To America! Transatlantic Mediation

Abstract

Using the example of Käthe Schirmacher’s travel to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, this chapter explores the transatlantic networks and the internationalisation strategies of women’s movements in the late nineteenth century. It discusses the role of multilingual mediators in the building of transnational networks of activism and the opportunities this role offered to young, well-educated women like Schirmacher who were looking for both an income and a political mission. The chapter also analyses the concept of the ‘new woman’ Schirmacher propagated in her speech at the congress and argues that in so doing she contributed to shaping a new persona that opened up professional identities for women and thus chances to earn an independent income.

In 1893, the same year that Männer, Frauen und Fortschritt appeared in German, Käthe Schirmacher’s life changed dramatically with a journey to the USA that she had long craved for. This chapter describes the circumstances of this voyage and ties in with questions raised earlier about women’s opportunities for university education and the possibility for them to develop professional personae. The chapter follows Schirmacher on her way to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the women’s congress that took place there. It examines how she positioned herself as a transatlantic mediator both before and after the congress and demonstrates the importance of linguistic competence in a transnational space of activism as well as the need for transnational mediators in a movement that was becoming increasingly international.

The chapter also explores how Schirmacher spoke about and thus helped to create a new type of female personality, the ‘modern woman’. I argue that in so doing, she participated in a transnational discourse that framed the ‘dreadful woman question’ that Emma Hosken Woodward had grappled with in the 1880s, in a new way. She helped to replace negative notions of certain types of women and contributed to the creation of a new role model. I argue that the fact that Schirmacher depicted the ‘modern woman’ both as a type that already existed and as something that had yet to be created, should not be read as a contradiction but as a necessary transitional instance in a transformative discourse leading the development of a new persona.

Transatlantic Exchanges

The history of transatlantic networks of European and North American women active in various forms of social reform dates back to the early nineteenth century. Political and economic emigration from Europe to the USA, and the travels of American activists to European countries, played an important role in this.¹ The progress of the women’s movement in the USA compared to that in many European countries became particularly visible at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.² An entire exhibition hall, the Woman’s Building, was dedicated to expositions on women’s achievements in different countries, prepared by national committees.³ Among the many conferences held on the occasion, a women’s congress was held in May 1893.⁴

The international event had its roots in networks established during a transatlantic trip made by US suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the early 1880s, which led to forging of the International Council of Women (ICW). At the 1888 convention of the US National Woman Suffrage Association, a number of foreign delegates were present. Together with their American co-activists they committed to organising an international women’s conference every five years.⁵ The ambivalence of this movement of predominantly white women from the upper and middle-classes of Western countries, who wanted to design an inclusive project for ‘all women’, can be seen both in the marginalisation of early Afro-American protagonists in the US movement and in the hierarchical concept of civilisation on which the international activists based their ideas.⁶

That said, the organisers of the 1893 conference were aware of the audacity of their undertaking. In her opening address, May Wright Sewall (1844–1920), president of the National Council of Women of the USA and chair of the organisational committee of the conference, defended the convention’s ‘high-sounding title, “The World’s Congress of Representative Women”’ by pointing to the presence of participants from most European countries and to delegates from Asia, Africa, and South America as well.⁷ She emphasised that the American organisers had made an effort to invite and involve as many women as possible from different countries and organisations. She also outlined the envisaged structure of the ICW that was to build on national umbrella organisations, each representing their respective country’s movement.⁸ Sewall optimistically imagined these national associations as democratic institutions that would envoy delegates to a ‘permanent international parliament of women’, which, in a far future, would motivate the creation of a world parliament of men and women. However, there was a problematic hierarchy between the bonds created by well-established transatlantic networks and their looser and less egalitarian relationship to other countries. The built-in nationalising strategy caused severe asymmetries in the later development of the organisation.⁹

In the winter of 1892/1893, when there were hardly any national councils, the invitation procedure was still quite informal. It seems that in their wish to encourage the founding of national councils in as many foreign countries as possible, the organising committee wrote to a variety of federations abroad asking them to suggest topics and to name major activists in their movement who might be willing to come to Chicago. When one of these letters arrived at the Danzig feminist association Verein Frauenwohl, for which Schirmacher did secretarial work, Schirmacher—who saw her return home due to illness as only temporary—seized the opportunity. After three years in Danzig, during which she had continued her study of Romance languages privately and earned money by teaching French to women through correspondence, she longed to set out into the world once more.¹⁰ The head of the association, Marianne Heidfeld (life dates unknown), who knew of Schirmacher’s yearning to make contact with American women, asked her to answer the letter and politely inform the organisers that it was unlikely that they would be able to send someone to Chicago.¹¹

Schirmacher interpreted the task in her own special way. As instructed, she did inform May Wright Sewall (in English) ‘that we have here no first class notoriety, we could send over’ but she also took the question concerning topics for discussion quite seriously and suggested the following:

The subject I would venture to propose to you is: Characterize the true type of the modern woman. Mark the difference between her and the fin de siècle woman. – The judgement of Germany on modern women. Why is marriage less attractive and less easy to be attained by the modern woman, particularly in Germany?¹²

She then went a step further and asked Sewall if she could help her to get to Chicago herself, emphasising her achievements:

If I have not yet attained a well acknowledged position in Germany, yet I am already to a certain extent known by my essays, my first book: Liberty! […] As you will already have guessed from the choice of my subjects, I am myself a modern woman and a young one, in a very old part of an old world, where it is not easy to make one’s way. Now, ever since I heard of the Chicago Exhibition my sehnlichster Wunsch [‘dearest wish’, German original] has been to be able to go to Chicago and see it.¹³

However, lacking the money to pay for her own travel, she inquired about the meaning of the statement in the invitation letter that the National Council of Women of the USA ‘pledged themselves to entertain during the Congress the delegates attending it from foreign countries’. She concluded by offering herself as a mediator between their different countries:

I am so eager […] to see and to help, I should so like to come into contact with you, your work and ideas, […] I think too, it would not be so bad an investment of capital, and humanity would profit by it, if I had the opportunity of seeing great things and afterwards using them in the service of a cause I am most truly devoted to.¹⁴

With her fervent plea Schirmacher managed not only to attract Sewall’s attention (even though the committee had to organise hundreds of lectures) but also to win her support.

‘I do, my dear young woman, appreciate your eager curiosity for a glimpse of this new world’, the head of the conference committee assured her in a three-page personal letter. Sewall not only extended an invitation to speak at the conference, but also explained the support the National Council (of which she was the president) offered to foreign delegates:

In regard to the meaning of the sentence which you quote from our National Council statement, I can say that it means exactly what its words say in English; but that meaning might not be correctly interpreted by a foreigner, and I therefore take pleasure in stating to you explicitly its significance:- It means that on the arrival in Chicago of delegates from foreign countries, they will be welcomed at a hotel, -- a good one, -- which will be chosen as their headquarters; and that their expenses of living at that hotel, namely: the expenses of lodging and board during the one week that the sessions of the Congress continue, will be paid out of the treasury of the National Council.¹⁵

In her effusive letter of thanks, Schirmacher hastened to assure Sewall that she would be happy to use her own savings to cover the travel expenses.¹⁶

In bypassing the senior leaders of the German movement, Sewall and Schirmacher caused irritation among the official German delegates, who kept their distance from Schirmacher in Chicago.¹⁷ However, it was Schirmacher who became the darling of the congress, was praised in the newspapers, and was invited to further talks with which she was able to finance an extended stay in the USA.¹⁸ Her boldness and her youth may have helped her. But three aspects certainly contributed to her success: her linguistic skills, her promise to mediate across national and cultural borders and, last but not least, a subject that promised lively debate.

The Modern Woman

Already at the opening session of the congress, attended by thousands, Schirmacher’s choice of topic had secured her special attention. She reported to her parents that May Wright Sewall, holding her hand, had presented her to the large audience as ‘the bravest of the brave’ as she had ‘undertaken to treat a subject nobody would venture upon—the marriage prospects of the modern woman!’¹⁹ She was among the few foreigners to make a short statement at the opening ceremony; but while most of the other speakers rather formally delivered the greetings of their associations, Schirmacher told her audience in a personal way how she had ‘set’ her ‘heart’ on being there and how she had made it to America with courage, luck, and thanks to the support of Mrs Sewall.²⁰ Language competence was an issue also on this occasion; the anonymous introductory note to the opening session in the minutes regretted that ‘foreign delegates whose knowledge of English was imperfect, were deterred by diffidence’ from speaking at the opening.²¹

But what was so ‘brave’ about Schirmacher’s topic? As a painting of the ‘Modern Woman’ commissioned for the Women’s Building aptly illustrated, the self-educated, self-sufficient woman she propagated was the declared ideal of the congress. The central panel of the large, three-part mural by American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) showed ‘Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge and Science’.²² The academically educated woman may have been a provocation for the broader public but not for the majority of visitors to the women’s congress. However, the way in which Schirmacher linked matrimony, higher education, and the demand for women’s admission to the professions revealed tensions and contradictions in the concept on both a theoretical and practical level.

While Emma Hosken Woodward’s Men, Women and Progress had invoked the possibility of married life on equal terms, Schirmacher remained critical of the chances of realising that hope in the near future. In her 1893 novel Halb (Halfway), which took up some characters from her earlier work Die Libertad, she painted a grim picture of such a relationship.²³ Her contribution at the Chicago conference provided a sociological and theoretical rationale for this assessment, but also outlined a future type of woman that she believed still needed to be developed.

Schirmacher named three reasons why many women in Germany could not secure a livelihood through marriage. First, there was the demographic background: since women made up the majority of the population, there was a shortage of eligible men. Second, she pointed to difficulties in setting up a household due to the fact that many men lacked economic opportunities and well-paid jobs.²⁴ Her third reason, however, was a cultural one, namely the fact that the average German man, supported by all institutions of society, expected his wife to be ‘[h]is inferior, but a pleasant one’.²⁵ Under these conditions, she said, modern women could not find fulfilment in marriage. Schirmacher demanded full access for women to higher education and the professions:

[A modern woman] asks as her right, considers as her personal duty, considers as a general necessity, that a woman should in the first place be a character and full-grown personality; that she should, secondly, make sure of her chief gift or capacity, and train it, so as to know what regular work means and be able to support herself.²⁶

Reframing equal participation both as a duty vis-à-vis society and as a necessity, she avoided being criticised for individualism or, worse, egoism and prepared the ground for her main argument as to why the modern woman would not marry:

She supports herself, and so does not want to marry in order that she may be provided for. She is fond of her work, absorbed by it, makes friends by it, is respected for it, and so need not marry in order to obtain the regards due to a useful member of society.²⁷

Schirmacher also argued that the modern woman’s increased knowledge of the world, and of its double moral standard in particular, led to a loss of respect for and an ‘estrangement’ from men.²⁸ However, she rejected the accusation that modern women were opposed to marriage on principle. Instead, she called for an improvement in society—and in men. Together with the ‘modern man’ that still had to be developed, the ‘modern woman’ would be ‘able to grapple with the great problems at issue’.²⁹

With her argument, Schirmacher decisively changed the perspective of the debate. She replaced the negative discourse about surplus women who could not find a husband and therefore had to be cared for (or become scary women’s activists) with the positive image of the ‘modern woman’ who was not only self-sufficient but also expected men to change if they wanted to find a wife. Two argumentative strategies facilitated this turnaround: national comparison and the ambiguity of her concept of the ‘modern woman’. In talking about Germany and its conservative culture, she limited her argument to a specific time and place and thereby opened up the possibility of change. By invoking the USA as a positive model that Germany should emulate, she praised her host country and yet was able to address problems that also resonated with American women.³⁰ The in-depth and thoroughly positive discussion after her presentation at the conference bears witness to the success of this strategy.³¹

The title of Schirmacher’s lecture was given differently on different occasions, reflecting her multi-facetted argument. Whether it was ‘modern life’ that changed all women’s marriage prospects, or whether it was the ‘modern woman’ responding in specific ways to social change, remained a matter of perspective. The variations illustrate that the issue was still under negotiation and on shifting ground.³² In the analytical part of her talk, Schirmacher made it clear that all women were affected by modern life and therefore had to become modern women, whether they wanted to or not. In the political conclusion, however, the modern woman appears as a more specific type, a personality that is aware of her particular situation and acts accordingly. Schirmacher then even went one step further and invoked an ideal model for a future society, also called ‘the modern woman’. With this threefold (sociological, political, and utopian) definition, she grounded her demand for change in an analytical understanding of society but also created a complex revolutionary subject: the oppressed woman and the woman who is able to analyse her situation and fight for change for all women. The third, utopian figure of the ‘modern woman’ included both, knowledge of social hierarchies and a political agenda, in this way claiming that her political goal was reachable and not a mere wish. Tying in with how Gadi Algazi has conceptualised the persona as a tool for negotiating new social roles that include, but also transcend professional contexts, I argue that Schirmacher and others used the concept of the ‘modern woman’ to argue for a fundamental cultural shift.³³ By positing individuality and autonomy as legitimate and necessary qualities of women in modern societies, they sought to create a new persona that would serve as the basis for a variety of professional personae that could be inhabited by a woman.

Becoming a Mediator

Early in her life, Schirmacher had imagined the USA as the land of freedom for women. Her idealisation of American life deliberately contradicted the negative ideas about the New World prevalent in late nineteenth-century Germany and turned them into a critique of her own society. In a pamphlet published shortly before the Chicago congress, German radical Minna Cauer (1841–1922) had criticised these prejudices in a similar way and pointed to the important contribution women had made to the rise of the USA.³⁴ The young Schirmacher’s love affair with the New World, like the more prudent assessment of Cauer, her senior, illustrates the thirst for information in Germany about the development of the women’s movement in the USA. American activists, on the other hand, saw the internationalisation of the movement both as a civilising project for the whole world and as a way to strengthen their movement at home by highlighting its global relevance.³⁵ However, the great success of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, attended by around 150,000 visitors, had also made clear how urgently mediators between different languages and cultures were needed. If the ideal world parliament imagined by May Wright Sewall in the opening ceremony was to become a reality, an enormous amount of translation had to be accomplished, and detailed and profound information about participating countries had to be exchanged. A variety of ideas about society and political agendas had to be shared and discussed, and there had to be constant learning about different cultures.

Schirmacher had already emphasised her willingness to act as a transatlantic mediator for the movement in her application. In a first step, she became a mediator in a reverse sense to that which she might have imagined: she became an expert at explaining German society to American audiences. The celebrity status that she had won by her appearances in Chicago spurred further invitations.³⁶ Schirmacher was asked to repeat her much-discussed speech in private gatherings and was invited to speak at other conferences that took place during the World’s Fair.³⁷ She won particular acclaim with a speech at the Congress of Higher Education on ‘Why German Universities are the last to Admit Women’.³⁸ The local German women’s association sent a detailed, admiring congratulatory letter the following day.³⁹ Her performance also won her high praise in the press. Comparing her with two professors who had spoken before her the reporter reflected her success at the conference:

The first two addresses […] were delivered in German, while the last paper was delivered in excellent English, leaving the inference […] that German professors […] have not the admirable command of English shown by the lady who so ably and tellingly made her point against the German exclusion of women from the higher education open to men, Fraulein [sic] Schirmacher’s address, indeed, justly carried off the honors from the learned professors from Berlin and Bonn, as was amply demonstrated in the applause with which she was greeted at every point she made […]⁴⁰

A few days later, Schirmacher was invited to participate at the conference of the International Association of University Women as a representative of Germany.⁴¹ It must have been a particular satisfaction for her to represent her home country’s university women, who, according to German law and German university practice, should not have existed at all. A report on a reception on the occasion of the conference, attended by several hundred people, mentioned the five most important guests at the event. Among them was ‘Fraulein Schirmacher of Dantzig, Germany’ [sic].⁴² Probably the first text by Schirmacher to be translated into a language she did not speak appeared in a Swedish journal shortly after this success: an article on why woman needed to be scientifically educated for the sake of social reform across the whole of society.⁴³

Part of Schirmacher’s success in the USA may have been that she was happy to take part in the proselytising kind of engagement that was central to the American women’s internationalising campaign. However, she also learned to talk in public to large audiences. This enabled her to become a mediator in the call for women’s international cooperation at home, too. After her return to Germany in the autumn of 1893, she published several reports on the event in German papers.⁴⁴ She also travelled through German towns to give talks about the Chicago congress. After her lecture tour to Danzig, Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), Dresden, Munich, and Stuttgart she went to Zurich to complete her studies in Romance languages.⁴⁵ Her American experience thus helped her to break free from her isolation in Danzig and achieve the goal she had long strived for. Whether it was personal encouragement, the public recognition she now also received in Germany, or the reasonable expectation of being able to make a living from her writing and lecturing, or a combination of factors, remains open. Instead of holding on to the elusive goal of becoming a university professor in a country she had imagined as a utopian place of equality between men and women, she now developed the more realistic persona of a mediator of feminist ideas across national borders and the Atlantic.

Notes

• 1. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement 1830–1860 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Margaret H. MacFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Joan Sangster, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s’, in Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s, eds. Pernilla Jonsson, Silke Neusinger, and Joan Sangster (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007), 9–19; Anja Schüler, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Susan Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998).

• 2. Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Zur Geschichte der internationalen Frauenbewegungen. Von transatlantischen Kontakten über institutionalisierte Organisationen zu globalen Netzwerken’, in Internationalismen. Transformation weltweiter Ungleichheit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Karin Fischer and Susan Zimmermann (Vienna: Promedia, 2008); Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 107–28; Susan Wels, ‘Spheres of Influence: The Role of Women at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of International Exposition of 1983 and the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition 1915’, Ex Post Facto 8 (1999), 26–36.

• 3. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Das Frauengebäude auf der Chicagoer Weltausstellung’, in Aus aller Herren Länder. Gesammelte Feuilletons, ed. Käthe Schirmacher (Paris/Leipzig: Welter, 1897), 299–311.

• 4. Mary Kavanaough Oldham Eagle, ed., The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building, Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A.,1893: With Portraits, Biographies, and Addresses, Published by Authority of the Board of Lady Managers (Chicago: J.S. Hyland, 1895).

• 5. Report of the International Council of Women, assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association Washington, D.C., U.S. of America, March 25 to April 1, 1888: Condensed from the Stenographic Report Made by Mary F. Seymour and Assistants, for the Woman’s Tribune, Published Daily During the Council (Washington: R.H. Darby, printer, 1888), 9–11.

• 6. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls. Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, ‘Forging Feminist Identity in an International Movement: A Collective Identity Approach to Twentieth-Century Feminism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (1999), 363–86; on the problematic continuities of this Western elite approach in twentieth-century research see Francisca de Haan, ‘Writing Inter/Transnational History: The Case of Women’s Movements and Feminisms’, in Internationale Geschichte in Theorie und Praxis/International History in Theory and Practice Bd. 4, eds. Barbara Haider-Wilson, William D. Godsey, and Wolfgang Mueller (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017), 510–13.

• 7. A Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, Convened in Chicago on May 15, and Adjourned on May 22, 1893, Under the Auspices of the Woman’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1894), 14–5.

• 8. Ibid.

• 9. Corinna Oesch, ‘Internationale Frauenbewegungen. Perspektiven einer Begriffsgeschichte und einer transnationalen Geschichte’, Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte 22, no. 2 (2016), 25–35; Susan Zimmermann, ‘The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Development of Feminist Inter/National Politics’, Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005), 87–117.

• 10. University Archive Zurich U 109e 4.1 (1895), Faculty Meeting 8 November 1890; Nl Sch 303/011, Jakob Baechtold to KS, 5 March 1891; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Korrespondenz-Lehrzirkel’, Die Lehrerin in Schule und Haus 6, no. 19 (1889/1890).

• 11. Nl Sch, 905/063, Marianne Heidfeld to KS, 20 January 1893.

• 12. Indianapolis Public Library digital, May Wright Sewall papers (WSP), KS to May Wright Sewall, 25 January 1893. Emphasis in the original.

• 13. WSP, KS to May Wright Sewall, 25 January 1893.

• 14. Ibid.

• 15. Nl Sch 693/001, May Wright Sewall to KS 28 February 1893.

• 16. WSP, KS to May Wright Sewall, 24 March 1893.

• 17. Rupp, Worlds, 124; see also Johanna Gehmacher, ‘Moderne Frauen, die Neue Welt und der alte Kontinent. Käthe Schirmacher reist im Netzwerk der Frauenbewegung’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (OeZG) 22, no. 1 (2011), 16–40; Nl Sch 017/034, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 16 May 1893.

• 18. On her travel through the USA see Johanna Gehmacher, Elisa Heinrich, and Corinna Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher: Agitation und autobiografische Praxis zwischen radikaler Frauenbewegung und völkischer Politik (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2018), 130–32.

• 19. Nl Sch 017/034, KS to Clara and Richard Schirmacher, 16 May 1893.

• 20. A Historical Résumé, 29–30.

• 21. Ibid., 36–37.

• 22. On the commission and reception of the lost work see Norma Broude, ‘Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood?’, Woman’s Art Journal 21, no. 2 (2000), 36–43.

• 23. Käthe Schirmacher, Halb. Roman (Leipzig: Wilhelm Friedrich, 1893).

• 24. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘The Effect of Modern Changes in Industrial and Social Life on Woman’s Marriage Prospects—Address by Kaethe Schirmacher of Germany’, in A Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, Convened in Chicago on May 15, and adjourned on May 22, 1893, under the auspices of the Woman’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1894), 592; further versions of the same text: Nl Sch 174/001, The Marriage Prospects of the Modern Woman [manuscript]; Miss Kathe Schirmaches [sic], ‘Marriage Prospects in Germany’, in Mary Kavanaough Oldham Eagle; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘The Marriage Prospects of the Modern Woman. Rede, gehalten auf dem Internationalen Frauen-Kongress in Chicago am 17 Mai 1893’, in Käthe Schirmacher, Aus aller Herren Länder. Gesammelte Feuilletons (Paris/Leipzig: Welter 1897), 283–90.

• 25. Schirmacher, ‘The Effect’, 593.

• 26. Ibid., 594–95.

• 27. Ibid., 596.

• 28. Ibid., 596–97.

• 29. Ibid., 597. It is intriguing in this context that a major critique on Mary Cassett’s picture in the Women’s Building was that there were no men in it. Broude, ‘Mary Cassatt’, 36.

• 30. Nl Sch 693/001, May Wright Sewall to KS 28 February 1893.

• 31. Schirmacher, ‘The Effect’, response by Alice Timmons Toomy, Anna H. Shaw and Emily Marshall Wadsworth, 598–603.

• 32. WSP, KS to May Wright Sewall, 25 January 1893: ‘Characterize the true type of the modern woman […]’; Nl Sch 905/001, May Wright Sewall to KS, February 1893: ‘The Effects of Modern Life upon the Marriage Prospects of Women’; A Historical Résumé, 592; ‘The Effect’; Eagle, The Congress, 181: Marriage Prospects in Germany; Käthe Schirmacher, Aus aller Herren Länder. Gesammelte Feuilletons (Paris/Leipzig: H. Welter, 1897), 285: ‘The Marriage Prospects of the Modern Woman’.

• 33. Gadi Algazi, ‘Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 131 (2016), 8–32, at 12, https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10262.

• 34. Minna Cauer, Die Frauen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Berlin: Richard Lesser, 1893), 27; see for a critical reading: Schüler, Sklar, and Strasser, Social Justice, 130–31.

• 35. On the dynamics of internationalisation see Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945’, The American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994), 1571–1600.

• 36. Nl Sch 905/014, 015, ‘Husbands in Demand. Poor Prospects for German Women’; ‘Marriage and Some Other Things’ [paper clippings without bibliographical references]. Nl Sch 905/008 Harriet Brainard to KS 1 July 1893; Nl Sch 905/010, Frederick Bliss to KS, 13 July 1893.

• 37. Nl Sch 014/011, KS to Richard Schirmacher, 3 July 1893.

• 38. Nl Sch 905/024, Women in German Universities [paper clipping without bibliographical reference].

• 39. Nl Sch 905/011, Columbia Damen-Club to KS, 22 June 1893.

• 40. Nl Sch 905/024, Women in German Universities [paper clipping without bibliographical reference].

• 41. Nl Sch 905/009, International Association of University Women to KS [without date].

• 42. ‘College Women’, The Woman’s Journal 24, no. 32 (12 August 1893), 263.

• 43. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Kvinnofrågan och vetenskapen’, Idun. Praktisk Veckotidning för Kvinnan och Hemmet, no. 31 (4 augusti 1893), 242 [no translator mentioned].

• 44. Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Der internationale Frauenkongress in Chicago’, Nationalzeitung 25. Juni 1893; Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Der internationale Frauencongress in Chicago 1893’, Lose Blätter im Interesse der Frauenfrage no. 11 (1894); Schirmacher, ‘Das Frauengebäude’.

• 45. Gehmacher, Heinrich, and Oesch, Käthe Schirmacher, 131; see also Gehmacher, ‘Moderne Frauen’.