Marianne Weber

Works

• 1907Wife and Mother in the Development of Law

  History of the legal position of wives and mothers from early societies through Egypt, Israel, Islam, Rome and medieval Germanic law to the modern codes: Weber criticises theories of an original mother right, argues that the marriage law of the German Civil Code is patriarchal and ends with the critique of marriage, divorce and sexual relations outside marriage.

• 1913Woman and Objective Culture

  Essay in the journal Logos answering Simmel’s “female culture”: the abilities needed to create objective culture are not reserved to men, and what women ought to want cannot be derived from a male ideal of female perfection.

Position

Marianne Weber is on the map as one of the women among the founders of sociological theory and as a theorist of marriage and gender. “Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung” (1907) traces the legal position of wives and mothers from early societies through the ancient and medieval world to the modern codes. Against the theory, going back to Bachofen and spread by Engels and Bebel, that humanity began with a general stage of mother right, she argued that the evidence shows no such stage and that marriage law had largely been a law of patriarchal authority; the German Civil Code of 1900 still subordinated the wife in personal relations, parental authority and property. She called for legal equality within marriage and for equal rights for children born outside it, but rejected a right to abortion. In “Die Frau und die objektive Kultur” (1913) she answered Georg Simmel, who held that objective culture – science, law, art – is male in its very form and that women’s nature lies in an undivided inner wholeness: the abilities needed for objective culture, she replied, belong to both sexes, and what women ought to want cannot be derived from a male ideal of female perfection. Further essays on the women’s question were collected in “Frauenfragen und Frauengedanken” (1919). Her edition of Max Weber’s posthumous works and her biography of him (1926) shaped his reception for decades; P. M. Lengermann and J. Niebrugge-Brantley (1998) placed her own work among the founding contributions to sociology.

Life & context

Marianne Schnitger was born on 2 August 1870 in Oerlinghausen in the Principality of Lippe. In 1893 she married Max Weber, with whom she moved to Freiburg in 1894 and to Heidelberg in 1896. Since women could not yet enrol, she studied philosophy and economics as a guest auditor and attended Heinrich Rickert’s lectures in Freiburg; her study “Fichte’s Sozialismus und sein Verhältnis zur Marx’schen Doktrin” appeared in 1900. She joined the board of the Federation of German Women’s Associations (BDF), set up a legal advice office for women in Heidelberg and in 1907 published her main work, “Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung”. In 1918 she was among the founders of the German Democratic Party; elected to the constituent assembly of Baden in 1919, she gave there the first speech by a woman in a German parliament. From 1919 to 1923 she chaired the BDF as Gertrud Bäumer’s successor. After Max Weber’s death in 1920 she edited his writings, among them “Economy and Society” (1921–22), received an honorary doctorate from the Heidelberg law faculty in 1922 and published “Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild” (1926). Her house in Heidelberg remained a meeting place for scholars, among them Karl Jaspers. She died in Heidelberg on 12 March 1954.

Further main works

• Fichte’s Sozialismus und sein Verhältnis zur Marx’schen Doktrin (1900)
• Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907)
• Die Frau und die objektive Kultur (Logos, 1913)
• Frauenfragen und Frauengedanken (essays, 1919)
• Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (1926)
• Lebenserinnerungen (1948)