Weber, Marianne

Marianne Schnitger Weber (1870–1954) is best known for her marriage to sociologist Max Weber and her efforts to ensure his scholarly legacy by editing 10 volumes of his writings and penning his biography, published in 1926. In Germany during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Weber was recognized as a feminist intellectual who wrote and spoke widely on women's issues. Her feminist theoretical writings provided a counterpoise to sociological theories by contemporaneous male academicians, which brought to sociological discourse a focus on women's roles in society. Weber rejected the assumption that sociological theory written from a male standpoint is applicable to all social actors.

In 1896, Weber was one of the first generation of women to study at the University of Heidelberg. Here, she joined a feminist organization and began to develop her sociological investigations that begin with women's experiences and situations. Weber completed a dissertation at the University of Freiburg titled, “Fichte's Socialism and Its Relationship to Marxist Doctrine” (1900). In 1904, she traveled to America, meeting a number of women activists, reformers, and educators, including Jane Addams and Florence Kelly of Hull House and Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement. It was M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, and Ethel Puffer Howes, professor of philosophy and psychology at Wellesley College, however, who most shared Weber's belief that women should be given the opportunity for intellectual development through coeducation. Weber based her arguments concerning women and education not on economic opportunity but on feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's thesis that women would experience financial and marital freedom through paid employment. Weber's critique, informed by an awareness of social differentiation as well as current statistics assumed that the majority of women would endure the double burden of low-wage physical labor plus the duties of motherhood and housekeeping. Weber argued that housework and child care be given economic value in her essay “On the Valuation of Housework” (1912). In this essay, Weber posits that the underlying [Page 877]moral and economic operative within marriage should be one of equality rather than based on a patriarchal system of inequality. A new valuation of the partnership calls for a means of economic independence so wives have freedom to shape their personal lives. Weber notes that constant economic dependency relevant to the subjective responses of another is demeaning. The subordinate loses self-respect and is induced to using methods of trickery and deception as found in the master-slave relationship. To alleviate this destructive marital pattern, Weber proposes the enacting of marriage laws so that a fixed amount of the husband's income be apportioned for household and personal use by the wife. She is aware that the redistribution of familial economic power by a patriarchal legislation will not readily occur; her ulterior objective is to raise public consciousness concerning marital economic inequity and transform not only marital law but marital custom.

Weber penned a series of writings titled Reflections on Women and Women's Issues (1904–1919). Her writings presage Carol Gilligan's work on difference as well as other feminists who find that using male models and male culture obscures the riches found in female culture. In 1907, she published an in-depth study, Marriage, Motherhood and the Law, critiquing the historical and structural developmentof marital relationships as dictated by patriarchy. Her 1912 composition, “Authority and Autonomy in Marriage,” looks critically at how marital relationships based on subordinate and superordinate positions are destructive to both men and women. Her 1913 essay, “Woman and Objective Culture,” is a treatise responding to Georg Simmel's supposition that men create objective culture and women, due to an undifferentiated nature, are engaged by subjective culture. In addressing Simmel's dialectical method of defining men and women, Weber disputes his thesis that a dramatic metaphysical difference exists between the genders. She brings a focus to their similarities, framing the sexes as overlapping circles. Each circle maintains its unique areas of distinction; however, areas of commonality are greater than differences. Weber notes that the creation of objective culture requires rationality, objectivity, and goal orientation, human qualities applicable to both men and women. She states that due to social regulation women are excluded from the realms where objective culture is created, and she draws a link between women's work and the transference of objective culture into subjective knowledge. Her thesis is that women's participation in the development of objective culture would expand and enrich cultural arenas.

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