Nancy R. Reagin

The Imagined Hausfrau: National Identity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in Imperial Germany*

Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, the author of the 1908 work Home Life in Germany, was a bourgeois woman of German parentage who married an Englishman around the turn of the century. Accustomed to German styles of housekeeping, she had to adjust to English approaches to household management after her marriage, and she observed English domesticity with wry amusement. When she first heard a discussion of “English housekeeping,” she later wrote, “it was a new idea to me that any women in the world except the Germans kept house at all. If you live among Germans when you are young you adopt this view quite insensibly and without argument.”1 Bourgeois English housewives, Mrs. Sidgwick wrote, left much of their work to the servants and did not maintain really clean houses. Although she spent most of her adult life in England, Mrs. Sidgwick clearly admired and preferred the community of German bourgeois Hausfrauen to which her mother, aunts, and cousins belonged. It was a community that was at least partly imagined, in the sense defined by Benedict Anderson, because most of its members would never meet each other and yet thought of themselves as belonging to a common group.2 Reading Mrs. Sidgwick’s work (and earlier literature produced by nineteenth-century bourgeois German women) makes it clear that many considered themselves to be part of a community of German bourgeois Hausfrauen and that this community helped define the na-