Full Description
Deeply engaged in women's rights debates and discussions of the 'third sex,' Are They Women? is about the lively communities of lesbians across turn-of-the-century Central Europe. It is one of the first lesbian novels written in German-indeed, in any language. It is also one of the very few pre-Second Wave feminist texts to provide a positive, non-pathologizing, and romantic portrait of lesbians. As such, it complicates the dominant critical narrative of pre-liberation lesbian literature, whereby heroines conventionally face loneliness, imprisonment, madness, death, and heterosexual conversion. A work of popular literature with cultural significance, Are They Women? is both highly readable and remarkably progressive for its time. This is the first complete English translation of the novel, and the only edition in print in any language. The historical appendices provide contemporary materials on homosexuality, as well as compelling images from German feminist periodicals of the time.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Mina Adelt-Duc: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Are They Women?
Appendix A: Reviews of Are They Women?
1. Review of Sind es Frauen?, Westermanns Illustrierte Deutsche Monatshefte [Westermann's Illustrated German Monthly Magazine] (November 1901)
2. From Numa Praetorius [Eugen Wilhelm], "Weibliche Homosexualität" ["Female Homosexuality"], Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen [Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types] (1903)
Appendix B: Anita Augspurg on Women and Marriage
1. Anita Augspurg, "A Typical Case of the Present Time. An Open Letter" (1905)
Appendix C: Anna Rüling on the Women's Movement and Homosexuality
1. Anna Rüling, "What Interest Does the Women's Movement Have in Solving the Homosexual Problem?" (8 October 1904)
Appendix D: Havelock Ellis and Female Inversion
1. From Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, "Sexual Inversion in Women," Sexual Inversion (1897)
Appendix E: Cover Images from Draisena
1. Cover of 24 April 1899 edition of Draisena
2. Closeup of cover image from 26 October 1898
Appendix F: Cover Image from Adelt-Duc's Novella Collection
1. Cover image of Indische Novellen (1914)
Works Cited and Select Bibliography
