The surplus woman

The belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenberschu, formed a principal pillar of the first German womens movement and served as a central leitmotif in the debates regarding modernity in Imperial Germany. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many women without a husband. This book establishes the existence of a discourse surrounding the question of what to do with these women by examining primary sources from as early as the 1850s and extending the enquiry through World War I.

By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, this book provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about marital status of women as both a product and a reflection of changing times.