Julie von Bechtolsheim, a Political Life: Women's Work and Governance in the Age of Revolution

IF 0.2 3区社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-21 DOI:10.1111/1754-0208.12920

Patrick Anthony

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Abstract

This article understands how women and girls in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach negotiated core issues in the Age of Revolutions: early industrialization and political representation. The baroness Julie von Bechtolsheim (1751–1847) leveraged war, widowhood, courtly connections, and poetry to pursue a public ‘career’ as First Principal of Eisenach's Women's Association (Frauenverein) from 1814 to 1831, establishing a material link between her private estate and the political estate. The Association itself was contrived as a polity in microcosm. Accusations of Bechtolsheim's ‘despotic’ governance prompted a majority bourgeois managerial staff to establish electoral conventions. Not all women had equal claim to citizenship, however. The Association's records reveal a Romantic theory of labour that reinforced a social order built on women's work, and its ‘Industry School’ sustained a supply of female labour into the state's predominant industry, linen manufacture, as into the servant's quarters of its affluent homes.

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