Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

184 • The Making of a German ConstitutionGewerbeschule für Frauen und Töchter in Stettin. 100 In Dresden, the Frauenerwerbsverein(Women’s Professional Association), which was operated by women andhad been in operation for twenty-three years, offered training in the ‘white-blouse’professions, including tailoring, bookkeeping, typing and stenography. It also operateda business design school for women. As many as six hundred students enrolledannually, and the school was the recipient of considerable financial support fromlocal officials. The mayor of Dresden donated five hundred marks annually, and thequeen of Saxony was a regular donor as well. 101As I have tried to suggest in this chapter, the liberal anxiety over the positionof women in society reacted against major changes in gender relations that hadresulted from the decline of sex guardianship in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenthcentury before the introduction of the BGB, women contributed substantialsums of wealth to their marriages and they demanded the institution of marital propertysystems that allowed them to protect their wealth. German municipal courtsupheld not only women’s property rights, but their right to take oaths, bequeaththeir property and have guardianship of minor children. Moreover, women soughtcareers that required special skills and were more visible than ever in the businesscommunity. In her article ‘Die Ehefrage und der Beruf’, Henriette Fürth reportedthat, in the thirteen years between 1882 and 1895, the number of women in the tradeand service industries had risen 94.3 percent from 298,110 to 579,608. 102 The rise ofwomen’s trade schools and women’s interest in professional options offered strongevidence that women felt a sense of economic and social independence. Even theHandelsgesetzbuch (1897) acknowledged the rising numbers of businesswomen.Paragraph 1 reads: ‘In the sense of this code, a Kaufmann is one who operates abusiness’. 103 In a footnote, it specifically stated that the definition also included‘married women with or without the approval of their husbands’. 104 These economic,social and political changes of the time created an atmosphere of promise forGerman women and, during the nineteenth century, women increasingly exercisedbasic property rights inside and outside the home.At the same time, liberal, codified law was on the rise, and the political, socialand economic gains women made in German society were lost when the BGB wasintroduced in 1900. For the first time, women were faced with a national unifiedsystem of marital property relations and the denial of contractual freedom. The BGBreintroduced the Verwaltungsgemeinschaft and denied contractual liberty, forcingGermans to adhere to its provisions on marital property relations. The Code’s denialof women’s property rights had an adverse impact on the entire range of basic rightswomen had won over the course of the nineteenth century. Because the institution ofsex guardianship was part and parcel of the liberal agenda of constitutional transformation,the paradox is that, for this reason, it emerges as one of the key sociopoliticalindicators of the Bürgerliche Revolution that occurred in 1896. Nevertheless, theBGB would become one of the major sources of discontent in German society after