Your book identifies the later 18th Century as a crucial era in the development of women’s education and women’s rights. What accounts for this?

This is a huge question that the book addresses, but I’ll try to give a tantalizing slice here. The later 18th century was crucial because public debate over women’s education and rights intensified. I need to emphasize here, however, that this did not translate into wider educational opportunities or expansion of rights, so we need to distinguish between rhetoric and what actually transpired “on the ground.” At mid century Rousseau’s regressive ideology on Woman, essentially confining her to domesticity and a limited education, was spurred on by “scientific” and medical writings that aimed to prove women’s limited capacity to reason, to think in the abstract, to make sound judgements. The revolution in France, near end of century, opened a space for feminist reformists to petition for women’s rights – education included among these – and my study devotes a chapter to the ways these women strategically incorporated the rhetoric of the revolution in petitions to the National Assembly. Going back to the word “crucial,” important to add here is that the rhetoric did not lead to gains, in France or across Western Europe, as the conservative backlash to the revolution across national boundaries quashed any expectations that had been raised.

One of the strengths of your work is your ability to easily negotiate several languages and nations. Can you identify what impact nationality had on women’s education?

Another huge question, but instead of trying to give a superficial synopsis, I’ll give a few telling examples. But here again we need to distinguish between the discourses on women’s education and what was actually taking place. For example, Rousseau’s Emile or On education, in which he spelled out his educational plan for a boy (Emile) and a girl (Sophie) had a tremendous impact across Europe, which we can attribute in part to ideology, in part to its accessible narrative style. It spawned hundreds of imitative works in the form of novels, novellas, and stories, as well as essays, treatises, letters, etc. And, fictional and nonfictional works that argued the more “progressive” line also crossed national borders. It would certainly be appropriate to say that the plethora of writings on the Woman question constituted a pan-European debate. What was taking place on the ground, however, had everything to do with national and local political conditions. In England, for example, aside from the schools of the marginalized Quakers, no progressive institutional movement for middle-class girls paralleled that of Dissenting academies for boys. Instead, parents had two options: serious education with home tutors or superficial education in the boarding and day schools that institutionalized Restoration court values of fashion and feminine performance. In France, the rigorous education of convent schools in the 16th and 17th centuries became subordinated to catechism repetition and instruction in manners by the late 18th century, leading some educational entrepreneurs to establish maisons d’education (private boarding schools) in the cities. With respect to Germany, we cannot speak of a “nation,” rather of more than 325 German territories, most of them ruled by a king, prince, or duke. A girl living in the tiny territory of Gotha, where a 17th-century duke established a progressive educational system that included girls, could receive a sound education to the age of 16, whereas a girl living in a neighboring territory by a regressive or disinterested monarch could grow up illiterate.

In the course of writing your book, did you come to feel close to any historical figure – female or male – a contributed to the progress of women’s education?

Yes, indeed. In fact, over a period of some months I was ordering and receiving portrait prints of the eight writers I treat, in order to include these in the book. Some of these writers are better known than others, e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Condorcet. One day a print arrived from a museum in Bremen. It was a color print of a painting I had previously seen in a tiny black and white reproduction, of a little known educational reformist named Betty Gleim. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had truly come to know her, or, at the risk of sounding silly, that I had known her in a previous lifetime. I’m not sure if this is because she was a teacher herself or that I was familiar with her personal background, with the incredible bureaucratic obstacles she overcame to obtain permission to start her own school – where, by the way, curriculum was rigorous and the expectations high. Or perhaps it was because she wrote daringly, during the period of Napoleonic occupation, not only about women’s need to be educated for independence and self sufficiency but about German political emancipation. Anyway, the tears welled up and I addressed her, something to the effect, “I’ve written not only about you and your writings, dear Betty, but for you. You deserve to become known to a wider audience.”

What has been the reaction to your book so far? Any surprises?

I was delighted to learn that it was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by Choice Magazine, the review publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and it’s received a lengthy, exceedingly positive review in the Women in German newsletter by a renowned scholar in this field. On the more personal level, I was amazed that both my husband and eldest son read it cover to cover – they’re not remotely engaged in this field, they’re not in academe, I figured they’d find it a chore and a bore. Instead, they said it holds together like a story, entertainingly told. When it first appeared, it received attention in local media and at my university, and of course the library obtained it. I’m particularly gratified when students I don’t even know approach me to say they’ve used it in papers or presentations. And I just love it when readers tell of their surprise at learning that the most radical feminist reform writer of the era was not only male, but mayor of Konigsberg and a friend of Immanuel Kant, whose misogyny is legend.

What do you hope your book will contribute to the study of women’s history?

I’d like to clarify first of all that I’m not a historian, rather a student of literature. The major chapters look at works by educational reformists to understand how they formulated their arguments, what constituted the debates, what were the mentalities and ideologies at play. In fact, the issue of how to handle the history of women’s education was problematic in that the history was too unwieldy to weave through the chapters, yet readers would need this historical background in order to contextualize the discussion of rhetoric. My solution was to create mini-chapters between the major chapters – I call them “window chapters” – in which I give nationally specific synopses of educational reformists who have been forgotten over time and about the ways political events have impacted education policies. To those more geared toward literary and cultural studies. I hope the book’s examination of subversive expression assists in understanding how reformists used language strategically in the effort to get their ideas accepted by potentially hostile audiences, especially by those who wielded power.