WorldViews is a multilingual‚ digital resource for primary sources containing excerpts from textbooks from around the world on topics that are of global‚ transnational and interregional relevance. The selected source material from textbooks reveals how the individual countries position themselves in the world and how they portray other countries and their histories. Academic contributions provide more in-depth interpretations of the source material as well as information on the national education and textbook systems and background information on the history of education.
Text excerpts are chosen because they are striking in terms of representation interpretive framework and/or perspective. They are portrayals that are published in widely distributed textbooks or stand out due to their unique standpoint. They are collected by project partners or the editorial team‚ given academic context and translated into German and English paying particular attention to the cultural and historical context of the source text.
The document was published in the history textbook Geschichte und Geschehen that was designed for the use at theupper level of secondary school in Germany.It is incorporated into the two-page sub-chapter:
Enlightenment: Freedom and Equality – For Women Too?
and is the last article in the large thematic section on the modern state in absolutism and in the Enlightenment.
The Storm and Stress period poet, Christian F. D. Schubart, denounces the Europe-wide proliferation of female scholarship in his 1789 self-published
Vaterlandschronik
.
The Württembergian theater director and court poet, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-1791), published the article
Educated Vixens
in his literary magazine
Vaterlandschronik
in the first half of 1789. Therein the author criticizes female
scholarship
, which according to his point of view has expanded
throughout Europe
in circles of high nobility and among the upper middle class. His perception of women is consistent with the traditional perception of the woman’s role being that of wife, mother and housekeeper. Schubart utilizes the concept of Europe geographically. Indeed the text implicates an even wider European reference when the author declares that this development was throughout Europe during the era of Enlightenment, namely in the public space of a
republic of letters
.
2. A Women’s “Republic of Letters”?
Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-1791), a Storm and Stress period poet, on educated women and authors: “All of Europe is currently teeming with educated vixens; in Spain the broads have erected a learned society; in France it is the “done thing” among ladies, at gatherings to speak about mathematics, metaphysics, physics, statesmanship, history, the fine sciences; in England the dames have taken up writing novels, in Russia a woman presides over the Academy; -- and in Germany? – there are currently 50 female writers and of them, 20 poetesses – What will become of this all?... Indeed, I’d like to see King Solomon, were he to walk again upon the earth, erradicate his ideal of an apt woman, as she must be, if she is to be to the glory of her husband, and assemble in her stead another who speaks in seven tongues, creates verse, writes novels, philosophizes, is a free thinker, speaks in cathedral tones and teaches doctors and professors, but who leaves the nursery, kitchen and cellar, house and yard, garden and field neglected.”
(Quotation from: Andrea van Dülmen (Ed.): Frauen: Ein historisches Lesebuch, Munich 1989)