Become a Translator! Formations of an Im/Possible Persona

Abstract

Drawing both on the history of women’s education and on the interdisciplinary concept of the persona, this chapter discusses the discourses and practices that framed and limited young middle-class women’s chances of studying and becoming a learned person in late nineteenth-century Europe. It argues that in connection with the middle-class ideology of a woman’s place, a double standard of male and female scholarship prevailed. Considering the links between accepted models of femininity and new forms of professional identity, the chapter shows the development of new, if hidden, female personae at the fringes of academe, for example the persona of the supportive wife of a male academic or of the translator.

Drawing both on the history of women’s education and on the interdisciplinary concept of the persona, this chapter discusses the discourses and the institutionalised and other practices that framed and limited young middle-class women’s chances of learning and becoming a learned person in late nineteenth-century Europe. Exploring young Käthe Schirmacher’s correspondence with her family, and particularly with male family members who were connected to academia, I analyse prevalent norms of femininity in a liberal Protestant milieu and indications of transnational gendered practices of education in the 1880s. Delving into an exchange between Schirmacher and Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), who was later to become a renowned German-American psychologist, I argue in this chapter that it was not only institutional exclusion and the middle-class ideology of women’s place in society that hindered women’s intellectual development, but also the double standard that was applied to male and female learnedness.¹ The socio-economic constellations and constraints that affected Käthe Schirmacher in her striving for an academic career, as well as the arguments she used to negotiate an independent life for herself, point to the challenging conditions under which a growing number of middle-class European women tried to earn their living based on an education they still had to fight for. Considering the precarious links between accepted models of femininity and new forms of professional identity, I argue that the concept of gendered scientific/scholarly personae can be helpful in understanding both the considerably high numbers of productive female translators in the nineteenth century and the marginal attention they received and still receive.²

Gendered  Scientific/Scholarly Personae and the Exclusion of Women

This chapter starts from the premise that gendered divisions of labour and gender ideologies play a vital role in the process of producing academic knowledge. In the nineteenth century, the sciences paved the way for the growing importance of rational thinking and secular knowledge in Western societies; the humanities also differentiated into a growing number of professionalised disciplines with specific concepts and standards. As historians of science have shown, this process was not only structured by hierarchies of class and race but also accompanied by the almost complete exclusion of women from the universities.³ While this development varied across countries and disciplines, it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that the call for equal rights to study at a university and to pursue an academic career as a woman gained momentum. As the founding stories of the first women’s colleges in England, Girton (1869) and Newnham (1871), show, the fight for equal inclusion was often closely linked to women’s movements.⁴ In other cases, individual women’s striving for an academic education was embedded into socialist or nationalist liberation movements.⁵ However, full admission of women to universities was only achieved after decades of struggle and in most countries, did not happen until well into the twentieth century.⁶

Already these very basic facts demonstrate clearly that the success story of science since the Enlightenment cannot be adequately analysed without examining the effects of women’s exclusion—both in terms of individual biographies of men and women and on the topics, perspectives, and categories of knowledge production.⁷ Although important work has been done on women’s institutional exclusion and the struggles to overcome it, women’s contributions to scientific/scholarly knowledge remain severely under-researched.⁸ Case studies of women scientists and scholars show that many of them collaborated with male relatives.⁹ Exciting work has also been done on how a certain (hegemonic) form of masculinity was established and enforced in many disciplines in the nineteenth century.¹⁰ The use of the persona concept has proved to be particularly fruitful both for the analysis of collaborative processes and for the exploration of gendered identities in the academe.

The concept of the persona offers a means of understanding the influence of cultural practices on knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities. Referring to the functions of the mask (Lat. persona), which the actors in classical Greek theatre used to enhance their presence and to convey specific characters familiar to their audiences, the persona concept helps to analyse how scholars use ‘cultural templates’ to adapt their biographies to institutional requirements and social expectations in and beyond academia.¹¹ Persona studies also show how a particular persona develops, gains acceptance, and changes in a society.¹² These transformations are influenced by how scholars interpret, negotiate, and reshape the values and cultures of knowledge production.

Building on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ theory on the critical phase of transition between a social role and the development of an individual self, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum use the term persona to describe the complex relation between individual biographies and social institutions.¹³ Persona, for Daston and Sibum, is ‘a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognisable physiognomy’.¹⁴ Mineke Bosch observes that the persona concept which links ‘science as knowledge’ with ‘science as social process’ makes it possible to overcome the problematic divide between (often idealising) biographies of scientists on the one hand and the history of scientific progress in a particular field of knowledge on the other.¹⁵ However, Bosch also points out that previous to this development in science history, gender studies had already devised similar concepts of gender as ‘performed’ or created through ‘doing’.¹⁶ Likewise, biographical research has also developed elaborate concepts to discuss the complex relationship between cultural norms, biographical models, individual self-representations, and the habitus of a particular profession.¹⁷ The concept emphasises the (often also self-reflexive) agency of the historical protagonists: to form a specific persona is something one does deliberately, even if its acceptance has to be negotiated in the milieu to which it is addressed.¹⁸

Since Daston’s and Sibum’s 2003 intervention, the concept has become a well-calibrated analytical instrument to describe the complex connections between institutional careers, scientists’ individual curricula vitae, and how researchers claim relevance for their research in many disciplinary fields. It helps us to understand selection processes and relevance regimes as well as individual strategies for shaping a biographical narrative adapted to prevailing norms in a particular academic field. It took some time, however, until a broader effort was made to delve deeper into the concept’s gendered meanings and effects. Lorraine Daston, focusing on the male academic within his family environment and his gendered role models, analysed what she called the domestication of the scientific persona in the nineteenth century.¹⁹ Gadi Algazi’s investigation on scholarly work in private spaces demonstrates the complex relations between the professionalisation of learnedness and the development of academic households in the early modern period.²⁰ More recent work has shown the embodiment of scientific/scholarly personae in gendered behaviours and performances and demonstrated the productiveness of the concept for various disciplines.²¹

Whereas historians often focus primarily on the ‘reflexive co-creation of personal and social realities’, media studies point to the variability and diversity of personae that one individual can construct and inhabit.²² They thus emphasise the performative character of personae in the constitution of sociocultural realities. Following this, we can ask what kind of women in the nineteenth century dared to imagine and sometimes successfully create a scholarly/scientific persona for themselves despite an all-male academic milieu that was highly hostile to them. The teenage Käthe Schirmacher, searching for possibilities of developing an independent life, is a good case in point.

Danzig 1882: Can I be a Student?²³

At the age of sixteen, Schirmacher began a correspondence about her education and her future with her grandfather Julius Scharlok (1809–1899), a botanist and apothecary in Graudenz (now Grudziądz) and at that time the only person in her family with a close connection to science.²⁴ In her once well-to-do family (involved in transnational trade), she observed growing difficulties fuelled by the economic failure of her father’s company and the various illnesses of both her parents. She had begun to study languages (Dutch and French) and philosophy on her own from books the year before²⁵ and now pondered ways of becoming self-employed.²⁶ She hoped that she would be allowed to attend the teachers’ seminar the following year as the first step to further learning. Despite her otherwise liberal grandfather’s firm conviction that a woman’s destiny was to become a loving wife and mother, she defended her wish to study and her belief in women’s ability to reason. Against his verdict that reason and science were no field for women, she held that the borders between male and female characteristics were blurred; something that could be seen, for example, in men writing soulful poetry or girls developing an interest in science.²⁷ She repeatedly implored her grandfather to endorse her plan to study:

Grandfather, I want to work seriously, to be educated, then I will be useful and happy. It’s worth living for, isn’t it, grandfather? (Großvater, ich will ernst arbeiten, wissenschaftlich gebildet, dann werde ich nützen und glücklich sein. Darum lohnt es doch zu leben, nicht wahr, Großvater?)²⁸

That same year, as a Christmas present, she sent him an essay in which she had elaborated detailed arguments for women’s right to study at the university. Embracing the contemporary concept of progress, she held that everything was subject to change, and therefore, women should also be allowed to evolve; just as men had educated themselves, women also should have the chance to develop.²⁹ She ended her fervent call for women to have access to higher education and more diverse lifestyles with a double reference to economic circumstances and the common humanity of men and women:

Many women, either voluntarily or forced by circumstances, will have to renounce their once [only dream] of complete happiness […], in order to reach happiness by other means […] as a worker equal to man in striving to perfect not man, not woman, but humankind! (Viele Frauen werden freiwillig oder durch Verhältnisse gezwungen, dem einstmals [einzigen Traum] zum vollen Glück, entsagen [zu] müssen, und dann in anderen Bahnen […] zum Glück [zu] gelangen […], gleich dem Mann als Arbeiterin im Vervollkommnungswerk nicht des Mannes nicht der Frau, sondern des Menschen!)³⁰

Books from the family library, for instance by radical early feminist thinker Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919), as well as Schirmacher’s connection with the Free Church in her city, may have encouraged her in her ideas.³¹ However, to put her plan into action, she needed not only the support of her family, but also practical advice.

While Schirmacher discussed the appropriateness of higher education for women with a respected older member of her family, she sought information about the opportunities open to her personally from a peer. Her sister’s brother-in-law Hugo Münsterberg, two years Schirmacher’s senior, had begun his studies in Geneva in 1882 and told her about the famous Russian women students he had met there. In the summer of the same year, Münsterberg wrote detailed letters to Schirmacher answering her questions about her chances of enrolling as a student. One particularly long epistle he sent to her on her seventeenth birthday was not without a certain unintentional humour. In stilted terms, the nineteen-year-old fledgling student lectured Schirmacher about marriage and motherhood being incompatible with a woman’s public appearance on a lectern:

A woman’s soul should be like a temple where only a few worshippers kneel, not a funfair where a crowd can pay money to gawp and cheer. (Die Seele der Frau soll wie ein Tempel sein, wo wenige Andächtige niederknien, nicht wie eine Jahrmarktsbude, wo sich für Geld die große schaulustige Menge jubelnd amüsiert.)³²

The young man’s verbose response to the information Schirmacher had requested from him offers deep insights into the misogynist discourse of the era. Many of his utterances reflected popular pamphlets against women’s higher education which enjoyed considerable circulation among male students of the time.³³ Therefore, I take him as an exemplary source for exploring these discourses.

However, I am also interested in other aspects of Münsterberg’s advice. He presented in grim terms the major obstacles that, in his view, Schirmacher would have to overcome. After years of private learning to acquire the necessary knowledge for admission to a university, she would have to study abroad where, without the support of her family, she would face hostility from male students and professors. After all these costly efforts, her marriage prospects would be poorer than before.

Despite this daunting picture, Münsterberg also outlined two possible paths into the academic world. Using the example of the Russian students he had met, he acknowledged that there was a natural force of true vocation. Against their express desire to become mothers and wives, some extraordinary women were drawn to science and to work for the greater good by an irresistible calling. However, he claimed that such women never made a principle of their extraordinary path but humbly accepted it as their fate, a burden they had to bear.³⁴ The exclusionary intention of this argument was obvious. It derived from Theodor von Bischoff’s (1807–1882) assertion that there was no need for change in the gendered system of higher education because female genius in a woman, if it were truly present, would always prevail no matter what the circumstances.³⁵ As early as the 1870s, Hedwig Dohm had criticised this position in one of her sharp and lucid treatises.³⁶ However, by referring to the concept of vocation, Münsterberg also sketched a possible, if uncomfortable, persona for a female scholar: the brilliant woman who was unable to escape her vocation and therefore had to forgo the happiness of love and motherhood. According to this model, one way for a woman to enter academe was to present herself as drawn to an irresistible calling, even if this meant denying her feminine identity, since academic virtues were inextricably linked to masculinity.

For different reasons, however, both Schirmacher and Münsterberg rejected this possible view of Schirmacher as a unique, gifted personality with a vocation. He preferred to admire her feminine charms instead of seeing her as a genius. She, on the other hand, argued politically by declaring that she did not want to be an exception but to pave the way to higher education for all women—an approach her pen pal strongly objected to.³⁷ Still, Münsterberg had another suggestion, based on his own needs, which could indirectly open a door into the academic world for her. While he had studied Greek and Latin at grammar school, he knew that Schirmacher was good at modern languages, considered a more appropriate skill for women.³⁸ In order to study his particular interests, anthropology and cultural history, he needed someone to translate books from English and French (which he did not read well enough) into German. He would send her these texts, and in exchange for her translating excerpts from them, he would teach her about his innovative field of research. ‘Schulter an Schulter’ (shoulder to shoulder) they would go through life exploring new ideas as scientists. As he put it, a clear decision was required:

Yes or no, Käthe? I am waiting for an answer, a quick answer without long deliberation, yes or no? (Ja oder nein, Käthe? Ich warte auf Antwort, auf schnelle Antwort, ohne langes Besinnen, Ja oder nein?)³⁹

He did not explain the urgency—was this a covert marriage proposal, or did he just need the translations quickly? Soon after this intense exchange, the relationship between the two cooled. Still, with his proposal, the self-assured Münsterberg had also outlined another model that could be adopted by a female scholarly/scientific persona: the educated helpmate of a brilliant man.

Münsterberg warned Schirmacher that men would question a woman’s qualification in an academic discipline and disparage what she might have learned outside the university as ‘mere pastime’ (Spielerei) like other women played with cats.⁴⁰ He pointed to the greater openness of new fields such as his own special interest, cultural history. If she chose a field such as this, that was not yet recognised as a university discipline, she would not be seen as an unwelcome competitor, and there would be room for her to contribute to and participate in this innovative venture. Münsterberg also pointed out the lack of translators for academic texts in all disciplines. Many were willing to translate novels, but few were learned and willing enough to translate texts that required scientific/scholarly knowledge. He knew a young French woman who earned a considerable income by rendering English academic books into French.⁴¹

But, he argued, the satisfaction that Schirmacher could derive from this could be more than just financial; her competency in modern languages could be a pathway into academia. Münsterberg wrote at some length about Johanna Mestorf (1828–1909) who, without ever having attended a university, had translated anthropological books from Danish into German, written introductions to texts she had translated, and developed, step by step, into a recognised scientist. He emphasised that Mestorf had always remained womanly, and that there was nothing ‘widernatürliches’ (unnatural) in her development. He also pointed out that it had been easier for her because her field of work was not a university discipline.⁴²

Johanna Mestorf, the first woman to be awarded an honorary professorship in Prussia (1899), is indeed an interesting case.⁴³ Her extraordinary career exemplifies the challenges a woman had to face in academic life. After her father’s death, Mestorf’s family lived under difficult circumstances, and at the age of 21, she went to Sweden as a governess to support herself. She learned Scandinavian languages and later also travelled through Europe for several years as the companion of a member of her employer’s family.⁴⁴ After returning to Hamburg, she worked as a secretary for foreign correspondence and privately acquired a broad knowledge of Scandinavian archaeology, whose major works she translated into German.⁴⁵ She also contributed numerous research texts of her own and coined technical terms which are still in use today. An expert, she gradually rose from being a volunteer at Kiel’s Museum of Antiquities of the Fatherland (Museum vaterländischer Alterthümer) to becoming its director.⁴⁶ It was mentioned on various occasions that she always insisted on being addressed as ‘Fräulein’ (Miss), the formal German address for an unmarried woman.⁴⁷ This striving for a persona that did not transgress conventional norms was reflected in Hugo Münsterberg’s praise that there was nothing unnatural about Miss Mestorf.⁴⁸

Paris 1887: An Aspiring Young Woman Negotiates Her Future

Two themes stand out in Münsterberg’s letters to Schirmacher: gender-specific social norms and his problematisation of competition between men and women. This had not changed when the two resumed their correspondence five years later. In the meantime, Schirmacher had continued her education against all the odds. Becoming a governess or teacher for young children was still one of the very few paths a young educated middle-class woman who had to make a living could take. Finishing the teachers’ seminar in Danzig at the age of eighteen, Schirmacher had reached the highest official level of education a woman could achieve in Prussia at that time. She became a governess in a private household in Thuringia, where she fought for a few free hours in the evenings to read the books Münsterberg had recommended to her.⁴⁹ A year later, she left her job after a conflict with her employer. With the financial help of her affluent brother-in-law Otto Münsterberg (1854–1915), Hugo’s older brother, she then went to France to improve her French. Soon after her arrival in France, she began to study German at the Sorbonne, with Otto Münsterberg’s consent but without the knowledge of her wider family.

Late nineteenth-century Paris was a significant place in terms of gendered educational strategies and transnational cultural relations. To learn modern languages, French in particular, was deemed a suitable occupation for young, unmarried, middle-class women in Germany. To send daughters to France or Switzerland to refine their education was seen as a good way of bridging the time between school and marriage. While wealthy families could afford to send their offspring to a girls’ boarding school, less well-off young women went abroad for a stay in a private household—some as a guest or adopted family member and others as a governess or maid.⁵⁰ So there was nothing unusual in sending the somewhat unruly young Schirmacher to France for a while after her short career as a governess. However, she soon changed the character of her sojourn in the French capital. The peculiarities of the French educational system offered her some opportunities. On the one hand, France allowed women free access to study languages at the university in order to train first-class female teachers for their strictly gender-segregated secular schools that competed with religious schools. On the other hand, due to the growing importance of the German Reich in Europe, there was a market for private German language lessons in Paris.⁵¹ Schirmacher took advantage of both circumstances. She studied German (and thus also French) at the Sorbonne, and to earn at least part of her keep and burden her brother-in-law as little as possible, she gave language lessons to fellow students.⁵² A stipend from the General German Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein) in her second year facilitated this endeavour.⁵³

In August 1887, she was the first German woman to pass the French agrégation, a competitive final exam for language students from the whole country. In 1887, out of 56 candidates (of both sexes) who took the written examination only nine were admitted to the final oral exam. Schirmacher graduated second best in this group.⁵⁴ In the months before the exam, however, her letters wavered between hope, optimism, and doubt as to whether she would succeed. One contributing factor to her ambivalence was her uncertainty about her future. If she did not marry (which she did not intend to do), she would have to earn money. Although she seemingly had no other option than to become a teacher, she was determined to continue her studies, so she planned to go to England and improve her English while teaching there. She saw this as just another step on her way to America, where she hoped to study further and eventually become a professor at a women’s college.⁵⁵ In this situation of stress, hope, and planning, in the early summer of 1887 Schirmacher resumed her correspondence with Hugo Münsterberg. At the age of only 24, he was about to finish his university studies with a Habilitation in psychology and to marry the painter Selma Oppler (1867–?). When Schirmacher learned about his impending marriage, she asked Münsterberg—probably mockingly—for his opinion on the dangers and advantages of the married state, but, more earnestly, also sent him an essay she had written and asked him for feedback. After an initial excuse saying that he was busy preparing for his Habilitation examination, Münsterberg finally answered her two questions in a detailed letter about a month later.⁵⁶

We have neither Schirmacher’s essay, which she had presumably written in preparation for her exam in German literature, nor her letters to Münsterberg. Nevertheless, his rather patronising response not only displays a conventional gender ideology—a woman, he held, was made for love and if she met the right man she would not think about marriage in such a utilitarian way. It also shows his gendered reading of a scholarly work that posited certain ideas about cooperation between men and women in science. Münsterberg suspected—probably correctly—that Schirmacher wanted feedback on her essay to find out whether she could be an academic in her own right. Based on this assumption, Münsterberg sharply criticised her work, which he considered full of empty phrases and thus a danger to ‘empirical/scientific’ (positive) knowledge. More, he reprimanded her for following presentations in textbooks without developing an independent argument based on work with primary sources. While we could ponder which of these criticisms the ambitious Münsterberg had perhaps been subjected to himself and how he probably enjoyed repeating them to someone else, in his letter he distanced himself entirely from all these flaws. In his opinion, they were typical of women who, in addition to all their other faults, liked to pick important topics but, lacking the knowledge to address them adequately, made do with generalisations and emotional arguments instead.

This firm, if unsubstantiated, conviction of the difference between men and women led him to a number of other discriminatory statements. First, Münsterberg emphasised the distinction between aesthetic and rational judgement, the latter being a masculine attribute in his view. Second, precisely because men would accept a woman’s better judgement in taste and feeling, women would have to acknowledge, he claimed, male supremacy in rational arguments:

Every prudent man accepts a woman’s opinion in matters of delicacy, tact and taste; why should a woman not admit that nature has bestowed the gift of consistent, rigorous, logical thinking [...] only on men. (Jeder besonnene Mann erkennt in Sachen des Feingefühls, des Taktes und Geschmackes dem Weibe das Urteil zu; weshalb soll da die Frau sich scheuen einzugestehen, daß die Natur die Gabe des consequenten streng logischen Denkens […] dem Manne allein verliehe.)⁵⁷

Another, related distinction Münsterberg made was between ‘producing’ (producieren) and ‘reproducing’ (reproducieren) in science. While women could contribute through reproducing existing knowledge, the innovative production of new knowledge was the burden and privilege of men. In his view, productive thinking consisted above all of deviating from the textbook and therefore required ‘fighting with the established’ (Kämpfen mit dem Hergebrachten), a struggle in which ‘a woman’s mind can only fail’ (da muß der Geist der Frau unterliegen). Münsterberg distinguished between knowledge from books, which was open to all who were eager enough to learn, and the more serious engagement with source texts, which, he said, required a man’s impartial judgement.⁵⁸ His doctrinal views thus resulted in a gender-specific division of labour in academia. While he was willing to let women do the necessary reproductive work of copying, excerpting, and translating, perhaps also teaching younger students, it was only men whom he believed to be able to break new ground, to develop innovative and challenging arguments, or to explore new material. That he envisaged this as a model for his own marriage became clear when he mentioned his bride’s exhaustion after reading scientific books in preparation for continuing to work with him.

After having scolded Schirmacher so harshly, at the end of his epistle Münsterberg completely changed his tune and stated that if the text Schirmacher had sent was not a scholarly work that she wished to publish but simply a kind of practice run to demonstrate that she had read the books thoroughly, he would not hesitate to congratulate her on her witty and comprehensive acquisition of the research literature, and the subtlety and taste of her stimulating writing. If her essay was lacking in critical argument and scientific analysis of the sources, it was not her duty as a woman to demonstrate these.⁵⁹ He corroborated this view in his final advice:

So then, I see in your essay that with luck and skill you most nobly testify to your talent and zeal; may you always do your service to science by diligently acquiring and processing knowledge, but may you never let false friends persuade you that you can do more than nature has permitted to woman. (So sehe ich denn in Ihrem Aufsatz, daß Sie mit Glück und Geschick Ihre Begabung und Ihren Eifer aufs edelste bezeugen; mögen Sie alle Zeit der Wissenschaft durch fleißige Aneignung und Verarbeitung Ihre Dienste leisten, aber mögen Sie nie durch falsche Freunde sich einreden lassen, daß Sie mehr können, als die Natur dem Weibe gegeben.)⁶⁰

Schirmacher was probably able to take this discouraging remark calmly, especially after the information that she had been admitted to the final exam arrived just a few days later.⁶¹ Shortly after her successful agrégation, Schirmacher started to write publicly about women’s struggle for higher education. In her comprehensive review of an omnibus volume by German professors on academic women which she published a decade later, she did not honour Münsterberg (who had contributed to the volume) with a mention. She did, however, point out the profound lack of logic in some of the professors’ arguments and concluded by saying that the performance of men and women should only be judged individually and independently of their gender.⁶²

Gendered Personae in Academia

In the 1880s, a female academic cooperating with men on equal terms was not yet a realistic model. Schirmacher knew that her university exam would not entitle her to equal participation in the professions, let alone in academia. Rather, she was quite conscious that the fact that she was studying at a university in itself had the effect of subverting prevalent gender norms. But how is one young woman’s struggle for a place in the academic world connected to the question of the figure of the translator? Is there a female persona of the translator? What at first glance appears as individual advice to an aspiring young woman actually reveals a broader but hidden strand of meaning in relation to academic personae. Münsterberg pointed, possibly unintentionally, to a well-established pattern of women’s participation in intellectual discourses through translation and other supportive practices.

In her study on German women writers and their translation practices in the Enlightenment period, Diana Spokiene highlights the important, but widely forgotten contribution of women translators to European literary history.⁶³ While the history of knowledge only mentions this group in passing, translation history and feminist translation studies have pointed to the important contribution of women in this field.⁶⁴ However, many historical protagonists, Schirmacher included, are not easy to place in the history of translation. They translated, but they were also writers, researchers, journalists, or activists who translated occasionally or at a certain period of their careers. The diversity of women’s translation practices does not suggest the existence of a particular persona. The fact that many women translated anonymously or as collaborators with their husbands, fathers, or brothers also complicates our understanding of this persona. We could thus follow Daston and Sibum’s conclusion that not every profession or occupation leads to the creation of a persona.⁶⁵ Despite these reservations, however, I would like to propose introducing the concept of the gendered persona into translation history and examining more closely the various connections between women’s demands for access to academic education and their translation practices in the context of the history of knowledge.

The exchange between Schirmacher and Münsterberg points to hidden biographical models for women that were closely linked to the persona of the male scientist developed during the nineteenth century. These female, subordinate personae were established and maintained by the gendered double standard inherent in the distinction between productive and reproductive work. Lorraine Daston mentions that when Charles Darwin was introduced to a professor’s daughters as potential brides, their ability to translate was particularly emphasised; she also points to the translation work carried out by other professors’ wives as one of the ways in which they supported their husbands.⁶⁶ Hence, we should investigate further how the persona of the professional academic’s ideal spouse, and other subordinate personae (such as translators and secretaries of both genders) that complemented the hegemonic male persona of the academic, were defined in a period when a growing number of academics married.

First, we should not suppose that for all women aspiring to be included in scientific/scholarly work there was only one solution and they either strived to achieve the hegemonic male model for themselves or succumbed to the prevalent model of femininity. Therefore, it could be rewarding to delve deeper into the various individual negotiations and solutions found in the biographies of many educated women.

Second, the example of Johanna Mestorf points to the transformative potential of working as a translator; it could be rewarding to investigate how women who fought for their place in academia and in the professions actively used this potential. In other words, we should look into the protagonists’ agency in forming a persona as a translator and inhabiting it for a while, either alone or together with other personae (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

Käthe Schirmacher (in the middle, seated) together with fellow students after her first university degree, the certificat d'aptitude in Paris in 1886 (University Library Rostock, Käthe Schirmacher Papers)

Notes

• 1. See on Hugo Münsterberg: Jutta Spillmann and Lothar Spillmann, ‘The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993), 322–38.

• 2. To convey the meaning of the German term ‘wissenschaftlich’, which refers to work in the sciences and the humanities, I use the split term scientific/scholarly.

• 3. James C. Albisetti, Mädchen und Frauenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2007); Juliane Jacobi, Mädchen- und Frauenbildung in Europa. Von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 2013); Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz, eds., Geschichte der Mädchen- und Frauenbildung, 2 vols (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 1996); Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History. Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass et al.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

• 4. From a contemporary perspective: Maria G. Grey, ‘The Women’s Educational Movement’, in The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essays, ed. Theodore Stanton (New York et al.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884), 30–62; J. Kettler, Was wird aus unseren Töchtern? (Weimar: Weimarer Verlagsanstalt, 1889); Helene Lange, Frauenbildung (Berlin: L.Oehmigke’s Verlag, 1889); Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, eds., Der Stand der Frauenbildung in den Kulturländern, vol. III, Handbuch der Frauenbewegung (Berlin: Moeser, 1902); Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Newnham’, Nationalzeitung 12 July 1891 (republished in Käthe Schirmacher, Aus aller Herren Länder (Paris and Leipzig: Welter), 269–82.

• 5. Monika Bednarczuk, ‘Akademicka “międzynarodówka” kobieca? Solidarność, rywalizacja i samotność w Szwajcarii (1870–1900)’, Wielogłos Pismo Wydziału Polonistyki UJ 44 no. 2 (2020), 5–34, https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.20.010.12401; Katharina Belser, ed., ‘Ebenso neu als kühn’. 120 Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität Zürich (Zürich et al.: eFeF-Verlag, 1988); Franziska Rogger, Der Doktorhut im Besenschrank. Das abenteuerliche Leben der ersten Studentinnen – am Beispiel der Universität Bern (Bern et al.: eFeF-Verlag, 1999); Käthe Schirmacher, Züricher Studentinnen (Leipzig and Zürich: Th. Schröter, 1896); Romana Weiershausen, Wissenschaft und Weiblichkeit. Die Studentin in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004).

• 6. Ilse Costas, ‘Der Kampf um das Frauenstudium im internationalen Vergleich. Begünstigende und hemmende Faktoren für die Emanzipation der Frauen aus ihrer intellektuellen Unmündigkeit in unterschiedlichen bürgerlichen Gesellschaften’, in Pionierinnen – Feministinnen – Karrierefrauen?, ed. Anne Schlüter (Pfaffenweiler: 1992), 115–44.

• 7. Falko Schnicke, ‘Fünf Analyseachsen für eine kritische Geschlechtergeschichte der Geisteswissenschaften. Aufriß eines Forschungsfeldes’, Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte 20 (2017 [2019]), 44–68.

• 8. E.g., Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, ‘Zum Engagement der österreichischen Frauenvereine für das Frauenstudium’, in ‘Durch Erkenntnis zu Freiheit und Glück…’. Frauen an der Universität Wien (ab 1897), ed. Waltraud Heindl and Martina Tichy (Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1993); Miriam Wallraven, ‘Die Petitionspolitik der bürgerlichen Frauenbewegung. Mathilde Weber und Helene Lange’, Hundert Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität Tübingen, http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/frauenstudium/, last modified 22 April 2015.

• 9. For example, Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives. Women in Science 1789–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, Creative Couples in the Sciences (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Theresa Wobbe, ed., Zwischen Vorderbühne und Hinterbühne: Beiträge zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen in der Wissenschaft vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2015).

• 10. Falko Schnicke, Die männliche Disziplin. Zur Vergeschlechtlichung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1780–1900 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015); Kirsti Niskanen and Michael Barany, eds., Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

• 11. On variations of the concept: Gadi Algazi, ‘Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 131 (2016), 8–32, at 9–11, 14, https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10262.

• 12. Lorraine Daston, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Persona. Arbeit und Berufung’, in Zwischen Vorderbühne und Hinterbühne: Beiträge zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen in der Wissenschaft vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Theresa Wobbe (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015).

• 13. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, ‘Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories’, Science in Context 16 (2003), 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026988970300067X.

• 14. Daston and Sibum, ‘Introduction’, 2.

• 15. Mineke Bosch, ‘Persona and the Performance of Identity. Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative’, L’Homme 24, no. 2 (2013), 14–5.

• 16. Ibid., 16. Bosch particularly points to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York et al.: Routledge, 1990) and Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987), 125–51.

• 17. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2020); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis, Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Liz Stanley, The Autobiographical I. The Theory and Practice of Feminist Autobiography (Manchester et al.: Manchester University Press, 1992); Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Leben schreiben. Stichworte zur biografischen Thematisierung als historiografisches Format’, in Bananen, Cola, Zeitgeschichte: Oliver Rathkolb und das lange 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Lucile Dreidemy et al. (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2015), 1013–26; Schnicke, Disziplin, 64–5.

• 18. P. David Marshall and Kim Barbour, ‘Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies: A New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective’, Persona Studies 1, no. 1 (2015), 1–12, at 5, https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2015vol1no1art464.

• 19. Daston, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Persona’.

• 20. Gadi Algazi, ‘Scholars in Households: Refiguring the Learned Habitus, 1480–1550’, Science in Context 16, no. 1/2 (2003), 9–42.

• 21. Falko Schnicke, ‘Kranke Historiker. Körperwahrnehmungen und Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert’, Historische Anthropologie 25 (2017), 11–31; Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch, and Kaat Wils, ‘Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities’, Persona Studies 4 (2018), 1–5, https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2018vol4no1art748.

• 22. Kirsti Niskanen and Michael Barany, ‘Introduction: The Scholar Incarnate’, in Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona Incarnations and Contestations, ed. Kirsti Niskanen and Michael Barany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 11.

• 23. Parts of this sub-chapter have been previously published in Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Im/Possible Careers. Gendered Perspectives on Scholarly Personae around 1900’. European Journal of Life Writing 11, Cluster: When Does the Genius do the Chores? Knowledge, Auto/Biography and Gender (2022), WG70–WG102, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38786; more detailed information on Schirmacher’s early formative process: Johanna Gehmacher, Elisa Heinrich, and Corinna Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiografische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2018), 37–158 (Gehmacher).

• 24. Joh. Abromeit, ‘Carl Julius Adolph Scharlok’, in Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft (1900), 153–7.

• 25. Nl Sch 522/004, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 5 June 1881; Nl Sch 686/004, KS to Julius Scharlok, 9 March 1882.

• 26. Ibid.

• 27. Ibid.

• 28. Nl Sch 686/010, KS to Julius Scharlok, 2 September 1882.

• 29. Nl Sch 686/013, KS to Julius Scharlok, December 1882.

• 30. Ibid.

• 31. On her acquaintance with Dohm’s book: Nl Sch 752/001, Käthe Schirmacher, Flammen, Manuscript, 31; on her relation to the free religious church: Nl Sch 538/005, Konfirmationsurkunde Käthe Schirmacher, 18. May 1882. On emancipatory thought among religious dissenters in Germany: Sylvia Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens. Frauen im Deutschkatholizismus und in den freien Gemeinden 1841–1852 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990).

• 32. Nl Sch 522/007, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 6 August 1882.

• 33. Weiershausen, Wissenschaft, 9 and 119; Edith Glaser, ‘“Sind Frauen studierfähig?” Vorurteile gegen das Frauenstudium’, in Geschichte der Mädchen- und Frauenbildung. vol 2: Vom Vormärz bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Claudia Opitz Elke Kleinau (Frankfurt/M., New York: Campus, 1996), 299–309.

• 34. Nl Sch 522/007, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 6 August 1882.

• 35. Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm Bischoff, Das Studium und die Ausübung der Medicin durch Frauen (München: Th. Riedel, 1872).

• 36. Hedwig Dohm, Die wissenschaftliche Emancipation der Frau (Berlin: Wedekind & Schwieger, 1874), 35–6.

• 37. Nl Sch 522/007, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 6 August 1882.

• 38. On the creating of different gender characters through (among other things) girls’ school curricula: Hausen, Karin, ‘Die Polarisierung Der “Geschlechtscharaktere” – Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben.’ In Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas. Neue Forschungen, ed. Werner Conze, 363–93 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1976), 388–9.

• 39. Nl Sch 522/007, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 6 August 1882.

• 40. Ibid.

• 41. Ibid.

• 42. Ibid.

• 43. Alexander F. Chamberlain, ‘Miss Johanna Mestorf’, American Anthropologist 11 (1909), 536–7.

• 44. Dagmar Unverhau, ‘Johanna Mestorf – Lebensabschnitte statt einer Biographie. Frühe Jahre und der Weg nach Kiel als Kustodin am Museum vaterländischer Alterthümer’, in Eine Dame zwischen 500 Herren: Johanna Mestorf – Werk und Wirkung, ed. Julia K. Koch (Münster et al.: Waxmann, 2002), 103–45, at 118–21.

• 45. Unverhau, ‘Johanna Mestorf’, 103–45, at 126–7.

• 46. Chamberlain, ‘Miss Johanna Mestorf.’

• 47. Nicole Schultheiß, ‘Professor Johanna Mestorf’, Kieler Frauenportraits, accessed 13 March 2022, https://www.kiel.de/de/kiel_zukunft/stadtgeschichte/frauenportraits/buch19_portrait_mestorf.php.

• 48. Another case where this attitude of confirming patriarchal norms proved a successful strategy was that of Lady Blennerhasset, a multilingual historian and biographer. See Laura Pachtner, Lady Charlotte Blennerhassett (1843–1917). Katholisch, kosmopolitisch, kämpferisch (Göttingen: Vandenhoek, 2020).

• 49. Nl Sch 684/022, 684/040, 684/042, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 10 Mai 1884, 13 November 1884, 20 November 1884.

• 50. Mareike König, ‘Konfliktbeladene Kulturvermittlung – Deutsche Dienstmädchen und Erzieherinnen in Paris um 1900’, in Transkulturalität. Gender- und bildungshistorische Perspektiven, ed. Wolfgang Gippert, Petra Götte, and Elke Kleinau (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2008), 238–55; Wolfgang Gippert, ‘Ambivalenter Kulturtransfer. Deutsche Lehrerinnen in Paris 1880 bis 1914’, Historische Mitteilungen (HMRG) 19 (2006), 105–33.

• 51. For a detailed description and further literature, see Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 65–9.

• 52. Nl Sch 313/003, Otto Münsterberg to KS, 9 June 1885; Nl Sch 316/017, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 30 Mai 1887.

• 53. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘L’agrégation d’allemand’, Die Lehrerin in Schule und Haus 4, no. 9 (1888), 271.

• 54. Schirmacher, ‘L’agrégation d’allemand’, 271.

• 55. Nl Sch 316/016, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 14 Mai 1887; Nl Sch 718/020, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 13 July 1887.

• 56. Nl Sch 522/015, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 29 June 1887; Nl Sch 522/016, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 20 July 1887.

• 57. Nl Sch 522/016, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 20 July 1887.

• 58. On the work with sources in history as something only a ‘whole man’ could do, see Schnicke, Disziplin, 114–6.

• 59. Nl Sch 522/016, Hugo Münsterberg to KS, 20 July 1887.

• 60. Ibid., emphasis in the original.

• 61. Nl Sch 994/010, Ernest Lichtenberger to KS, 25 July 1887.

• 62. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Die akademische Frau (Schluß.)’, Die Frauenbewegung 3, no. 3 (1897), 28.

• 63. Diana Spokiene, ‘Found in Translation: German Women Writers and Translation Practices Around 1800’, in Historical Textures of Translation: Traditions, Traumas, Transgressions, ed. Markus Reisenleitner and Susan Ingram (Vienna: Mille-Tre-Verlag, 2012), 95–108; see also Michaela Wolf, ‘The Creation of a “Room of One’s Own”. Feminist Translators as Mediators between Cultures and Genders’, in Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities, ed. José Santaemilia (Manchester et al.; St. Jerome, 2005), 15–25.

• 64. Susan Bassnett, Feminist Experiences. The Women’s Movement in Four Cultures ( London and Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Luise von Flotow, ed., Translating Women. Perspectives on Translation (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011); Sabine Messner and Michaela Wolf, Mittlerin zwischen den Kulturen – Mittlerin zwischen den Geschlechtern? Studie zu Theorie und Praxis feministischer Übersetzung (Graz: Institut für Translationswiss., 2000); Stefanie Kremmel, Julia Richter, Laris Schippel, and Tomasz Rozmysłowicz, Österreichische Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer im Exil (Vienna and Hamburg: New Academic Press, 2020).

• 65. Daston and Sibum, ‘Introduction’, 3.

• 66. Daston, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Persona’, 111.