4. Challenging Patriarchy: Marriage and the Reform of Marriage Law in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic

Abstract

“If it were not for husband and wife,” the German social historian and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823– 1897) wrote in 1855, “one could think people on earth [are] destined for freedom and equality. However, because God created women and men, he made inequality and dependence basic elements of all human development.”1 Gender according to Riehl not only constituted ideas of inequality and domination but contributed significantly to the construction of humanity, to the construction of the modern state. Gender was, he argues, not only one of the most powerful producers of inequality, but the most powerful. This meant that the existence of the traditional family was defended just as much as the traditional position of women, indeed that the subordination of women in marriage was regarded as a paradigm of human inequality and subordination par excellence. As a consequence, the exclusion of married women from the state necessarily resulted from their subordination in the family. The patriarchally organized family thus was not only a mirror image but also a basic element of the state. No wonder that women within the context of the Enlightenment started to question why all humans, including women, were not equal and why not in the family. “Wife, marriage and love exhibit the brand of slavery,” expressed the feminist and philosopher Louise Dittmar (1807– 1884) in 1849. “The man is master over his wife, the absolute monarch with unlimited power to give orders in his realm, and not even lip-service is paid to constitutional guarantees that may be applied to wives,”2 argued Hedwig Dohm (1831– 1919) almost forty