Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 2 The Weber's private, sex defined values.
35
does so only with respect to manly men: to the soldiers who will return from the front and,
having risked their lives, have a right to influence the future. Nowhere does he allude to the
situation of women or to their claims to political, personal, social and economic rights.¹
As I have said before, the omission of women and of their claims is not caused by Weber
somehow not having noticed the existence of the feminist movements in the Western
countries and in the rest of the world. His wife, Marianne Weber-Schnitger, was an active
feminist who campaigned for the rights of unmarried mothers, held important functions in the
right wing of the German bourgeois women's movement, the Bund Deutscher
Frauenvereine, and was, after the institution of the Weimar Republic, the first woman in the
Baden parliament.²
In the Weber household, although the everyday sexual division of labor was rejected,³
'feminism' and 'politics' appear to have been separated along the lines of the conventional
separation of the realms of women and men. According to Weber-Schnitger the
responsibility of women could only be to combine their general human capabilities and
responsibilities with 'the important special tasks resulting from her sexual determinedness
('Geschlechtsbestimmtheit')'
4
; for Weber politics concerned the struggle between men for
power in society. It is she who defines feminine values - feeling, goodness and love;
5
and he
in his turn points out the masculine ones, which according to him concern power, struggle
and objectivity.
The scientific labor of both spouses is also divided along sex-defined lines. In 1907 Weber-
Schnitger published a historical work on the legal position of married women, Ehefrau und
Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung; Weber not only stimulated her to begin this study, but also
helped her and contributed formulations on several subjects.
6
In his own work, however, he
1 Th
e claim to women's suffrage was honored in 1918 by the Weimar Republic, see Koontz p. 22 ff.; I found only
one place where Weber dedicates a parenthetic clause to the restricted version of this claim (ES, Appendix II, p.
1442, GPS p. 371).
2
To avoid calling the Webers Max and Marianne I will call her Weber-Schnitger. In 1919 she succeeded Gertrud
Bäumer as president of the liberal Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, the association which dominated the German
bourgeois women's movement. The BDF originally fought for equality between women and men, but after 1860 -
when the German translation of Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women unleashed the wrath of masculine
intellectuals - it shifted its standpoint to that of the difference between women and men; only in 1890 and 1910
the fight for equality was resumed, but in 1910 the 'radicals' were ousted; see van Vucht Tijssen (1987), Koontz
(1986) p. 35/6, and Evans (1976) p. 145 ff., who reports that Weber-Schnitger played at least a passive role in
this process, Since Weber-Schnitger after the death of her husband in 1921 did not write on feminist subjects
anymore, she did not speak out against the collaboration of the bourgeois feminists with the nazi's. See Koontz
(1986), p. 123.
3
According to her biography of Weber Weber-Schnitger had had some trouble convincing Weber that the real
traditional division of labor was not acceptable, but she refused to yield to the pressure of Weber and his mother;
she judged it more important to 'follow her own demon' than to train herself for housework. See Lebensbild p. 215
ff., Biography p. 186 ff.
4
Weber-Schnitger (1919), Die besonderen Kulturaufgaben der Frau, 1918, p. 238 ff. (239).
5
Ibid. p. 240: 'Ihre Gefühlsbeseelung, ihre Durchwärmung mit Liebe, Güte und reiner Gesinnung...'.
6
EuM, Vorwort, p. VI/VII. According to Roth in his introduction to ES, p. XLVIII, n. 23, EuM 'should be seen as the
background for the cursory treatment of marriage and property rights in chs. III and IV of Part Two' of ES; he
does not discuss, however, the relation between both works, nor the reasons why Weber does not refer to
Weber-Schnitger's theories.
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