IN THINKING ABOUT women and leadership, the question of age is paramount. After all, many of the most coveted positions of power are in the hands of older segments of the population. Specifically, old (white) men are the prime contenders for economic and political leadership positions while old women, and old unmarried women in particular, face a panoply of prejudicial notions that are designed to disempower them and keep them confined to dependent positions within the private sphere. Popular cultural stereotypes of “old maids,” whose minds and hearts deteriorate in the absence of husbands and children, are rooted in the nineteenth century. A subject of examination for physicians such as August Forel and Julius Weiss and sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the lifelong-single woman was represented as either sexually deviant, physically deficient, or both. In her study of unmarried women in Imperial Germany, The Surplus Woman, historian Catherine L. Dollard examines the single woman as “a destabilizing force in turnof-the-century gender norms.” According to Dollard, the contemporary fears regarding a growing number of unmarried women did not reflect a demographic surfeit of unwed women but rather arose “as a consequence of the tensions and uncertainties that characterized an era of great social transformation.” Nevertheless, the anxiety concerning the illusory female surplus impregnated the German cultural imagination. Yet it is precisely because these women are not subordinated to a husband or limited by the duties of childcare that they are potentially available for participation in the public sphere.

What emerged in response to this prevailing unease about the role of single older women was a discourse of unique female contributions to the German state, especially in terms of what Ann Taylor Allen calls “spiritual motherhood,” and, for more progressive writers, a critical reflection of a system that forced women into these dependent roles. In this chapter I examine the agency of older unwed and widowed women in the works of two authors from this period: E. Marlitt (1825–87) and Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919).