Image of women

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The term image of women describes the image, ie the overall internal impression or the idea of ​​a single person (or a group of people) of women in general, or of specific groups of women. This use of the term, which is common today, was not established until the 1970s.

Before that the term was used as a synonym for “woman” and also for pictures, paintings and statues that show one or more women.

Meanings of terms

Historically, a neologism was formed from the lemma "image of women" , which has been used in vocabulary with a new, transferred meaning since the 1970s . It refers to the immaterial notion of how women are, should be or are perceived. The earlier uses referred to a real woman in a direct meaning as well as material pictures, paintings and statues depicting a woman.

Direct meaning: the woman herself

Frauenbild ( frouwen bilde ( Mhd. , Around 11th to 14th century), frawenpilde and womenpild ( Frnhd. , 14th to 17th century)) is a term that is no longer in use today for an "elegant" woman or female figure. The image of women was used in the same way as the " common " image of women that is still in use today and, in relation to the man, the image of a man (also of a man).

Goethe used the term in this meaning and wrote:
Nature comes from God the Father,
the very dearest of women,
the spirit of man, you on the trail,
a loyal recruiter, she thought mildly.

Direct meaning: The artistic representation of a woman

Image of women also denotes - and still today in art - a portrait, painting or other image of one or more women.

In specific reference, such as female image Mariazell or in the extension lovers woman picture ( Our Lady image of Kaufbeuern ), these are to Marienbildnisse or statues,. Laaer Frauenbild - pars pro toto - is a very small chapel with a statue of the Virgin Mary in the community of Laa an der Thaya .

Figurative: The way women are seen

The Duden defines the most common usage today as "image of women: image (meaning 'imagination' or 'impression') that someone has of women". The increasingly frequent, initially purely technical use of this meaning began at the beginning of the 1970s, but was not included in the Duden even 26 years later (21st edition, 1996) due to the low use in colloquial language .

Scientific use

An early mention of this transferred use of the image of women can be found in 1970 by Eva-Maria Carne in the analysis of the perspective of women in Hartmann von Aue's work : “In order to make the special thing about Hartmann's image of women clear, here is a brief overview of the always a changing male attitude towards women. ”and“ It is a controversial question to what extent the almost unearthly image of women of high love and the veneration of Mary have influenced one another ”. A connection between the Christian image of women and the image of Mary - also understood in transference - was analyzed in 1999. Another field of research is the image of women in the Middle Ages , as dealt with not only in relation to the veneration of Mary, but also in particular in texts on the late medieval and early modern belief in witches.

Scientifically, the term is used in an explained use in history , the social sciences and especially in women's studies as a summary after an analysis, for example

  • Image of women and political awareness in the Swiss Catholic Women's Association ,
  • Image of women and women’s work in Austria ,
  • The image of women in fascist texts and its precursors in the bourgeois women's movement of the twenties .

Media use

In the media or in the political discussion, the image of women is rather less precisely defined and used as a key phrase (negative, positive, outdated, modern, distorted, propagated, etc. image of women) .

A non-differentiated, generalized description of women and groups of women using the term “image of women” was associated with “target and actual situation”, “stereotype” and “template” (image of women as “template of a contemporary ideal of women”).

Male image

Analogous to the image of women, the image of men is also used, but its use is less common in the literature, although it is below the colloquial frequency that is relevant for a mention in the Duden and is therefore not explained there.

Comparisons of images of women and images of men can be found, for example, in the following treatises:

  • Images of women and men in " Tatort " 2001 ,
  • Wild freshness, tender temptation: images of men and women on advertising posters from the fifties to nineties ,
  • Images of women and men in Stefan Zweig's novellas .

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: Image of women  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

References and comments

  1. ↑ Jakob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm : German Dictionary , Vol. 4, Column 77-78.
  2. ↑ Brothers Grimm: German Dictionary , Vol. 4, Column 77: "Even the simple 'picture' expresses us shape and person".
  3. ^ Brothers Grimm: German Dictionary , Vol. 28, Column 441-449.
  4. ^ Brothers Grimm: German Dictionary , Vol. 12, Column 1578–1579.
  5. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Adolf Streckfuß , Weimar, August 11, 1826.
  6. ↑ Jung-Hee Kim: Women pictures by Otto Dix: Reality and self-confession . LIT Verlag Münster, January 1, 1994, ISBN 978-3-89473-939-3 .
  7. ↑ Renate Trnek (Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Gemäldegalerie): The Dutch paintings of the 17th century: in the Gemäldegalerie of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna . Böhlau Verlag Vienna, 1992, ISBN 978-3-205-05408-5 , p. 91.
  8. ^ Directory of the coin and medal collection (auction on 7 January 1846 in Vienna) 1845, p. 776.
  9. ↑ Marian festival calendar for the Catholic people: arranged for every day of the year . Manz, 1866, p. 376.
  10. ^ Culture in the hallway: Laaer Frauenbild ; accessed on February 2, 2017.
  11. ↑ Duden: image of women
  12. ↑ a b GoogleBooks NGRAM-Viewer: "Frauenbild" and "Männerbild" in German literature from 1820 to 2010 .
  13. ^ Eva Maria Carne: Die Frauengestalten bei Hartmann von Aue: Their significance in the structure and content of the epics . NG Elwert, 1970, ISBN 978-3-7708-0112-1 , p. 2. Chapter VI is entitled Hartmanns Frauenbild und die Hofische Literatur .
  14. ^ Eva Maria Carne: Die Frauengestalten bei Hartmann von Aue: Their significance in the structure and content of the epics . NG Elwert, 1970, ISBN 978-3-7708-0112-1 , p. 4.
  15. ↑ Marion Wagner: The heavenly woman: image of Mary and image of women in dogmatic handbooks of the 19th and 20th centuries . Friedrich Pustet, 1999, ISBN 978-3-7917-1672-5 .
  16. ↑ Ortrun Riha : "Weibs-Bilder". Imaginations of femininity in witch belief and witch research. In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 14, 1996, pp. 29-44.
  17. ↑ The image of women and political awareness in the Swiss Catholic Women's Association: the SKF's path between church and women's movement Licensed work by Christa Mutter, Freiburg (1987).
  18. ↑ Edith Rigler: The image of women and women’s work in Austria 1976.
  19. ↑ Christine Wittrock: The image of women in fascist texts and its precursors in the bourgeois women's movement of the twenties . Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, 1981.
  20. ↑ Martina Steer: "- there it became clear: the man had no more world to offer her": Margarete Susman and the question of women's emancipation . Winkler, 2001, p. 68.
  21. ↑ Mechthild Mäsker: The image of women in the German Schlager 1970-1985 . Schäuble Verlag, 1990, ISBN 978-3-87718-013-6 , p. 123.
  22. ^ Roger Stein: The German Dirnenlied: literary cabaret from Bruant to Brecht . Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-03306-4 , p. 189.
  23. ↑ Wiltrud Gieseke: Handbook on women's education . Springer-Verlag, July 2, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-10277-9 , p. 59.
  24. ↑ Elke Feustel: Riddle princesses and sleeping beauties - typology and functions of the female characters in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm:. . Georg Olms Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-487-42050-9 , p. 12.
  25. ^ Ilonka A. de Ferraz de Carvalho: Images of women and men in the "Tatort" 2001 2002.
  26. ↑ Gabriele Huster: Wilde freshness, tender temptation: Men and women on advertising posters from the fifties to the nineties . Jonas Verlag, 2001.
  27. ↑ Images of women and men in the novels by Stefan Zweig . Hochsch.-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 978-3-8107-2271-3 .