Louise Aston in a Men’s Suit and Her Resistance Against the Oppression of Women
Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde
BCDSS Exhibition Curator
During the Vormärz period, Louise Aston (1814-1871) not only resolutely fought for the democratization of society but was also a radical advocate of equal rights for women. She gave provocative expression to her demands with her lifestyle: She separated from her unloved husband, became politically active alongside young men, AND even occasionally wore men’s clothing while smoking cigars. With her demands, she provoked not only civil society but also the women’s movement of the time, for which she was much too radical.
“Clothes Make People”
… not only in that they mark a person’s social, economic, or political status, but – similar to masked costumes – they also offer the wearers the possibility of taking on other roles. This “disguising” opens up freedom, which Louise Aston (fig. 1) recognized and used for her own purposes. By sometimes wearing men’s clothing as a young woman, she made use of this freedom to protest against the societal disempowerment of women and the situation in her own life. The pastor’s daughter from Gröningen near Halberstadt found herself in this situation through a forced marriage to the much older machine and textile manufacturer Samuel Aston. Through her forced marriage, Louise Aston experienced that men had control over her body and over her as a person, simply because she was a woman. In her writings, she then referred to marriage as “blinding slavery,” a “shackle,” (Aston 1847: 14) and an “uninterrupted sacrificial ceremony” (Aston 1847: 23).
Abb. 1: Portrait der Schriftstellerin und Frauenrechtlerin Louise Aston. Auguste Hüssener (1789-1877), ca. 1851, Stahlstich (Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Altbestand Märkisches Museum).
Fighter for Gender Equality
During the German Vormärz period, a time of political upheaval, Louise Aston was among the radical advocates of democracy and, closely connected to this in her view, also the rights of women. Aston thought the Vormärz demands for civil freedom and social equality through to their logical end. As a logical consequence of this, she demanded equal rights and freedoms for women, just like those demanded for civil – at that time, meaning male – society.
She expressed this demand not only in her texts but also visually. She reinforced the provocation represented by wearing men’s clothing by adopting male habits: Consuming alcohol and smoking cigars in public. Both were exclusively reserved for men in the civil society of the time. Louise Aston repeatedly felt the explosive power of her radical democratic and early feminist positions: They led her to an unsettled life as a revolutionary, writer, and nurse. Louise Aston was banished from various cities in the German-speaking world, lastly even Bremen, where she lived with her second husband and had not worn men’s clothing for some time. However, she was already stigmatized there: “in major cities,” as the Bremischer Beobachter wrote in May 1849, she “ran around with men in men’s clothing” and “smoked and quaffed with them,” as a result she was “banished by the police authorities everywhere, even in Zurich.” (Cyrus 1987: 151; Bremischer Beobachter 26.5.1849).
Punished With Oblivion
The rejection experienced by Louise Aston from society as well as from the women’s movement due to her radicalism led to her being forgotten shortly after her death. Her books, texts, and poems are hardly known – here she lost the fight for equality as a woman. While Gerhard Hauptmann’s play “The Weavers” or Heinrich Heine’s poem “The Silesian Weavers” are still widely known today, hardly anyone knows Aston’s poem “Song of a Silesian Weaver,” for example, or other texts in which she decries the misery of factory workers. She had obviously viewed this at close range as the wife of machine and textile manufacturer Samuel Aston. An experience that she also addresses in her autobiographical book “From a Life of a Woman” (Aston 1847). Wearing men’s clothing – as a protest against social gender bias and a demand for equal rights for women – seems to us today like a casual marginal issue. In Louise Aston’s time, however, it was an outrageous provocation, something of which has perhaps been preserved in the painting by Johann Baptist Reiter (fig. 2).
Abb. 2: Die Emanzipierte. Johann Baptist Reiter (1813-1890), o. J., vermutlich ein Portrait Astons (Foto: Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, 2013).
Song of a Silesian Weaver[i]
Louise Aston
When all rests up in the mountains,
The millstream rages loud,
The moon in silent sorrow
Listens through the thatch of straw;
When dimly the lamp flickers
In the recess on the shrine:
Then down onto my lap
My tired hands will fall.
So often have I sat here
Till deep into the night,
With open eyes, yet dreaming,
Not knowing what I thought;
But ever hotter falling,
The tears upon my hands
Perhaps I had been thinking:
Has my misery no end?
My father, he has perished]
A year has passed since then –
His slumber, soft and gentle,
Upon his deathbed came!
My love took up his rifle
To help in times of need,
Never did he return here,
The forester shot him dead. –
The people often tell me:
“You’re so beautiful and young,
And yet so pale and mournful
Must you perish in pain?” –
“Not pale, nor lost in mourning!”
How quickly this is said,
When in the endless heavens
No stars still shine for me!
The factory boss approached me
And said to me: “My heart child,
I know how much your family,
Is suffering and in need;
So stay with me and rest here
For three nights, maybe four,
And see this shining piece of gold!
At once it will be yours!”
I knew not what I’d heard then –
O Heaven, please be fair
Leave me to my suffering,
But keep my soul still pure!
O do not let me falter!
Much more I cannot bear,
When I see my sick mother
And young sister at home!
Now all of them are resting,
The candle’s light is out,
Only in my heart is pain,
No tears are left to cry.
If You, o God, can’t help us,
Then let us go instead,
Where deep down in the valley
The mourning birches stand!
Weiterführende Literatur
Aston, Louise, 1847. Aus dem Leben einer Frau. Autobiografischer Roman. Otto Meißner, Hamburg 1847. (https://books.google.de/books?id=yx9VAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Bremischer Beobachter. Lokale Wochenzeitung, erschien 1849-1855 zweimal wöchentlich, danach fortgesetzt als Bremer Tageblatt.
Cyrus, Hannelore, 1987. „Denn ich will aus mir machen das Feinste…“ In: Malerinnen und Schriftstellerinnen im 19. Jahrhundert in Bremen. Bremen: Verlag in der Sonnenstraße. Pp. 147–154.
Garves, Agnieszka, 2011. Louise Aston (1814-1871)
– kompromisslose Denkerin und scharfsinnige Kritikerin der Gesellschaft. In: lpb-bw.de. Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden-Württemberg. (https://www.lpb-bw.de/louise-aston-frau-im-fokus).
Goetzinger, Germaine, 1983. Für die Selbstverwirklichung der Frau: Louise Aston. In Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
Sichtermann, Barbara, 2014. Ich rauche Zigarren und glaube nicht an Gott. Hommage an Louise Aston. Berlin: edition ebersbach.
[i] https://www.zgedichte.de/gedichte/louise-franziska-aston.html