Something new took place in the German states in 1802. A work of philosophy was published under a woman’s name. In her audacious book On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Development (Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung), Amalia Holst declared that it was time someone spoke out about the plight of women in Germany ‘from a woman’s standpoint’. While men had written extensively about the duties of the female sex, restricting women to knowledge that is useful for their ‘threefold calling’ as wife, mother and housewife, Holst argued that men ‘are constantly partial to their own’ and ‘rarely allow justice to be done to ours’. Indignant at the unjust claims made by her male interlocutors, and bemused by the ongoing silence of women on a matter so close to their hearts, she lay down a fiery demand:
In the name of our sex I challenge men to justify the right they have presumed for themselves to hold back an entire half of the human race, barring them from the source of science and allowing them at most to skim its surface.
(all translations of Amalia Holst are from my forthcoming edition of her work)
Holst does not emulate the supposedly genderless position adopted in works of philosophy by men. While she acknowledges that the challenge of philosophy is to ‘abstract from the love of [one’s] sex’, and to present arguments before ‘the judgment seat of sound reason’, she nevertheless makes her demand from a position that ‘knows, loves and treasures the gentle, amiable, and often unrewarded female virtues’. She switches seamlessly between a general critique of male prejudice and direct appeals to her female readers (meine Freundinnen) to be a refutation of the self-deceived claims made by men.
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