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Chapter 2

SEXOLOGY AND THE SINGLE WOMAN

Old maids have a long history. Prior to the late nineteenth century, condemnations of single women were based upon a simple premise: unwed women threatened the prevailing economic and social order. Indeed, fear of the unattached woman as a destabilizing force had contributed to the condemnation of widows during the witch craze of early modern Europe. By the turn of the twentieth century, as educational and professional opportunities became more accessible for middle-class single women, one might have been able to hope for the eradication of discrimination against the unwed. Yet a 1911 essay asserted otherwise: “The old maid, that brutal social malformation, was about to disappear…but suddenly in the last few years, she has emerged again.”¹

A review of sexual scholarship indicates that representations of the alte Jungfer (old maid) took on new characteristics just when one might have expected the hackneyed stereotype to fade away. The emerging field of Sexualwissenschaft (sexology) at the turn-of-the-century offered fresh insights into the category of old maidenhood by openly discussing female sexuality and affirming the existence and importance of the female sex drive. Sexual scientists offered an interpretation of single women supporting Michel Foucault's contention that “the society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society…set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex…as if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge.”² In pursuit of a uniform truth, scientia sexualis established controlling norms of sexual health and deviance. Yet, as historians Edward R. Dickinson and Richard Wetzell have observed regarding the historiography of German sexuality, “the field of sexual power/knowledge is constructed within a complex social environment…it is not the property of a few academically trained doctors or servants.”³ The sexologists addressed in this chapter responded and further contributed to a discourse on sexuality that reflected contemporary concerns about gender roles, women's rights, separate spheres, and the meaning of marriage. The surplus woman stood at the nexus of those anxieties. Sexological examination of the female unwed rendered readings that were embedded in an era of cultural and social apprehension, even as they attempted to create a modern, scientific understanding of womanhood.

Richard Krafft-Ebing, the Viennese neurologist who pioneered Central European sexology,⁴ established in the late nineteenth century the paradigmatic view of sexologists on single marital status: “Mental illness is much more frequent among the single than among the married, a fact that…is explained in that the ages of the single are more strongly represented in the population which exhibits a greater predisposition to illness…[and] that the more hygienic conditions of married life and regular sexual intercourse have prophylactic effects.”⁵ The greater likelihood of mental illness befalling the unwed, combined with the belief that women in general exhibited “a greater disposition to mental illness than men,” meant a much higher likelihood of instability among single women: “If the female must bear alone the struggle for existence—as in the case of widows—then she succumbs more easily and rapidly than the man.” Beyond the psychic stress of solitary life, unmarried women suffered due to celibacy: “The female, by nature as much in need of sex as the man, at least in the ideal sense, knows no other respectable satisfaction of this need than marriage…Through countless generations, her character is developed in this direction.” Thus, Krafft-Ebing and the generation of sexologists that followed him viewed the female surplus as a serious threat to female mental health: “Modern life with its increasing demands offers ever fewer prospects of fulfillment in marriage. This is especially true for the higher classes, in which marriages take place later and more seldomly.”⁶

Bourgeois surplus women emerged as objects of case studies among the early sexologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Krafft-Ebing described the female proclivity toward mental illness in contrast to men:

As the stronger, through their greater intellectual and physical strength and their free social position, men can procure for themselves sexual satisfaction without trouble or can easily find an equivalent in a vocation which calls for their entire energy. But these paths are closed to the single females of the better classes. This initially leads to conscious or unconscious dissatisfactions with themselves and the world, to abnormal brooding. For some time, many sought a surrogate in religion, but in vain. Religious zeal, with or without masturbation, has brought forth a host of neuropathies, among which hysteria and mental illness are not infrequent. Only realize the fact that the greatest frequency of insanity among single females occurs in the time of the 25th to the 35th years of life, the time where the prime of life disappears and life's hopes along with it.⁷

Naturally inferior to men, weakened by forsaken dreams, and sickened by sexual abstinence, single women occupied a precarious realm of mental health. Elite social status further imperiled them and the historical sanctuary of religious faith could well make them even more ill. The female surplus thus provided fertile cases of dysfunction for the emerging field of sexual science to examine. The Kaiserreich bore witness to the reinvention of the alte Jungfer as new deviant.⁸

Lapdogs and Libidos

The field of Sexualwissenschaft emerged in the early twentieth century.⁹ The designation of the field marked a culmination of important work on the subject of sex, which had been conducted in the previous decades by psychologists, anthropologists, and physicians. Sexologists sought both to raise the understanding of the importance of sex to the human condition and to make the study of sex an important category of scientific knowledge. At the same time, as historian Harry Oosterhuis has argued, “nineteenth-century medical interest in sexuality was dictated by wider social anxieties.”¹⁰ Debate surrounding women's rights informed the ways in which sexual scientists approached female sexuality in general as well as the sexuality of unwed females in particular. An examination of the work of Central European sexologists, including Iwan Bloch, August Forel, Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Max Marcuse, Hermann Ploss, Hermann Rohleder, Wilhelm Stekel, and Otto Weininger, demonstrates that the stereotype of the alte Jungfer received new vigor as unmarried women came under the lens of sexual science.¹¹

While scientific examination of sexuality was relatively new, conjecture about the single woman's sensual life was not. The mockery that pervaded cultural depictions of unwed women also penetrated discussions about the alte Jungfer as sexually abnormal. The keystone of such lampooning was the alleged attachment of the spinster to her pets. The association of unmarried women and animals has an extensive history and was a central feature of the persecution of women as witches.¹² Most turn-of-the-century accounts did not exhibit such a diabolical component; in fact, many justified the perceived affection of old maids for animals as a consequence of their lonely lives. Amalie Baisch's advice book for maturing girls observed that most unwed women were “too proud to admit their unsatisfying existence and as a result take on a more and more unpleasant life of ambiguity. Everything good, loving, and heartfelt that remains in them is mainly wasted on dogs, cats, parrots, other pets; in such a way they resign themselves to a bad situation and add to it the horrible reward of ridiculousness.”¹³ Another account featured the loyal poodle and canary as the only friends an old maid ultimately could trust in a monotonous life.¹⁴

In his extensive biological and anthropological study of women, physician and ethnologist Hermann Heinrich Ploss implied a deeper relationship between single woman and household pet:

She is left with nothing to hope for and remains yet again excluded by the unfeeling male world…Thus [she] retires into herself. She has only one who belongs to her heart, who endures all of her moods, in whose devotedly silent bosom she can pour all of her life's sorrow and grief, and who, in the same way that the hostile world stands opposed to her, stands by her: that is her loyal roommate and bedmate: her lapdog. With him the withered rose sits desolately behind the ivy trellis that adorns her window and remembers with quiet wistfulness the days when she was still a fresh bud.¹⁵

The lapdog is the most familiar symbol in the iconography of the alte Jungfer. In cartoons parodying single women, the dog is a mainstay. Ploss' rendition of this well-known image was made vivid by the physical yearning latent in the description. The male world and all of its comforts have rejected her. Seeking relief, she comforts herself in the dog's bosom, sharing her life and even—especially—her bed.

Ploss hinted at bestiality; sexologists would be more explicit. Krafft-Ebing succinctly noted in Psychopathia Sexualis that, “The intercourse of females with beasts is limited to dogs.”¹⁶ In 1908, Iwan Bloch provided the following description of female bestiality:

The peculiar zoöphily of many city women…is due not to any diseased predisposition but to the influences of continued intimate association with the animal. The role which dogs have always played in this connection is well known, not less known is the fact that they are trained by women to carry out the most perverse practices…[It has been reported] that women train dogs, cats, and at times even monkeys genitalia lambere by smearing these parts with honey or putting sugar in them…The “lap dog” is [not] the consoler only of old maids yearning for love; it is to be found at least as frequently in the possession of married women, to whom the pleasures of normal sexual gratification are by no means unknown.¹⁷

This characterization of the literal love between females and pets made three significant assumptions. First, Bloch situated the phenomenon among urban women, adding perverse particulars to fears about the proliferation of unwed women in cities. Second, Bloch took for granted that his audience had an inkling of his subject and thus relied on standing presumptions about women and their pets. Third, Bloch paused to establish the fact that married women joined and perhaps even exceeded single women in this base means of gratification. Yet the very need for such a clarification reveals the extent to which Bloch's discussion was founded upon conventional stereotypes of the old maid. Bloch offered no case studies to support his assertions. Instead, his findings regarding female bestiality were based upon the perception of shared assumptions about unwed women and their associated perversities.

Old maids preceded sexology. Indeed, the iconography of the antiquated spinster provided a wealth of traditional views for sexologists to examine. Some sexologists were more sympathetic than Bloch in regard to pets; August Forel saw the problem as being more psychological than physical: “Having lost [out on] love, all her mental power shrinks up. Her cat, her little dog, and the daily care of her person and small household occupy her whole mind. It is not surprising that such persons generally create a pitiable and ridiculous impression.”¹⁸ But whether one explained the unnatural attachment in Forel's compassionate terms or demonstrated the debauchery in Bloch's dreadful detail, the paradigm of the odd and perhaps dangerous old maid remained. The topic of bestiality provided a conventional and simultaneously shocking means for sexologists to commence their consideration of surplus women as sexually abnormal.

Turn-of-the-century scientists sought to verify the existence of the old maid as well as to define her pathology. Max Marcuse took an interdisciplinary approach, observing that “the alte Jungfer [is] an anthropologically well-defined type to be regarded solely as the outcome of sexual abstinence and whose pathological characteristics quickly would be eliminated if regular sexual intercourse took place”; moreover, the work of neurologists, sexologists, and gynecologists “confirm that this alte Jungfer is not…simply a product of indolence and lack of responsibility.”¹⁹ Another account placed the onset of old maidenhood in the mid twenties: “this seems to be the critical age [when young women] fall physically and mentally ill due to half-unconscious sexual arousal and the frustrated yearning for love and motherhood: mild mental disturbances with erotic overtones, sexual visions, fantasies and hallucinations emerge.”²⁰ The unspent potential for sexual activity, romance, and reproduction dominated such classifications of the alte Jungfern.

Ultimately, the scientific essence of the old maid could be verified only in the physical realm. If a woman did not meet her natural, biological calling, she joined the ranks of a group that was alternatively vilified, satirized, and pitied. The physician Julius Weiss argued that the phrase alte Jungfer could only be defined in sexual terms: “alte Jungfer—the concept really must be more distinctly expressed…The virgin is old if she comes to the thirtieth year and she has a right to the designation ‘alte Jungfer as long as her sexual maturity lasts, as long as she ovulates and can become a birth mother, as long as she menstruates.”²¹ The old virgin—the basic essence of the alte Jungfer—merited the status of maiden only as long as she was capable of reproduction. According to Weiss, once she passed through menopause, the sexual nature of the female was defunct and the status of her virginity was no longer relevant. The potential for sexual activity and reproduction thus dominated any classification of old maidenhood. The fact that unmarried females might also be sexually active did not enter Weiss' discussion—further securing the image of unwed women as unsexed.

Iwan Bloch agreed that fertility was the kernel of female sexuality; it followed that sexually inactive single women necessarily fell outside of the norm. A member of the Bund für Mutterschutz (BfM; Federation for the Protection of Mothers),²² Bloch believed that women were more organically sexual than men due to their reproductive capacity. In The Sexual Life of our Time (1907), Bloch cited a passage from a contemporary novel in describing the sexual nature of women:

Women are in fact pure sex from knees to neck. We men have concentrated our apparatus in a single place…They are sexual surface, we have only sexual arrow. Procreation is their proper element, and when they are engaged in it they remain at home in their own sphere…We may devote to the matter barely ten minutes; women give as many months…They procreate unceasingly, they stand continually at the witches' cauldron, boiling and brewing; while we lend a hand merely in passing, and do no more than throw one or two fragments into the vessel.²³

Eminently sexual, the woman also was utterly dependent on a partner, if only for those few indispensable minutes. Bloch's accounts of female sexuality had women immersed in sex and enjoying it too,²⁴ but their particular biology nonetheless served to define them—indeed, from knees to neck. This remarkable passage at once frees women from the confines of bourgeois morality by celebrating their sexual selves, yet at the same time it reinvigorates the reproductive and domestic spheres by affirming them as the essential female haven.

August Forel also cited procreative drive as the sexual essence of the female:

The unsatiated desires of the normal woman are less inclined toward coitus than toward the assemblage of consequences of this act…When the sight of a certain man awakes in a young girl sympathetic desires…she aspires to procreate children with this man only, to give herself to him as a slave, to receive his caresses, to be loved by him only, that he may become both the support and master of her whole life. It is a question of…a powerful desire to become a mother and enjoy domestic comfort, to realize a poetic and chivalrous ideal in man, to gratify a general sensual need distributed over the whole body and in no way concentrated in the sexual organs or in the desire for coitus.²⁵

Forel's females needed to have sex not in order to satisfy libidinous desires, but rather to achieve their true calling. That the calling was rooted in biology more than religion or civics did not change the fact that the female nature placed women in essentially the same role as church and state had assigned to them for centuries. Such views echoed traditional morality in asserting the inviolability of motherhood as the female Beruf (vocation, calling). Sexology made the calling more vital and earthy, less spiritual and transcendent. But the childless, unattached, and unsexed woman remained superfluous.

Sex and the Single Woman

But was she truly unsexed? If procreation was the root of the female, celibacy was the spoiler. At least one sexologist argued that true sexual abstention was impossible. Hermann Rohleder asserted that, “the sex drive is a natural occurrence. Abstinence is the opposite…Everyone must know that perpetual abstinence is unnatural and that there is no such thing and there can be no such thing.”²⁶ Forel, too, assailed celibacy: “Without love woman abjures her nature and ceases to be normal…Still more than men [old maids] have need of compensation for sexual love, to avoid losing their natural qualities and becoming dried-up beings or useless egoists.”²⁷ Science offered an important inversion of cause and effect: instead of old maids resulting from inadequate sex appeal, insufficient (or non-existent) sex created old maids. Sexology thus challenged the many marriage manuals that exhorted maturing girls to become beautiful and deferential spousal candidates or instead face the specter of old maidenhood.²⁸ Still, the cause did not matter much if you were a single woman suffering the effects. And the effects, as described by sexologists, were dire. For if the sex drive was natural and abstinence debilitating (if not impossible), what happened to one who was denied monogamous heterosexuality and had no partiality for pets? Turn-of-the-century sexologists offered three answers: as a sexual anaesthetic, the single woman suffered from the ravages of repression; as a sexual hyperaesthetic, she was either sexually promiscuous or a rampant masturbator; or as a homosexual, she sought fulfillment with other women.²⁹

Sexual Anaesthesia

Wilhelm Stekel saw the alte Jungfer as the embodiment of sexual stagnation: “We need only cast one look at the abstinent, dried up, soured old maid and then at the joyous, blooming woman of the same age who enjoys the fruits of love to be convinced of the great value of properly indulging the normal sexual function.”³⁰ Celibate female bodies could cease to function in a feminine way: “among women who very seldomly”—or never?—“have had sexual satisfaction granted to them, there is frequently an extraordinary scarcity of menstruation.”³¹ Julius Weiss cited the old maid's body as evidence of abstention: “The unmarried girl who goes without sexual relations for her entire life ages earlier than the woman who is once, twice, or thrice married, bears a number of children, raises them and does all the work of a mother and wife. If exhausting demands are not made, the sex life in certain ways has a rejuvenating influence on the female.”³² Assuming that such a prolific mother survived multiple births (an increasing likelihood at the turn of the twentieth century), it followed that sexually active women enjoyed better health than the celibate. An editorial in the journal Sexual-Probleme compared the vibrant sexuality of ardent young women with their vacant counterparts: “girls who have a naturally fiery temperament…feel the awakening of the sex drive earlier and stronger than phlegmatic grown Jungfrauen separated from the world of men.”³³

Iwan Bloch lamented the fate of those women who stood outside of matrimony and thus, regrettably, renounced the joys of sexuality: “How was it possible that to hundreds and thousands the simple right to love was refused, so that they were condemned to a joyless existence, in which all the beautiful blossoms of life withered away?”³⁴ His 1907 foray into the language of flora provided interesting similitude to an anonymous author who described more than fifty years earlier the bereavement of life without marriage: “As the natural form becomes stunted when it is…hindered from its normal growth, so the spiritual life will also be marred by deformity if it cannot develop naturally. The solitary alte Jungfrau does not stand in the blessed ground in which the female nature carries its most beautiful bloom; is it not natural that she withers?”³⁵

According to Sigmund Freud, modern culture created the conditions for such withering: “Under the domination of a civilized sexual morality the health and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment.”³⁶ The early Freudian writings on sexuality had enormous influence on the ways in which Sexualwissenschaftler assessed the female experience of nervous illnesses.³⁷ In an 1895 text on anxiety neurosis, Freud asserted that the condition “also occurs in widows and intentionally abstinent women, not seldom in a typical combination with obsessional ideas.”³⁸ Intentional repression intensified the struggle initiated by developmental repression; in the Freudian worldview, the abstinent woman was custom-made for anxiety neurosis, or—worse yet—hysteria. ³⁹

The view of hysteria as rooted in the female body clearly is not unique to this era—the etymology reveals as much. But central European sexologists brought academic authentication to the category of hysteria by developing an association between hysterics and case studies of sexual repression. Historian of psychiatry Franziska Lamott has summarized the turn-of-the-century view of hysteria as one in which “frigidity is the hallmark of the violation of the boundaries of female normality. It is the sign of a pathology and represents the inversion of ideal femininity: the Non-Mother—the Hysteric.”⁴⁰ The pathology of hysteria emerged from a scientific framework, but the oddball status of the hysteric remained unchanged. Sexology provided a new causality for the centuries-old status of outcast. Early in his work on sexuality, Freud declared its centrality to the diagnosis of hysteria: “Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience. So here for the first time we seem to have discovered an aetiological precondition for hysterical symptoms.”⁴¹

The sexological argument went like this: without the opportunity to follow a more ‘natural’ life course of marriage, sex, and children, the unmarried woman repressed her urges in a noxious mix of tedium and chastity: “The monotony of daily life seems to us to be the real enemy of bachelors and alten Jungfern. It manifests itself into an overwhelming awareness of one's own person and one's petty concerns, which leads to hypochondria and hysteria.”⁴² Wilhelm Stekel provided the link between celibacy and hysteric behavior: “In consequence of the renunciation of sexual delights [girls] lose the ability to love. Disgust, modesty, and bashfulness have done away with desire…Sexual yearnings and sexual inhibitions are in conflict with one another and the result is a more or less severe hysteria.”⁴³

Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger shared the view that hysteria was brought about mainly by a woman's inability to admit to herself the reality of sexual desire latent within. In his disturbing yet nonetheless influential Sex and Character (1903),⁴⁴ Weininger criticized Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's 1895 Studies on Hysteria for presenting “hysterics in particular as eminently moral individuals. All that hysterics have done is to allow morality, which was originally alien to them, to take them over from outside more completely than other people.”⁴⁵ Hysterical fits resulted when “sexual desire threatens to prevail against the seeming restraint…Their reaction is always their last untruthful defense against the tremendous eruption of their own constitution: the attitudes passionelles of hysterical women are nothing but this demonstrative rejection of the sexual act.”⁴⁶ While he did not link hysteria specifically to a woman's marital status, Weininger's typology of hysterics connoted singlehood through the well-worn stereotypes of the maid and the shrew. Historian Chandak Sengoopta interprets Weininger's use of the dyad in the following manner: “The hysterical woman belonged to the psychological type ‘Maid.’ She was born, not made…The Maid was opposed to the Shrew, who represented the type of woman least susceptible to hysteria. The Shrew vented her wrath (deriving from lack of sexual satisfaction) on others; the Maid vented it on herself.”⁴⁷ Desire—or more precisely, fear of desire—impelled the mind of the Maid toward hysterical disturbances.

Freud also tapped into this fear of desire in the case history of Katharina, a “rather sulky-looking girl of perhaps eighteen.”⁴⁸ While hiking in the Alps, Freud met a girl who complained of a nervous affliction. Since he could not conduct a full psychotherapeutic investigation while in the midst of his trek, Freud was forced to try “a lucky guess. I had found often enough that in girls anxiety was a consequence of the horror by which a virginal mind is overcome when it is faced for the first time with the world of sexuality.”⁴⁹ Freud termed this condition as ‘virginal anxiety’: “The anxiety from which Katharina suffered in her attacks was a hysterical one…a mere suspicion of sexual relations calls up the affect of anxiety in virginal individuals.”⁵⁰ Freudian thought held that sexual apprehension could bring forth hysterical illness and frigidity among both girls and women.

Johannes Rutgers, a Dutch birth control pioneer, elicited the aura of Altjungfertum in describing the symptoms of his hysterical patients: “The absent sexual life reveals itself even more in the vascular system…The blood, which in this period of life should be actively stimulating the reproductive organs, obviously takes an inverted turn in the case of abstinence!…Muscle tone can become flaccid; the lymphatic circulation can become inertial. The clinical case will emerge as indolent, lymphatic, even scrofulous.”⁵¹ The blood betrays the maiden; the body becomes barren. Neither child nor bride, this woman is destined to be a specimen. Rutgers saw her as an all too familiar character: “Who does not know a host of these ‘suchenden Seelen [searching souls]’? The more normal or elevated a person's disposition, all the more has she the desire and the need for love in its fullest fruition.”⁵² Hysteria emerged from an empty and asexual life, conditions sexologists widely ascribed to unmarried women, especially those of the middle-and upper-classes.⁵³

Freud presented just such an elevated disposition in reporting the case history of 24-year-old Fräulein Elisabeth von R. One of five cases in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, this text offers a fine demonstration of the sexological link between marital status and hysteria. Freud described Elisabeth as exhibiting great giftedness and ambition, traits he recognized among many hysterics.⁵⁴ Her positive nature belied her physical afflictions: “She seemed intelligent and mentally normal and bore her troubles…with a cheerful air—the belle indifference of a hysteric.”⁵⁵ In noting such belle indifference, even as he attempted to provide a modern and scientific understanding of hysteria, Freud affirmed his readers' prejudices regarding the nature of the condition and in so doing revealed his own as well.⁵⁶

Freud's patient had a troubled history: in the space of just a few years, Elisabeth had nursed her beloved father through an ultimately fatal illness; her mother subsequently fell ill; Elisabeth's own health problems soon followed; her married sister then died after giving birth to her second child; and family tensions arose among the survivors of these tragic events.⁵⁷ An unhappy story, indeed—but how did this chain of misfortune lead to hysterical pain? Freud diagnosed the conversion as involving several factors: the worry produced through prolonged sick-nursing,⁵⁸ the confusion stimulated by Elisabeth's emerging sexuality,⁵⁹ and the anxiety created over the uncertainty of her future.⁶⁰ Myriad elements characterized Elisabeth's case, yet neither grief over her father's declining health, wistfulness for her fleeting youth, nor the frustrated misery of being unable to fall in carefree love were factors that emerged as most critical in Freud's evaluation. Instead, sex formed the centerpiece of this single woman's story, as inhibited sexual desire was the Freudian path toward affliction.

Thwarted love persecuted Elisabeth. After months of therapy, Freud realized a startling fact: his patient was in love with her dead sister's husband, and had been so long before her sister had passed away. The “psychical excitations” occasioned by her attraction to her brother-in-law and the extraordinary reservoir of will that enabled Elisabeth to “fend them off” created a mental strain her body could not bear.⁶¹ These excitations were caused neither by the impossibility of her affectionate inclination nor by the pure horror at the fleeting thought inspired by viewing her sister's deathbed—“Now he is free again and I can be his wife!”⁶² Sexual attraction prevailed: “A circle of ideas of an erotic kind…came into conflict with all her moral ideas…The coldness of her nature began to yield and she admitted to herself her need for a man's love. During the several weeks which she passed in his company…her erotic feelings as well as her pains reached their full height.”⁶³ Sexual desire and hysterical pain went hand-in-hand. Of course, the extreme circumstances of Elisabeth's case served as significant contributing factors to her pathology. But the Freudian diagnosis of hysteria mandated the existence of sexual repression; other circumstances were merely predispositional.

Yet not even erotic ideas could explain the particular physical manifestation of Elisabeth's hysteria. When she could no longer fend off the excitations created by sexual desire, she experienced such severe leg pain that, at times, she could not walk. Why? One factor was the fact that while nursing her father, Elisabeth's legs touched those of the ill man's, forming “an artificial hysterogenic zone.”⁶⁴ This precipitating event was intensified by the great mental strain caused by Elisabeth's uncertainty and anxiety over her future; as Elisabeth moved out of girlhood, she was “overcome by a sense of her weakness as a woman and by a longing for love in which, to quote her own words, her frozen nature began to melt.”⁶⁵ After a walk with her brother-in-law during a period of self-doubt, Elisabeth again experienced excruciating leg pains. In hearing of this episode, Freud began to divine an answer to the question occasioned by the peculiar location of her pain: Elisabeth was loathe to become an alleinstehende Frau—a woman standing alone.

Fear of never marrying helped to make Elisabeth hysterical. The means of this process was a mechanism Freud termed ‘symbolization’: “She found…a somatic expression for her lack of an independent position and her inability to make any alteration in her circumstances…such phrases as ‘not being able to take a single step forward’, ‘not having anything to lean upon’, served as the bridge for this fresh act of conversion.”⁶⁶ Elisabeth had told Freud as much during a therapeutic session: “The patient ended her description of a whole series of episodes by complaining that they had made the fact of her ‘standing alone’ painful to her.” Freud observed that, “I could not help thinking that the patient had done nothing more nor less than look for a symbolic expression of her painful thoughts and that she had found it in the intensification of her sufferings.⁶⁷ He did not consider the fact that marriage itself offered little promise to Elisabeth, a woman who had watched her sister be destroyed by its fruits.⁶⁸ Freudian diagnosis settled on a view of Elisabeth as frozen in time—her family ill and dying, her prospects for love obstructed by the most difficult circumstances, and her former self-assurance fading. It is no wonder that her body should freeze as well, her legs unable to take a step and no support to prop her up. How could she possibly stand alone?

Freud's assessment of this case foreshadowed his 1905 Fragment of a Case of Hysteria, the case history of Dora. The symbiotic relationship between Freud's female patients and the Freudian theory of hysteria has been described by literary scholar Evelyne Ender as a dynamic in which the patient “‘produces' in her hysteria that which needs to be brought to consciousness and which stands in the place of consciousness. The spoils will be his, just as this knowledge extracted from her will constitute the foundation of his science of the mind,” resulting in a “simultaneous valorization and negation of the woman's experience.”⁶⁹ Elisabeth's marital status was central to Freud's diagnosis, yet any autonomy she may have had in choosing this path was nullified by the psychotherapist's account that left her entirely a passive victim to both her singleness and her sexual anxiety. Much like the later case of Dora, Freud's own personhood is omnipresent in the hysterical narrative.⁷⁰ A modern psychoanalytical appraisal of the case of Elisabeth von R. has described the interaction of doctor and patient as “more like unfeeling interrogations or…efficient paternalistic forms of taking control.”⁷¹ The paternalistic formulation of Elisabeth's narrative manifests itself in the supererogatory role of the deceased father in the case history, while the living mother exists as only a pale presence.⁷² Father, first love, and brother-in-law acted upon Elisabeth's weak psyche (despite her sharp intellect) to form her hysteria. Only a male hero, equipped with the valiant weapons of science, could rescue Elisabeth and provide her with the strength to stand.

In a feminist analysis of Freud's case studies, Susan Katz has argued that when Freud “drew on traditional narrative forms, particularly the nineteenth-century novel, in shaping the lives and case histories of his women patients, Freud perpetuated the belief in marriage as a standard for mental health.” Central to the literary typologies Freud inherited was “an equation of marriage with health, and, conversely, spinsterhood with illness.”⁷³ Such a narrative insisted that a spinster could only enjoy mental health if she “learn[ed] her place.”⁷⁴ Mental instability emerged when a single woman struggled with her social status. The illness of Elisabeth von R., “Freud implies, is brought on by her grandiose ambition to master her situation single-handedly.”⁷⁵ Indeed, Freud asserted that he was able to cure Elisabeth von R. by his revolutionary method of cathartic therapy;⁷⁶ a few years later, “by her own inclination, she…married someone unknown to me.”⁷⁷ These nuptials provided for Freud with both literary closure and therapeutic success, for “marriage indicates mental recovery.”⁷⁸

But not all hysterics and neurasthenics would marry. And not all sexologists, doctors, and psychologists of the early twentieth century shared Freud's opinion of the giftedness exhibited by hysterics. But many, eventually most, did adopt his unshakeable conviction as to the centrality of sex to mental health. Freud wrote in 1905 that, “Anyone who knows how to interpret the language of hysteria will recognize that the neurosis is concerned only with the patient's repressed sexuality.”⁷⁹ In the eyes of Freud and most other sexologists, single women became a scientifically problematic category due to the ravages of sexual repression and anxiety about ‘standing alone.’ Socially aberrant and sometimes hysterical, the repressed old maid remained a conspicuous character in imperial German society; Sexualwissenschaft added darker contours to the picture of her existence.

Sexual Hyperaesthesia

Imagine the options confronted by a middle-class, unmarried young woman at the dawn of the twentieth century. Science had revealed that she possessed an innate and scientifically validated sexual drive, the repression of which might lead to hysteria or at the very least an embittered fate. Erich Lilienthal, a turn-of-the-century novelist and one of the most scathing observers of Altjungfertum, offered this summary of the effects of life without sex: “The eternally barren…give away nothing of their worm-eaten treasures, their thin, wilted lips pointed at constant vigilance, fearful, petty weighing and haggling…They do not become old and gray and silent, they do not become benevolent and understanding, they…talk and agitate with their bitter sophisms and [they] accomplish nothing at all. They are completely useless.”⁸⁰ Anticipating such a fate, replete with “thin, wilted lips,” a rational woman might elect other options. Free love was one of them.

Or at least this was the dread of many contemporary observers who feared the damage that could be wrought upon society by sexually active single women. The claims of sexology fueled this type of anxiety. August Forel observed that, “it is a real pity to see so many healthy, active and intelligent girls become old maids, simply because they have no money and do not wish to throw themselves at the first scamp who comes.” His solution? “A little free polygamy.” ⁸¹ Iwan Bloch and the BfM also proposed that the sexual and cultural landscape could be transformed by responsible and committed relationships outside of marriage.⁸² Bloch believed that the epoch of the old maid would only end when the contours of marriage were changed. He condemned:

The heartlessness…of modern European society, which simultaneously makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is profoundly immoral, it is radically evil. It is moral and good to contest it with all our energy…Let us make a clearance of this medieval bugbear of coercive marriage morality, which is a disgrace in respect of our state of civilization…Two million women in a condition of compulsory celibacy and coercive marriage morality. It is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side, in order to display before our eyes the complete ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.⁸³

Bloch proposed instead that all adults should counter “putrescent morality” by finding and enjoying love, companionship, and sex. Wilhelm Stekel used the example of prostitution to make the case for active female sexuality: “Love, regular sexual intercourse…keep ‘immoral’ women fresh and healthy.”⁸⁴ Stekel's argument did not facilitate unambiguously the cause of sexual reform. Based upon weak substantiation, Stekel's position that “compulsory abstinence is more injurious than immoderate indulgence”⁸⁵ might justifiably have raised queries of just what types of indulgence, and at how immoderate a rate?

In fact, most sexual scientists placed the topic of active sexuality among the female unwed under the rubric of sexual dysfunction, centered on the notion of hyperaesthesia. The notion of the natural female sexual desire had problematic implications. As Michael Hau has argued in The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, “female desires…could be the basis for the independent articulation of female interests. Furthermore, if women were capable of experiencing lust, whose fault was it if they did not?”⁸⁶ Would they seek fulfillment of that lust outside of the confines of marriage? Bourgeois morality held that the most frightening path an unmarried woman could elect was the pursuit of extramarital sexual fulfillment. Max Marcuse used the work of British sexologist Havelock Ellis to articulate the nature of the threat: “A great many women who are healthy, chaste, and modest, feel at times such a powerful sexual desire that they can scarcely resist the temptation to go into the street and solicit the first man they meet. Not a few such women, often of good breeding, do actually offer themselves to men with whom they may have perhaps only the slightest acquaintance.”⁸⁷ The emphasis on good breeding was the great threat created by the sexually free woman—uncontrolled reproduction and uncertain paternity: “under the influence of Malthusianism, sexuality outside of marriage was viewed as the source of [social] depletion.”⁸⁸ Fears regarding single women's sexuality abounded during an age of eugenic science.

Sexual overindulgence informed the Freudian understanding of hysteria as well. One of Freud's goals in describing the pathology of the disease was to “clear up the enigmatic contradiction which hysteria presents, by revealing the pair of opposites by which it is characterized—exaggerated sexual craving and excessive aversion to sexuality.”⁸⁹ An exaggerated sex drive among females was a perilous prospect, one that could be considered dangerous if single women were the ones doing the craving. Freud identified this link in the early sexual lives of people who would later be diagnosed as neurotics: “Their sexual life begins like that of perverts, and a considerable part of their childhood is occupied with perverse sexual activity…(usually before puberty, but now and then even long afterwards), and from that time onwards neurosis takes the place of perversion…We are reminded of the proverb Junge Hure, alte Betschwester [A young whore makes an old nun]’, only that here youth has lasted all too short a time.”⁹⁰ While Freud used gender-neutral language to describe the psychological evolution of these perverts-cum-neurotics, female deviance nonetheless was latent in the archetypal iconography of whore and nun. Even as he attempted to provide a scientific profile of the female psyche, Freud relied upon well-worn images that would resonate to his audience.

Hermann Rohleder ruled out extramarital sex as a source of relief for the unmarried woman. In a 1908 article on “Abstinentia sexualis,” Rohleder asked himself rhetorically, “Are the consequences of abstinence so severe…that they warrant the recommendation of therapeutic extramarital intercourse among the unmarried?…Today I will again answer no…It is not the consequences of abstinence that have led me to this, but much more important things, prevention of a much greater unhappiness.”⁹¹ In this diagnosis without remedy, Rohleder sighed at the ill fortunes of those who suffered outside of marriage, yet the distanced air of resignation provided little alternative to a life without sexual companionship—other than getting married in the first place!

Perhaps the “much greater unhappiness” Rohleder hinted at can be found in the work of August Forel. Forel speculated on the enormous, untapped female sexual appetite:

Some women…from their first youth experience violent sexual desire, causing them to masturbate or to throw themselves onto men. Such excesses in woman take on a more pathological character than in man, and go under the name of nymphomania…Although in the normal state woman is naturally full of delicacy and sentiments of modesty, nothing is easier than to make these disappear completely by training her systematically to sexual immodesty or to prostitution. Here we observe the effects of the routine and suggestible character of feminine psychology, of the tendency of woman to become the slave of habit and custom.⁹²

This description of the hyperaesthetic female offers a dichotomy: the nymphomaniac who is likely pathological and certainly abnormal, and the obedient woman who, as victim of her own malleable psyche, is led down a path of dissolution. Forel did not resolve this tension between nature and nurture, drawing instead a portrait of a creature both plagued by inherent aberrance and hoodwinked by her own weak character and the diabolical suggestions of others.