Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

A Century of Promise • 171of work, often keeping the books in their fathers’ businesses. 20 As a result of thisegalitarian distribution of power, wives represented their households in the publicspace as mistresses of the house and not only as their husbands’ representatives. 21These conditions were a far cry from Jacob Grimm’s imagined place of women asthe Schlüsselträgerinnen of their husbands.In his study on Neckarhausen, David Sabean has shown that, as farm womenincreasingly produced cash crops in the early nineteenth century and contributedgreater wealth to the family purse, they began to demand a say in the disposal ofboth the products they produced and their proceeds. Husbands and wives met on amore equal footing and, as Sabean demonstrates, these changing economic conditionswere reflected in local court decisions. ‘Courts’, accordingly, ‘shifted in theway they related to the family.’ 22 While, in the beginning, ‘they sought to effectcontrol by enhancing the authority of the Hausvater’, over time, ‘they came to actmore flexibly, allying with whichever spouse seemed to be the most effective commodityproducer’. 23The daily reality of nineteenth-century gender relations did not reflect liberal sociopoliticaldemands or their imagined Gemeinwesen. At the same time, it is importantto understand also that the family was a metaphor for the state in the Germanists’political theory. In the aftermath of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, as I have mentioned,the discussion of public law and constitutions was virtually banned. It was inthis environment that political science found expression as legal history on Germanprivate law. This changing reality was evident in Eichhorn’s shifting focus from municipalconstitutions to private law. However, Eichhorn inverted the basis of participationand pointed toward the critical importance of private property ownership asthe basis of vollkommene Freiheit. While participation and everything connected withit underwent a process of masculinization, exclusion underwent a theoretical processof feminization. This was evident in Grimm’s analysis of symbols and language, forexample. It also served to underscore a point that Dieter Grimm makes, namely, thatthe codification of private law ‘at no time was isolated from the social reality andquestions of political organization’. 24Accordingly, descriptions of gender relations in the family were the metaphoricalter ego of public relationships of power and conceptions of exclusive legal personality.It was a narrative that did not target wealthy women alone, but also the dangersof working-class women, who were also acquiring property. Kathleen Canning hasshown how ‘narratives of danger about female factory labor were constituted across arange of statements, texts, signs, and practices: from academic lectures and scientificsurveys, state inquiries and parliamentary resolutions, to union brochures and[anti-]feminist tracts, employers’ sanctions, and even calls for strikes against thehiring of women workers’. 25 These narratives contributed to the passage of so-calledprotective legislation, namely, the Labor Code of 1878, which prohibited femalelabor in the mines at the same time that it required three weeks maternity leave;and the revised Code of 1891, which, amongst other policing measures, prescribed