584
PARTISAN REVIEW
Grete Meisel-Hess's focus was on marriage law. Even though she
began to push for social measures to help expectant mothers in 1901,
maternity insurance was not granted until 1914. She also championed the
rights of illegi timate mothers to raise their children, and for such children
to be able to inherit from one another. In 1911, together with others, she
supported the German League for the Protection of Mothers, which
among a variety of things condemned marriages that "merged money and
love"-namely of rich middle-aged men to beautiful young girls-in the
search for a higher moral order. Meisel-Hess found scientific support in
Freud's theories of sexuality, since she believed also that women needed an
active sexual life to further physical and mental health. In her words, "every
possibility of the inner rebirth of an individual is conditional on his rela–
tion to sexuali ty."
Irma von Troll-Borostyani was yet another autodidact who herself suf–
fered from the dreary existence to which girls of "good families" were then
relegated. In addition to Nietzsche, Goethe, Meister Eckhardt, and Jakob
Boehme, she had read Aristotle, Cicero, the Kabbalah, Schopenhauer,
Emerson, and Byron. And she didn't want to live "without a goal." After
publishing
The Equality
oj
the Sexes and the Riform
oj
the Education oJYouth
(Die Gleichstellung der Geschlechter und die Riform der Jugenderziehung)
under
her real name, she was accused of plagiarizing a man's work, namely August
Bebel's
Die Frau und der Sozialismus
which had come out fourteen years ear–
lier. Critics did not believe that women could have independent ideas: they
were expected to have inferior minds, able to write romances at best.
I have mentioned only a few of the leading feminists Harriet Anderson
writes about in her excellent book. Here, my aim is to call attention to the
fact that in Vienna feminist initiatives mushroomed during the same peri–
od as Freud "invented" psychoanalysis; and to indicate that the arguments
about the role of women among the early Freudians were part of the
Zeitgeist. So, whether or not individual feminists would or would not
accept the existence of an unconscious was less of an issue in the culture
at large than the fact that both movements were threatening the existing
order.
Much has been made of Wittels's statement of March 11, 1908, in the
Minutes
oj
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society,
that "women bemoan the fact
that they did not come into the world as men; [that] they try to become
men via the fem.inist movement; [and that neither] people [nor women
themselves] appreciate the perversity and senselessness of these strivings."
At the time, Freud apparently had been amused and stimulated by the ensu–
ing responses. Adler's comments were particularly sharp, as these ended up
with a Marxist analysis and the dismissal ofWittels's presentation as a fairy
tale. However, their differences were based in their personal politics, since
