Six Modern Women.
An Early Study Of The Female Psyche
By A Non-Feminist Woman
[Psychology]. Hansson, Laura Marholm. Six Modern Women: Psychological Sketches. Translated from the German by Hermoine Ramsden. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.
Small 8vo.; preliminaries lightly sunned; hinges tender; green cloth decoratively stamped in gilt; covers worn, especially at tips and at spine; still, a pleasant copy.
First American edition, presumably preceded by the German edition from which this is translated.
An interesting work in that Hansson, a woman writing in a field nearly totally dominated by men at that time, has written an essentially anti-feminist text focusing on her thesis that women’s rights and women’s fulfillment as women are mutually and inextricably exclusive. Hansson organizes her work into 6 chapters or case studies: “The Learned Woman: Sonia Kovalevsky;” “Neurotic Keynotes: George Edgerton;” “The Modern Woman on the Stage: Eleonora Duse;” “The Woman Naturalist: Amalie Skram;” “A Young Girl’s Tragedy: Marie Bashkirtseff;” and “The Woman’s Rights Woman: A. Ch. Edgren-Leffler.”
The author makes her perspective crystal clear in the preface to her work:
There is only one point which I should like to emphasize in these six types of modern womanhood, and that is the manifestation of their womanly feelings. I want to show how it asserts itself in spite of everything – in spite of the theories on which they built up their lives, in spite of the opinions of which they were the teachers, and in spite of the success which crowned their efforts….They were out of harmony with themselves, suffering from a conflict which made its first appearance in the world when the “woman question” came to the fore….
A woman who seeks freedom by means of the modern method of independence is generally one who desires to escape from a woman’s sufferings. She is anxious to avoid subjection, also motherhood, and the dependence and impersonality of an ordinary woman’s life; but in doing so she unconsciously deprives herself of her womanliness…(pp. v-vi)
Hansson was not the first social commentator to offer these views; nor, surely, would she be the last. But she was an early anti-feminist female author, a status that makes her work important.
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