The ‘Woman-Question’ of Intellectual History: Women’s Intellectual Habitus and Intellectual Labour in Social Research in the Twentieth Century

How could women become intellectuals in the 19^th and 20^th centuries? What did their creative processes look like, and how did they create space and opportunities for their intellectual work? These questions are central to my research. 

Focusing on the newly emerging field of social research, my research project considers the personal and intellectual journeys of a number of women from Great Britain and Central Europe from the late 19^th century up until the 1960s. It considers how their roles evolved in and against historical circumstances, what contributions they made to their specific subject areas, and what opportunities and sacrifices were necessary for women to establish themselves at different times and in different places. The project thus also aims at a methodological intervention within the ever-growing field of women’s intellectual history. 

Expanding the canon thus constitutes an important aspect of the project, but it also aims at a more fundamental engagement with knowledge production and habitus-formation in intellectual cultures under gendered auspices. How do women intellectuals differ from – generic (?) – male ones? How do their roles change in national and international contexts, through exile and migration, and changing cultures and industries of knowledge production? Do women set different research impulses, focus on different topics, work differently? In order to establish more thoroughly the spectrum of ‘being an intellectual’, and to establish opportunities for comparison across time and space, the project homes in on three types that describe their ways of being and working: the academics, the activists and the experts. 

Deconstructing the gendered attributes of ‘the intellectual’ and their working processes also entails a systematic re-definition of intellectual labour and a reassessment of intellectual collaboration, as well as a change of perspective away from individualised outputs or works towards a more robust understanding of collective contributions. From mentorship and creative partnerships to newly established research protocols, the project aims to show the relationship between subject-specific changes and women’s roles as intellectuals. 

By focusing on examples from a broadly defined group of social researchers from the late nineteenth-century onwards, covering individuals and intellectual communities as well as research institutes in Great Britain and German-speaking areas of Central Europe, the project can demonstrate developments and interconnections across generations and integrate individual stories into a larger history of intellectuals / intellectual history of women in social research. Great Britain and Central Europe are two important poles within this history, brought even closer together through the so-called ‘intellectual migration in the 1930s.