Zneužitá ženská síla. Poznámky k textům Laury Marholmové a Ellen Keyové v časopise Die Zeit a některým souvislostem s českým prostředím
The Misuse of Female Power. Remarks on Texts of Laura Marholm and Ellen Key in the Weekly Die Zeit and on their Connections with the Czech Culture

Summary/Abstract: The text with a rather ambivalent title “The misuse of Female Power” deals with two Norse modernists, Laura Marholm and Ellen Key, who published in the weekly Die Zeit since 1895. Their concepts of a woman, emphasizing the woman’s erotic character, were in opposition to the legal, educational and social feminism. Laura Marholm met Hermann Bahr, the editor in Die Zeit, in the second half of the 1880’s in Berlin and even thought their attitudes were transforming during the 1890’s, Bahr’s standpoint in terms of the women’s issue was a product of the Laura Marholm’s doctrine, whom he viewed as the authentic voice of psychology of a woman. The opinion on a woman held by Ellen Key did not differ much from that of Laura Marholm, however the fundamental difference between them was the concept of the basic instinct of a woman determining her behaviour and conduct as well as her opportunities to establish herself in public sphere and employment. Marholm advocated erotic determinism of a woman’s dependence on a man, while Key emphasized motherhood as the basic instinct. Key fascinated modernists in Austria, Germany as well in Bohemia by her redemptive individualistic philosophy based on evolutionism and positivism and by her emotional style and utterance. (Šalda’s concept of “female psychical mother tongue” is based on Key’s work in many aspects). As far as the weekly Die Zeit is concerned, Key published both articles on women’s issue as well as other pedagogical and philosophical texts. The present article also partially follows the conflict of emancipatory feminism with the modernist differential concept of a woman, using the example of a scandal caused by a brochure Die Frauen und das Studium der Medicin by Eduard Albert, a Czech physician in Vienna, in which Albert used both contemporary anthropological theories (C. Lombroso) and Laura Marholm’s arguments against women in medicine.

• Details
• Contents