The Surplus Woman. Catherine L. Dollard

      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