Carl Hayden and Dr. Robert McFarland, German Studies

Introduction

Though women may have hidden behind masculine façade’s as indicated by Ann Tizia Leitich’s chastising remark, they definitely were not remaining as quite as they once did. Compared to the late 1800’s where one would be lucky to find five articles written by women in a given month, one can easily find about thirty in a given month during the 1920’s. Women expressed not only views about fashion in these articles, but also critiqued Freud, submitted literary analyses, created wonderful allegories and shaped the views of the United States of America and Japan. Through Professor Robert McFarland’s and my efforts, we have cataloged over 627 articles during the early twentieth century written by over 97 German speaking women. From these we collected a little over twenty for Dr. McFarland’s Red Vienna, White Socialism, and the Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’s Amerika. We are presently citing and referencing these articles on the Sophie Project website.

Importance

While contributing to Dr. McFarland’s annotated bibliography, the expansion of the Sophie database will have far-reaching effects. Unlike before the project, an online index of female contributors to the Neue Freie Presse is available and will be updated regularly. At this time, we have uploaded more than 100 hyperlinks to the original articles to the Sophie site, including the Ann Tizia Leitich’s articles. We are continuing to add more hyperlinks at this time and expect to be done by mid-December. As such, when other scholars use the database, they will be able to find sources for their work quickly and get down to the difficult process of analyzing. We hope that this will increase the number and quality of biographical works on German-speaking women journalists.

In addition, we have added more than twenty new authors also to the entire Sophie database. With these hitherto hidden names available to other scholars, they will see the opportunities in the field, use them to create their own work, and contribute to the knowledge base. In addition to the ease of access that Sophie provides to academia, we expect that these additional authors will increase the curiosity of those involved in research and bring these names further out of the dark.

While the numbers may seem enough, the quality of the articles found are even greater, from countless film critiques and accolades by Lilly Klaudy to stark social commentaries by Marianne Haintich about “Die Jugend und die Pornographie”, the individual articles bring out the breadth of possibilities that women had to write during the time. Women did not write only on fashion, housekeeping and toiletries (Erika Selden’s specialty), but were in fact writing on pressing issues, tearing down and building up arguments on controversial topics.

With the increased number of articles available on the Sophie project website, we expect the amount and quality of similar works to increase. We also expect that other authors will continue to be brought into the light by further scholarly work. As such, academia will further disprove Janet Wolff’s “The Invisible Flaneuse” and Elizabeth Klaus’s commentary on the state of female journalism during the twentieth century.

Project Timetable Fulfillment

January-April: Initiated the cataloging of the articles found on the ANNO site. I developed a familiarity with the Fraktur script and Dr. McFarland tutored me in how to speed up article retrieval. We gathered information as we went to ensure quick annotation later on and easier reference when posting to the Sophie database.

May-June: I travelled to Vienna as planned and increased familiarity with the culture, language and the surroundings of Austria. Through this immersion, my ability to recognize names and understand the text of the articles increased.

July-September: The annotated bibliography was prepared while we continued to gather more articles, though it was clear that we would not get far, as the number of articles we were finding exceeded our expectations and the frequency appeared to be increasing. We began posting links onto the Sophie website. Plans for furthering the project began to fruit

October: Completed the final report, though work was still in progress. We counseled on how I could contribute further to the Sophie project while continuing to increase my skill set.