Amalia Holst

Amalia Holst (born von Justi ; born February 10, 1758 in Mecklenburg , † 1829 in Groß-Timkenberg ) was a German educator and women's rights activist . She worked for an education in the spirit of the Enlightenment and was an advocate of women's education .

Life

Amalia Holst was the daughter of the Prussian mountain councilor Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi in Berlin . After the parents' divorce, Amalia grew up with him and his second wife. Justi was later professor for political economy and natural science in Göttingen. In 1760 he published his call for a new kind of education for women with the proposal to set up an academy in front of the women's room . He wrote in it

that it would be extremely useful and salutary if one were more concerned with a sensible upbringing of the female sex, and erecting a certain kind of higher schools and academies in front of it.

1767 followed his suggestion of the establishment of a female lay judge's chair , which provided that only women should judge women in courts. In 1771 he died in prison, where he was held on suspicion of infidelity. How Amalia fared afterwards is not known.

Amalia married the lawyer Ludolf Holst in Hamburg in 1792. With him she ran educational institutions in Hamburg, Wittenberg, Boitzenburg, Schwerin and Parchim. They lived the marriage as a working group. The two had three children. From records from 1807 we know that Amalia Holst was registered in Wittenberg and her husband in Hamburg. So the two seem to have lived separately. The Damen-Conversations-Lexikon recorded in 1864, the only source for this, Amalia Holst's doctorate in philosophy from the University of Kiel . From 1823 until her death she lived in Timkenberg near Boizenburg.

pedagogy

In 1791 Holst formulated her remarks about the errors of our modern education . The old educational methods are only a memory exercise, without taking into account the development of the mind. They only encouraged “superficial knowledge” and complacency. She ties in with Johann Bernhard Basedow , Joachim Heinrich Campe and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann , whose theoretical ideas she endorses. However, their concepts are practically inadequately implemented. She complained about the amount of talk and too little action.

She declined the "playful lessons, which are entirely according to the child's mood", as it teaches superficiality. The result is that instead of dealing extensively with the useful, the students only quickly deal with what appeals to them until it has lost the charm of the new. You shouldn't put anything in front of the child, but purposefully deepen an observed individual interest.

In the comments on the flaws of our modern upbringing , no distinction is made between education for boys and girls. There is no explicit consideration of the gender issue.

Women's rights

Social role

In 1795 a novel by Wilhelmine Karoline von Wobeser was published in Leipzig, initially anonymously Elisa or Das Weib as it should be . It portrays the heroine, daughter, wife and mother Elisa as the ideal of a traditional conception of female virtues. This work attracted Holst to her letters to Elisa (1799/1800) published in magazines , in which she criticized the idealized subordination of the wife.

In the letters she refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Jean de Lafontaine , Christoph Meiners and Carl Friedrich Pockel . Holst's assessment of Rousseau changes over time. His image of women, shown in the novel Julie or Die neue Heloise , still receives her approval in the letters about Elisa . In her determination of women , on the other hand, she paints the image of Rousseau as a reactionary denier of rights. Here she instead refers to Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel , whose treatise On the bourgeois improvement of women she desires more attention. Hippel is presumed to be the likely source of ideas for the stronger emphasis compared to the letters to Elisa .

Amalia Holst opposes the assumption that women can think less precisely. In the context of the Enlightenment, it points out that people only make themselves responsible through education. She writes of marriage that it should be viewed as a contract between equal partners. Their basis can only be love, not a relationship of domination. She rejects the idea of ​​a woman developing her effect through subtle influencing of her husband:

We throw away the invisible threads with which we have hitherto directed the machinery of the great spectacle of the world behind the scenes, because it is below our dignity as human beings to disguise ourselves further in order to achieve our purpose through cunning and intrigue.

education

In 1802, On the Determination of Women for Higher Spiritual Education appeared . In the spirit of the Enlightenment, she stood up for the natural right of all people to education. The restriction to men follows the law of the strongest, which has to be overcome by culture.

Does our mind think according to other logical laws, does it perceive things of the outside world differently than men?

Like Rousseau, Pockel is also being reassessed here. Holst parodies his writing about a woman distracted by education and neglecting her domestic duties, in which she reports in the same style of some men distracted by education. If you deny a woman education in order not to distract her, you have to deny men any education that goes beyond their professional needs.

Holst gives unmarried women the opportunity to earn a living thanks to their education. Otherwise she speaks of traditional family responsibilities for women. When she contemplates women's education, she always has only the higher classes in mind.

reception

An anonymous reviewer dealt with Holst's theses in 1802 in the magazine on the history of time, manners and taste . He sees scientifically gifted women as an anomaly in nature. He accuses Holst of being inconsistent: she demands scientific education, but no corresponding professions for women. Then she called for education for women, but not for members of the lower classes. Modern assessments, such as Claudia Honegger's, follow the observation of the mother role in Holst's work, which restricts professional prospects.

Elke Spitzer sees Holst as an educator on the one hand, and on the other hand as standing in the tradition of the Querelle des femmes . Holst failed to call for a change in gender roles, not as a concession of a different nature, but as a freely agreed distribution of tasks. Spitzer observes features of the querelle des femmes in Holst. The scholastic argumentation pattern of speech and counter-speech shines through. Typical of this tradition is also Holst's list of famous women, which is cited as an indication of equal abilities of the sexes, as well as their intense father relationship.

Works

• Remarks on the Errors of Our Modern Upbringing (1791)
• Letters to Elisa (1799)
• About the destiny of women for higher intellectual education . (1802; published in Berlin by Heinrich Frölich)

literature

• Elke Spitzer: Amalia Holst. In: Metis. 3/1994. Pp. 29-38. ISSN  0939-5970
• Dieter Dümcke: Thoughts of a “practical educator”. Amalia Holst. From: Wolf-Günter Völker, Horst-Gösta Berling (Hrsg.): Mecklenburgische Schulmeister. Pictures of life from teachers between Neubrandenburg and Schwerin, Neukloster and Parchim. Society for School History of Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania eV, Thon, Schwerin, 1998. pp. 33–36.
• Kleinau, Opitz: History of girls and women education. Volume 1, 1996, p. 340.

Web links

• Literature by and about Amalia Holst in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Walk freely in the field of knowledge" . (Deutschlandfunk)
2. ^ Felden, Heide from: Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Netherlands and in Germany. Notes on the reception of Rousseau in the 18th century. In: Boer, Dick E. H; Gleba, Gudrun, Holbach, Rudolf (eds.): Migration of people, dissemination of ideas, exchange of goods in the Dutch and German coastal regions from the 13th to 18th centuries ( PDF )
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Spitzer, Elke: Claims to emancipation between the Querelle des Femmes and the modern women's movement. Kassel University Press 2002. ( PDF  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )  
4. ^ Wobeser, Wilhelmine Karoline von. In: The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Oxford University Press 2005
5. ↑ Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 1796, Volume 3, No. 207 ( facsimile )
6. ↑ Felden, Heide from: The women and Rousseau. the Rousseau reception of contemporary women writers in Germany . Campus, Frankfurt / Main, 1997