The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of Psalms in the Early Medieval West by Derek A. Olsen (review)

Abstract

It would be interesting to learn how Zumholz would integrate the criticism of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century feminists into her story. Perhaps the most important moderate feminist leader in Imperial Germany, Helene Lange, grew up in Oldenburg, and Zumholz describes her life and work for women’s education. Gertrud Bäumer, Lange’s life-long partner and successor as the leader of the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein, the National Council of Women’s Organizations with half a million members in 1913, criticized Catholic women activists for their acceptance of Catholic doctrine that required women’s subordination to men. In 1901 Bäumer called into question the idea of a “women’s movement in the narrow sense” that could grow from the foundation of Catholicism. (Bäumer, Die Geschichte der Frauenbewegung in Deutschland [1901], p. 165). Similarly, Ika Freundenberg, a Bavarian moderate women’s activist, argued in 1904 after the founding of the Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund that “Catholic belief is a constraint for the spread of the women’s movement.” (Alfred Kall, Katholische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland [1983], p. 308). Catholic leaders of religious orders made decisions about the sisters’ basic freedoms: who wrote them letters, what they could read, where they could go, and whom they could see. Sisters who came into conflict with church authorities could find themselves punished. These aspects of life in a Catholic order and the sisters’ vow of obedience are not consistent with Zumholz’s emphasis on the independence and choices of the women religious she studies.