Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis by Helga Thorson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis by Helga Thorson Scott Spector Helga Thorson, Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis. Women and Gender in German Studies 9. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. 278 pp. In terms of the scope and originality of her contribution, Grete Meisel-Hess is a key figure in fin-de-siècle feminism, although she has hardly been recognized as such. One thing that Helga Thorson's new book, Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis, makes evident is how widely known Meisel-Hess was in her own lifetime and how much at the heartbeat of the shifting thinking of the period she remained in the first two decades of the twentieth century. A monograph in English dedicated specifically to her life and work was in this sense very much in order. The book is not chiefly a biography but a recounting of Meisel-Hess's varied cultural production (literary, scientific, and polemical) in the broad context of the movements, debates, and ambivalences of her time. One of this account's great strengths is the convincing [End Page 114] way it braids together these cultural contexts with Meisel-Hess's feminist and sociological thinking, her belletristic writing, and her life. In doing so, Thorson makes several strong and interlocking arguments. Meisel-Hess's intellectual disposition was strongly oriented toward the then rising idea of monism, or the unity of seemingly disparate things and refusal of essential binaries such as that of the ideal and the material; this was the ground of a potentially radical reconfiguration of gender relations. Like many others of her epoch, she was swept up in a sense that humanity was on the brink of an epic shift of ways of living to correspond with (or catch up to) new modes of understanding emergent in the last third of the previous century. Modernism (die Moderne was a term that encompassed this term as well as "modernity") promised to realize this potential; at the same time, the ways in which the social order was broken were seen to be a result of the rapid changes of modernity. Meisel-Hess's commitment to a major shift forward was an investment in the promise of the Moderne. In Thorson's reading, Meisel-Hess's Moderne, her feminism, and her Jewishness were of a piece. True to Meisel-Hess's own monist predilections, Thorson sees a breakdown of the boundary between author and work, such that the subject's own life is merged with her cultural contribution. The oft-discussed "New Woman" of the period is, in Thorson's book, both a discursive figure and an agent of change. Meisel-Hess, according to Thorson, represents and critically appraises the figure even as she fashions herself as a "fervent" New Woman with agency. In an equally provocative move, Thorson argues that the "sexual crisis" of Meisel-Hess's best-known title is not just an object of her analysis and critique, it comes to be the condition that entraps her and leads to her own demise. After a concise introduction of the subject and the author's intentions, Thorson begins with two chapters that focus on Meisel-Hess's engagement with the figure of the New Woman in literary and polemical work. These references to "the New Woman" as though it were a single and clear thing—a very particular figure with a specific look and signification—seems somewhat too reified, when the term in fact referred to many contradictory images, types, and fantasies. The thesis that Meisel-Hess herself had such an image in mind and consciously pursued it in her life is persuasive. Following Meisel-Hess as she moves to Berlin, Thorson then focuses on Die sexuelle Krise (1909) and other works. Here she makes some headway in dispelling the suspicion some readers may have that the book borders in places on hagiography. Most anyone who knows Meisel-Hess's chief works will have expected more than a [End Page 115] mention of the feminist's rather obvious reliance on Rassenhygiene. While this link is mentioned early on, it may seem to contemporary readers...