helene Stocker, the league went in a direction he had not expected: to demand equal rights for unmarried mothers, the legalization of abortion and free distribution of contraceptives. Early in 1907 Weber fumed to Michels that the ‘motherhood protection mob’ was a ‘completely confused rabble’: ‘Crude hedonism & ethics only to men’s benefit, presented as a goal for women: that is simply twaddle.’ He spoke of ‘petty bourgeois run amok’.
Weber’s outburst may be seen as reflecting his sexual inhibition at the time, but a century later his view that free love is often at the women’s expense and that an intact family is the best protection of motherhood does not appear completely unrealistic, even if it is not theoretically conclusive either. Weber’s lashing out at the ‘motherhood protection mob’ reminds one of his attack ten years earlier on the ‘demon of matriarchy’; the theory of primeval matriarchy was then also part of the ideology of free love. Seven years later, however, the same Max Weber was using all his legal skills to fight for the mother’s right to her child.
Although the women’s movement may at first have had a somewhat spinsterly aspect, the League for the Protection of Motherhood introduced a new element that caused a great deal of tension and excitement. One part of the women’s movement met up here with the ‘erotic movement’, the gospel of free love combined with free contraception; we may even say that it was under the banner of the protection of motherhood that sexual reformers formed themselves into a regular movement. Unfettered eroticism lay concealed beneath a slogan that seemed to speak of welfare and social protection.
Charity work by good middle-class women on behalf of ‘fallen girls’ previously had a certain voyeuristic appeal. As Marianne wrote in 1895 of a visit to the Verein fur Frauenschutz, ‘hot and cold flushes came over’ her as she saw how ‘young women could speak of the most intimate aspects . . .of their confinement’. It was always interesting to discuss the ‘social question’ as asexual question, whether in relation to ‘night lodgers’ in large apartment blocks or to the defenselessness of female factory-workers. In the autumn of 1902, when Max was traveling, various female visitors began to debate with Marianne ‘so loudly and heated about issues of morality’ that someone said it was fortunate that ‘there was not a man in the house’- then Max suddenly appeared in the room and the discussion broke off. In 1903, at the time of her campaign against the Heidelberg brothel, Marianne wrote that ‘the issue of morality’, which then ‘passionately occupied’ her, was leading to tensions within the women’s movement. Questions of love, marriage and morality helped her gain a wider audience than Max ever had in his lifetime. Her book on women and love, Die Frauen und die Liebe (1935), was a late reply to Helene Stocker’s Die Liebe und die Frauen (1906).
For all her criticism of patriarchal structures, Marianne always regarded monogamy as an ethical achievement for women in particular, whereas the BDF chairwoman and actress Marie Stritt (1855-1928), the wife of an opera singer, took a different line. In 1903 Marianne complained of her: ‘She is attached with all her heart to the economic independence of women . . .and, to make this possible, she would happily send family and marriage to the devil and call upon all women to limit the number of their children.’ The BDF leader was ‘quite beside herself’ over Marianne’s essay on professional life and marriage, Beruf und Ehe (1905), which on the one hand had energetically pleaded, in the spirit of The Protestant Ethic, for women to be instructed in ‘methodically planning of their lives’, but on the other hand had insisted on motherhood as an woman’s special vocation and rejected attempts to lift the burden on women through collective childcare. Marie Stritt would never forgive her for this piece, and from now on Marianne worked to have her removed from her leadership position. And in fact –as a result of ‘intrigues behind the scenes’, according to Richard Evans- Marie Stritt was replaced in 19190 by Marianne’s friend Gertrud Baumer.
This was preceded by a sharp dispute over whether the League for the Protection of Motherhood should be accepted into the BDF- which at the time was a dispute over marriage and sexual morality. Marie Stritt argued in favor of its acceptance, but the contrary position upheld by Gertrud Baumer and Marianne Weber won in the end. The whole controversy left an unpleasant aftertaste for Alice Salomon, who felt that Marianne Weber, Helene Lang and Gertrud Baumer had conduced a ‘smear campaign’ against Marie Stritt. Her characterization of ‘the Webers’ cast light on how they were seen outside their circle of friends, and shows once again that they were not naturally inclined to make critical use of knowledge:
But Marianne has for some time ,. . .been fighting hard, as the Webers often do, because thy believe in the unconditional truth and correctness of their conviction. And this leads them to pass sentence on their opponent, to sneer at other people who are aware of human errors & fine shades of grey between black & white.
In 1907 Marianne dreaded the thought of a lecture that Helene Stocker was due to give in Heidelberg, although she was used to arguing with her about the legal history of women.
On the other hand, of course, male and female students do not have to be told twice that ‘free relations’ are much noble than monogamy. It is quite certain that H. St. is seriously harming our movement and, if this is not at all her intention, encouraging the libertinism of youth ,. . . You can imagine that the whole business is praying on my mind . . . And then this terrible effect on young people. It would seem that in Munich they are all amusing themselves with free relationships and trading condoms.
‘Torn by revulsion’ at the splendor of ‘blood-warm life’
Between the lines Marianne assumed, like Max Weber, that human beings –including girls- had a naturally polygamous sex drive, which immediately broke through once it gained an appearance of legitimacy. In her biography, Mariane described with remarkable candor the inner turmoil that the challenge of the ‘erotic movement’ aroused in herself and Max. Arguments about it in their circle with ‘highly principled, cultured people’ ‘shocked the Webers and perturbed them far more than the impersonal public fight’; their world was indeed filled with lively people, essentially from their personal circle. As they watched the gospel of free love take its toll, mainly through the breakdown of marriages, they were ‘torn by horror and revulsion by the theory and by a profound sympathy for the unhappy lives that prepared the ground for such misleading teachings’.
To be sure, there were no taboo subjects for Max and Marianne, and they pondered whether each of them might not find sexual happiness in other relationships; they therefore felt quite personally affected by the debates about eroticism. Both Max and Marianne often traveled alone, not worrying too much about conventional bourgeois norms, and in 1907 she even went to Pontresina and Sils Maria with a highly regarded young philosopher Emil Lask, with whom she was connected by a common interest in Fichte. Already in 1915, ‘we met up when Max was ill in Rome’, she wrote to Helene without any inhibition. Its through Lask that Mina Tobler entered the Weber circle; and, when Lask- who supported the idea of free love- started a relationship with Lina Radbruch that led to the breakup of the Radbruch’s marriage, the circle found itself devastated not for the last time by the erotic movement.
In today’s history books, the ten years before 1914 were a time of growing international tensions. But Marianne, with the Weber world before her eyes, wrote in 1907: ‘There seems no doubt that we are living in a period of sharp sexual tension’. She must of felt the tension inside herself too. Admittedly she was indignant in 1902 when the Saxon crown princess scandalized Europe by running off to Switzerland with her private tutor: ‘Can that be considered from a general point of view? she asked. ‘It’s really just an appalling act by one individual.’ A few years later, however, she came to see this kind of female autonomy more and more from ‘a general point of view’:
Commitment to the emancipated woman of the future did not necessarily go together with strong sympathy for actually existing women- nor did it in reality in the case of Max Weber. As Ingrid Gilcher Holtey has written: ‘Without a sensual-erotic component, the relationship to woman becomes for Max Weber the abstract women’s question.’ In fact, Max Weber felt a degree of distaste for the female world characteristic of the upper classes of his time: the lavish spending on toiletries, the typical female conversation and dances. In France and Spain in 1897, the female elegance does not seem to have had the slightest attraction for him, so that he could write of the women out for a stroll in San Sebastion: ‘Their hats are a meter high, and although their faces rise above the horrifying emptiness of French women they too are on the whole chattering silk and flower stalls . . .a creature that can make you feel quite sick’. But many feminists shared his abhorrence of this female type, who preferred to look in the mirror rather than a serious books.
Max Weber had a higher regard for the feminist movement at the abstract level than he did for most feminist women. ‘Furies’ became his standard term for feminists, even if he sometimes put it between inverted commas. ‘My wife is with the other ‘furies’ in Berlin visiting the culture minister,’ he wrote in 1907 to Rickert, when a delegation from a congress on higher education for women was invited to the ministry. In 1910, speaking to Sophie Rickert, he referred to a BDF meeting in Heidelberg as a ‘furies’ ‘ congress’, and at the thought of the women congregating there, he wanted to ‘put his tail between his legs and take it as far away as possible’. Marianne ‘quite often conceded ‘ that ‘male feminists’- which include him- ‘were not basically seen by women as altogether of the male sex.
But, however highly she thought of feminists, Marianne did not feel comfortable at large women’s congresses; more often than not, they were a test of nerves rather than a source of strength. Women who attended them, she wrote to Helene in 1894, were ‘rather poorly endowed in corpore’; they had not been ‘brought up to feel solidarity with one another’ or to discuss ‘in a logical and parliamentary manner’. In July 1900 she spoke dismissively of a ‘long-winded women’s meeting’; in 1905 she described a meeting of the BDF presidency, to which she had allowed herself to be elected, as an ‘awful sacrifice’ that caused her several days of migraine; and in early 1911 she noted in her diary that a ‘low-grade public’ had assembled in Karlsruhe for the founding conference of the Baden Women’s League.
Sometimes she endured women’s meetings with better humor and treated them as a necessary stage for hitherto non-political women, where they ‘rabbit on about the purest nonsense’. Occasionally – and, one might say, forgivably for a woman living by the side of Max Weber – she felt the intellectual superiority of men. ‘I covet the wisdom of men’, she wrote in 1908 to Helene. Such slips are probably one of the reasons why, despite the many books by women about women, Marianne has still not found a thorough female biographer. But we should bear in mind that she was not alone in experiencing large women’s meetings as a chore rather than a joy. Even Gertrude Baumer, who was elected BDF chairperson in 1910 and appeared to be the archetypal political woman, confessed to her in early 1909 ‘that the world of objectivity’- that is of politics and supra-individual interests – was ‘a pretty feeble affair’, although she wanted this ‘female admission to remain confidential, as otherwise ‘men will look down on us’. Even for her, then, the women’s movement was not a tightly fitting reality. Her friend Ika Freudenberg wrote to her around that time: ‘Let’s forget about the whole women’s movement and find a nest for ourselves somewhere in the bosom of nature’.
When Alice Salomon was elected to the BDF presidency in 1900 she found herself on a committee where the youngest person until then had been ‘not less than sixty’; she quoted without comment a male writer who described the women at BDF meetings as ‘black widows’. Marianne’s first impressions of the women’s movement were similar. Evidently, man-hating and pleasure-hating old spinsters were not a bogey invented by anti-feminists. Marie Stritt, chairperson of the BDF from 1899 to 1910, placed a pointed remark at the front of a book on contraception (1908): ‘The women’s question is not the spinsters’ question.’
The generational change in the women’s movement after the turn of the century brought new tensions, in which personal rivalries were combined with disputes on substantive issues such as the extent to which common cause should be made with social democratic women. In a letter to Max, who was then at the establishment in Urach, Marianne raged against the ‘radicals’ who spent two whole days ‘scribbling at a women’s congress and ‘talking everyone else half-dead’ in order to make a ‘declaration of love to the social democratesses (Sozialdemokrateusen)’.’ Your little Snouty shot off her mouth off a few times. Against the declaration of love, of course.’ Other controversies touched on more intimate issues. Should marriage – or celibacy in the unmarried –remain the ideal for women, or should the movement make unmarried mothers and contraception one of its special concerns? Should it demand equal right as in every respect or, basing itself on women’s special nature, call for special measures to protect them? Marianne held that later view, and Max Weber too, in arguing with his mother, condemned doctrinaire notions of equality that refused to recognize any particularities: ‘Of course, this whole opposition on the part of women is out of touch with the reality of life and is a source of of amusement for factory-owners who profit from it. As far as women were concerned, life does seem to have been a fount of law.***
Weber’s fury with the ‘motherhood protection’ mob
The seemingly innocuous question of the employment rights of expectant and nursing mothers was a delicate matter in those days, for it applied mainly to unmarried women; even Alice Salomon, who remained single all her life, thought that it ‘threatened to leave married women out of consideration’. In 1905 a League for the Protection of Motherhood was founded; its leading light was Helene Stocker (1869-1943), publisher since 1903 of the Frauen-Rundschau, who had done a doctorate in philosophy, admired Nietzsche and actively promoted not only women’s rights but also pacifism, greater sexual freedoms and eugenics. The league expanded rapidly in its first few years: two-thirds of its members were women, but the proportion of doctors was also conspicuously high.
Both Max Weber and Werner Sombart signed the funding appeal, but Weber withdrew before the end of the first year. For, under the aegis of Helene Stocker, the league went in a direction he had not expected: to demand equal rights for unmarried mothers, the legalization of abortion and free distribution of contraceptives. Early in 1907 Weber fumed to Michels that the ‘motherhood protection mob’ was a ‘completely confused rabble’: ‘Crude hedonism & ethics only to men’s benefit, presented as a goal for women: that is simply twaddle.’ He spoke of ‘petty bourgeois run amok’.
Weber’s outburst may be seen as reflecting his sexual inhibition at the time, but a century later his view that free love is often at the women’s expense and that an intact family is the best protection of motherhood does not appear completely unrealistic, even if it is not theoretically conclusive either. Weber’s lashing out at the ‘motherhood protection mob’ reminds one of his attack ten years earlier on the ‘demon of matriarchy’; the theory of primeval matriarchy was then also part of the ideology of free love. Seven years later, however, the same Max Weber was using all his legal skills to fight for the mother’s right to her child.
Although the women’s movement may at first have had a somewhat spinsterly aspect, the League for the Protection of Motherhood introduced a new element that caused a great deal of tension and excitement. One part of the women’s movement met up here with the ‘erotic movement’, the gospel of free love combined with free contraception; we may even say that it was under the banner of the protection of motherhood that sexual reformers formed themselves into a regular movement. Unfettered eroticism lay concealed beneath a slogan that seemed to speak of welfare and social protection.
Charity work by good middle-class women on behalf of ‘fallen girls’ previously had a certain voyeuristic appeal. As Marianne wrote in 1895 of a visit to the Verein fur Frauenschutz, ‘hot and cold flushes came over’ her as she saw how ‘young women could speak of the most intimate aspects . . .of their confinement’. It was always interesting to discuss the ‘social question’ as asexual question, whether in relation to ‘night lodgers’ in large apartment blocks or to the defenselessness of female factory-workers. In the autumn of 1902, when Max was traveling, various female visitors began to debate with Marianne ‘so loudly and heated about issues of morality’ that someone said it was fortunate that ‘there was not a man in the house’- then Max suddenly appeared in the room and the discussion broke off. In 1903, at the time of her campaign against the Heidelberg brothel, Marianne wrote that ‘the issue of morality’, which then ‘passionately occupied’ her, was leading to tensions within the women’s movement. Questions of love, marriage and morality helped her gain a wider audience than Max ever had in his lifetime. Her book on women and love, Die Frauen und die Liebe (1935), was a late reply to Helene Stocker’s Die Liebe und die Frauen (1906).
For all her criticism of patriarchal structures, Marianne always regarded monogamy as an ethical achievement for women in particular, whereas the BDF chairwoman and actress Marie Stritt (1855-1928), the wife of an opera singer, took a different line. In 1903 Marianne complained of her: ‘She is attached with all her heart to the economic independence of women . . .and, to make this possible, she would happily send family and marriage to the devil and call upon all women to limit the number of their children.’ The BDF leader was ‘quite beside herself’ over Marianne’s essay on professional life and marriage, Beruf und Ehe (1905), which on the one hand had energetically pleaded, in the spirit of The Protestant Ethic, for women to be instructed in ‘methodically planning of their lives’, but on the other hand had insisted on motherhood as an woman’s special vocation and rejected attempts to lift the burden on women through collective childcare. Marie Stritt would never forgive her for this piece, and from now on Marianne worked to have her removed from her leadership position. And in fact –as a result of ‘intrigues behind the scenes’, according to Richard Evans- Marie Stritt was replaced in 19190 by Marianne’s friend Gertrud Baumer.
This was preceded by a sharp dispute over whether the League for the Protection of Motherhood should be accepted into the BDF- which at the time was a dispute over marriage and sexual morality. Marie Stritt argued in favor of its acceptance, but the contrary position upheld by Gertrud Baumer and Marianne Weber won in the end. The whole controversy left an unpleasant aftertaste for Alice Salomon, who felt that Marianne Weber, Helene Lang and Gertrud Baumer had conduced a ‘smear campaign’ against Marie Stritt. Her characterization of ‘the Webers’ cast light on how they were seen outside their circle of friends, and shows once again that they were not naturally inclined to make critical use of knowledge:
But Marianne has for some time ,. . .been fighting hard, as the Webers often do, because thy believe in the unconditional truth and correctness of their conviction. And this leads them to pass sentence on their opponent, to sneer at other people who are aware of human errors & fine shades of grey between black & white.
In 1907 Marianne dreaded the thought of a lecture that Helene Stocker was due to give in Heidelberg, although she was used to arguing with her about the legal history of women.
On the other hand, of course, male and female students do not have to be told twice that ‘free relations’ are much noble than monogamy. It is quite certain that H. St. is seriously harming our movement and, if this is not at all her intention, encouraging the libertinism of youth ,. . . You can imagine that the whole business is praying on my mind . . . And then this terrible effect on young people. It would seem that in Munich they are all amusing themselves with free relationships and trading condoms.
‘Torn by revulsion’ at the splendor of ‘blood-warm life’
Between the lines Marianne assumed, like Max Weber, that human beings –including girls- had a naturally polygamous sex drive, which immediately broke through once it gained an appearance of legitimacy. In her biography, Mariane described with remarkable candor the inner turmoil that the challenge of the ‘erotic movement’ aroused in herself and Max. Arguments about it in their circle with ‘highly principled, cultured people’ ‘shocked the Webers and perturbed them far more than the impersonal public fight’; their world was indeed filled with lively people, essentially from their personal circle. As they watched the gospel of free love take its toll, mainly through the breakdown of marriages, they were ‘torn by horror and revulsion by the theory and by a profound sympathy for the unhappy lives that prepared the ground for such misleading teachings’.
To be sure, there were no taboo subjects for Max and Marianne, and they pondered whether each of them might not find sexual happiness in other relationships; they therefore felt quite personally affected by the debates about eroticism. Both Max and Marianne often traveled alone, not worrying too much about conventional bourgeois norms, and in 1907 she even went to Pontresina and Sils Maria with a highly regarded young philosopher Emil Lask, with whom she was connected by a common interest in Fichte. Already in 1915, ‘we met up when Max was ill in Rome’, she wrote to Helene without any inhibition. Its through Lask that Mina Tobler entered the Weber circle; and, when Lask- who supported the idea of free love- started a relationship with Lina Radbruch that led to the breakup of the Radbruch’s marriage, the circle found itself devastated not for the last time by the erotic movement.
In today’s history books, the ten years before 1914 were a time of growing international tensions. But Marianne, with the Weber world before her eyes, wrote in 1907: ‘There seems no doubt that we are living in a period of sharp sexual tension’. She must of felt the tension inside herself too. Admittedly she was indignant in 1902 when the Saxon crown princess scandalized Europe by running off to Switzerland with her private tutor: ‘Can that be considered from a general point of view? she asked. ‘It’s really just an appalling act by one individual.’ A few years later, however, she came to see this kind of female autonomy more and more from ‘a general point of view’:
‘What
was the value of norms that so often stifled the magnificence of vibrant life,
repressed natural drives, and, above all, denied fulfilment to so many women?
Law, duty, asceticism – were not all these ideas derived from the demonization of
sex by outgrown Christianity? To shape one’s future entirely on the basis of one’s
own nature, to let the currents of life flow through one and then to bar the
consequences, was better than to sneak along the sterile paths of caution hemmed
in by morality.’
She was playing the devil’s advocate here, but doing it so brilliantly that one feels something of herself in the words. For Marianne, too, nature was the origin of the human condition. Anyway, over the years she developed a certain understanding of the erotic movement, especially as the result of the turbulent relations of Else Jaffe**** . . .
* Eranos Years:
An air of eroticism hung over Weber’s circle: the talk was not only scholarly but also turned to life’s problems; those present were overwhelmingly young and unmarried and emphatically free of of prejudices; the two sexes were equally represented. Later, in the Zwischenbetrachtung, Weber argued that the ‘intellectualism of salon culture’ had brought about a ‘further enhancement of the specifically sensationalist character of eroticism’. For ‘salon culture rested on the conviction that inter-sexual conversation is a valuable creative power’, so that ‘the latent or overt erotic sensation’ became an indispensable means of stimulating this conversation’. Precisely because such intellectualism grew so remote from the organic cycle of life, only sexual life’ remained as a link to ‘the natural fountain of all life.’
** She studied at Heidelberg. What relation she had to the Bernays who married into the Freuds may be available in German Wikipedia, or not.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/bernays-marie-1883-1939
*** life, the reality of life as it is actually lived is the main subject of sociology itself and through-out his life Weber grappled with the implications of natural law theory for it .Briefly, what is natural for men and women, what is the behavior rising from social and political norms of the society in which they live? What means to what ends? Usually, the author notes, Weber takes a position opposing the prevailing opinion within his milieu, not without contradiction and ambiguity. Evidentially Weber struggled with his own ‘natural feelings’ and this is the ‘sickness’ and its attempted cures in various clinical residencies mentioned in the text.
**** her sister married D.H.Lawrence.She was convinced she was the model for Lady Chatterley
She was playing the devil’s advocate here, but doing it so brilliantly that one feels something of herself in the words. For Marianne, too, nature was the origin of the human condition. Anyway, over the years she developed a certain understanding of the erotic movement, especially as the result of the turbulent relations of Else Jaffe**** . . .
* Eranos Years:
An air of eroticism hung over Weber’s circle: the talk was not only scholarly but also turned to life’s problems; those present were overwhelmingly young and unmarried and emphatically free of of prejudices; the two sexes were equally represented. Later, in the Zwischenbetrachtung, Weber argued that the ‘intellectualism of salon culture’ had brought about a ‘further enhancement of the specifically sensationalist character of eroticism’. For ‘salon culture rested on the conviction that inter-sexual conversation is a valuable creative power’, so that ‘the latent or overt erotic sensation’ became an indispensable means of stimulating this conversation’. Precisely because such intellectualism grew so remote from the organic cycle of life, only sexual life’ remained as a link to ‘the natural fountain of all life.’
** She studied at Heidelberg. What relation she had to the Bernays who married into the Freuds may be available in German Wikipedia, or not.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/bernays-marie-1883-1939
*** life, the reality of life as it is actually lived is the main subject of sociology itself and through-out his life Weber grappled with the implications of natural law theory for it .Briefly, what is natural for men and women, what is the behavior rising from social and political norms of the society in which they live? What means to what ends? Usually, the author notes, Weber takes a position opposing the prevailing opinion within his milieu, not without contradiction and ambiguity. Evidentially Weber struggled with his own ‘natural feelings’ and this is the ‘sickness’ and its attempted cures in various clinical residencies mentioned in the text.
**** her sister married D.H.Lawrence.She was convinced she was the model for Lady Chatterley
