Viola Klein: A Neglected Key Theorist of Gender Studies

Names such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, or Simone Weil tend to evoke particular associations in people’s minds, even if these are somewhat vague or disparate. But we cannot say the same with any certainty for Viola Klein (1907–73). And yet, as a theorist and social researcher, she was highly attuned to the societal crises and failings of her time—especially the persistent gender inequalities and women’s experiences of oppression—and helped to address them. When comparing Klein to other thinkers, we must pay particular attention to her major work of social theory: The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, published in 1946 by Routledge & Kegan Paul in the ‘International Library of Sociology’ series, which was founded by Karl Mannheim.

In this work, Klein observed that what we call ‘femininity’, or the ‘feminine character’ or ‘essence’, is not as intrinsic a quality as it is commonly supposed to be. The ideas associated with it are connected to the socio-historical context from which they emerged. Such notions are subjectively situated, meaning that they do not exist independently of the people who hold them; rather, they are closely bound up in their lived experiences, their socialization, and their prejudices, intentions, and desires. In short, they arise from processes of social negotiation and communication. Yet their impact on the thoughts, actions, and emotions of women—that is, the people to whom these ideas and images refer—is not to be underestimated. They determine how women are thought of, and what is expected of them.

Although academic researchers are commonly supposed to have a knack for impartial observation, they cannot produce entirely objective knowledge. Yet because the veracity of their findings is rarely doubted, and they therefore enjoy a high degree of interpretive clout, they exert particular influence over what is thought and articulated at any given time. For this reason, Viola Klein’s study addressed prominent theories from the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century that sought to clearly define the ‘feminine character’. Klein showed that these ideas were not free of ideological assumptions, social conditioning, or personal interests. In her view, they were not upstream of society, but an integral part of it, and thus reflected its dominant currents of thought and feeling.

Here, if not before, it becomes clear why Simone de Beauvoir generally appears at the top of any list of influential female social theorists. After all, her much-cited words ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’¹ firmly enshrined her 1949 monograph Le deuxième sexe in the memory of the feminist movement and earned her the status of feminist pioneer. To this day, she is seen as one of the first thinkers—or even the first—to expose the social character of what makes ‘a woman’. And yet, as we have just seen, Viola Klein beat de Beauvoir to this insight by three years. Or five, strictly speaking, as she submitted her PhD thesis—the basis of her monograph—to the London School of Economics in 1944.² Her supervisor was Karl Mannheim, one of the founding fathers of German academic sociology, and his influence on her research is unmistakable. She had fled from Prague in 1939 to escape the threat of National Socialism. Three years later, she was awarded a scholarship by the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile to pursue her academic interest in the reality of women’s lives, to explore the conditions for the (still unrealized) achievement of gender equality, and to lay the foundations for a lived emancipation that went beyond the mere adjustment of political rights.

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Viola Klein in the Archives

My PhD project seeks to bring an end to the persistent neglect of Viola Klein and her works of social and gender criticism.³ In my view, her exclusion from the sociological canon is not just a product of the power dynamics inherent to the reception history of sociology (as well as other humanities subjects), but is also a missed opportunity to enrich the modern disciplinary landscape with her theories and findings. The failure to fully acknowledge Klein’s work is also problematic for the history of sociology. Sociology is a discipline that emerges from and addresses society; one that consistently devotes itself to issues and phenomena that have become acute, and thus are inevitably turned into objects of scrutiny and societal modelling. As long as disciplinary histories exclude theoretical approaches that addressed societal problems and crises before they had entered the collective awareness, or when they had done so only to a limited extent, then those histories will remain flawed and one-sided.

From this perspective, my project also considers the extent to which Viola Klein’s contributions to sociology and to gender research served to expose social problems in this way—to take certain states of affairs (such as gender relations) that had previously been obscured by ideology, and subject them to critical inquiry for the first time. I am also interested in whether her status as a female Jewish gender researcher living in exile influenced her thinking and her academic work. My project is thus rooted in the history of sociology: I do not solely consider the insights and findings presented in Klein’s work—that is, what she said and wrote—but also examine the socio-historical context in which that work was produced. What prompted her to engage with issues of gender? Who influenced her thinking? What impact did historical events and political conditions have on her research? What intellectual and social circles did she move in? Which earlier theories and studies were crucial for the formation of her ideas, and in what ways did she break with them? How was her work on the sociology of gender received within her lifetime?

In order to answer these questions, I came to England with the support of the German Historical Institute London. Two British archives contain items from Viola Klein’s personal papers: the special collections of the University of Reading, held in the Museum of English Rural Life, and the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics. I also visited the special collections at Keele University, which hold some records relating to Karl Mannheim. As a sociologist by training, I did not have much prior experience of archival work, the stock-in-trade of the historian. However, I was struck by the symbolism of the fact that Klein’s papers are held in two different archives—and furthermore that she is the only sociologist found in the special collections of the University of Reading, which otherwise hold records relating to various writers and natural scientists. Archives are sites of memory, of distinction, and, not least, of the reproduction of power. It is the archivist who decides what is worthy of retention, who is remembered, and which items are made available to interested audiences and thus have a lasting impact on scholarly communities and the public at large. The decision to preserve Viola Klein’s papers was an unexpectedly far-sighted one. Yet Klein was admitted to English archival collections even as her work remained underacknowledged and underdiscussed, and this simultaneous recognition and exclusion is typical of her work.

Klein’s scholarship only came to be appreciated in the 1950s and 1960s, when she switched her attention from criticism of ideology to empirical gender research and focused on the problem of the double burden placed on women by waged employment and domestic work. She only gained a university position towards the end of her career, when she was hired as a lecturer at the University of Reading in 1964. Before that, she had faced lasting professional precarity, and was forced to make a living from non-academic work, whether as a nanny, a translator for the British Foreign Office, or a journalist for various publications. Her archive provides not just a symbolic, but a very concrete foundation for an act of remembrance: her inclusion in the collective disciplinary memory of sociology and gender research and, building on that, an engagement with her work.

The ‘Marginal Man’: The Ideal-Type Underpinning Klein’s Research and Lived Experience

On 25 April 1944, in a letter to Karl Mannheim, Viola Klein revealed the crucial motivation behind her academic work:

Being, as you know, particularly interested in the problem of the ‘marginal man’, I think work in connection with ‘displaced populations’ would give me scope for further investigations. After so many years of struggle to put into practice my keen interest in sociological research, I am not inclined to give it up so easily when it just seemed to be within easy reach.⁴

At this time, Klein was about to hand in her PhD thesis, and was worried about finding employment afterwards. Time and again, she turned to her doctoral supervisor in the hope that he might know of a suitable position for her. These lines reveal her ambition to study the ideal-type of the ‘marginal man’, a concept developed by the social psychologist Robert Ezra Park that she saw as reflective of her own experiences.⁵

The ‘marginal man’ describes a subject who is caught between two life-worlds: that of majority society, and one in which he is assigned a subordinate position as an ‘other’, based on a predefined category (such as gender, religion, or ‘race’). He strives to be part of majority society, but the powerful majority pushes him into the secondary life-world, to which he also feels a sense of belonging. At best he is tolerated, but he is never fully integrated; his consciousness and his identity are divided, caught in a continual conflict. He lives in a grey zone of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, and is never fully admitted into any social group. Evidently, Viola Klein saw her work as improving the situation of marginal groups that conformed to this ideal-type. Building on some observations made by Karl Mannheim,⁶ her PhD thesis claims that such groups share an awareness of social problems, as well as a heightened interest in social progress and the achievement of democratic and liberal goals: ‘All these groups have a vital interest in the promotion of a humanitarian, universalist outlook, in the abolition of discrimination against people on account of their race, creed, sex, or nationality.’⁷

Klein’s academic work always displayed a strong commitment to social change, which may have been influenced by her own experiences. Even before her exile, she had been active as a scholar. She gained her first doctorate at the German University in Prague in 1937 with a study of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s language and style. A copy of this work is held at the University of Reading, but it was never published.⁸ Like many others from a similar background, she was forced to re-establish herself in England. Engaging with questions of gender as a female Austrian–Jewish émigré meant living in permanent precarity, and called for adaptiveness, diplomacy, and mimetic action—much like what was required of the ‘marginal man’. In this context, a remark made by Viola Klein in an interview with The Times, which I came across during my archival research in Reading, particularly stood out to me: ‘[Y]ou really must not write me down as a militant feminist . . . An accidental—or even incidental—one would be nearer the mark.’⁹ Because of her research, which can certainly be called feminist, she felt a constant pressure to justify herself. Disclosing a political stance in post-war England would have damaged her scholarly credibility, which she had fought so hard to build. Thus, although the author and her work should not be seen as one and the same thing, they cannot be wholly separated either—that much I have learned from my work in the archives.

Translated by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL).

Feature image: Women washing clothes, 1943. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library, via Unsplash.

1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York, 2010; 1st pub. 1949), 330. [↩]
2. It originally bore the title ‘Some Theories of Feminine Attitudes and So-Called Character Traits: A Study in Ideologies’, and was subsequently adapted for publication. The original manuscript is held in the Women’s Library at the LSE. [↩]
3. There have been some studies of Viola Klein’s work; the contributions by the Swedish gender researcher E. Stina Lyon, whom I got to know during my stay in England, are particularly important. See e.g. E. Regine Gildemeister and Katja Hericks, Geschlechtersoziologie: Theoretische Zugänge zu einer vertrackten Kategorie des Sozialen (Munich, 2006), 99–103 and 126–8; Stina Lyon, ‘Viola Klein: Forgotten Émigré Intellectual, Public Sociologist and Advocate of Women’, Sociology, 41/5 (2007), 829–42; Janet Sayers, ‘New Introduction’, in Viola Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology (London, 1989; 1st pub. 1946), pp. ix–xxxiv; Emily Steinhauer, ‘Time, Labour and the “Dual Role”: Viola Klein’s Study of “Professional Womanpower” as a Feminist Archive’, Women’s History Review, 33/1(2024), 40–59; Shira Tarrant, When Sex Became Gender (New York, 2006), 133–64. It is striking, however, that most of the extant literature addresses Viola Klein’s later socio-empirical work, while little attention has been paid to her theoretical contributions (which are the focus of this post). To this day, there has been no systematic study of her PhD. [↩]
4. University of Reading Special Collections, Viola Klein Papers, MS 1215 5/4. [↩]
5. Robert E. Park, ‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man’, American Journal of Sociology, 33/6 (1928), 881–93; Everett Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York, 1937). [↩]
6. Keele University Special Collections, Karl Mannheim Papers, Box 1, Folder F, Frankfurt Lectures. [↩]
7. Viola Klein, ‘Some Theories of Feminine Attitudes and So-Called Character Traits: A Study in Ideologies’ (unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 1944), 335. [↩]
8. University of Reading Special Collections, Viola Klein Papers, MS 1215 7/4: Viola Klein, ‘Sprache und Stil des Louis Ferdinand Céline’ (unpublished PhD thesis, German University in Prague, 1937). [↩]
9. LSE Womens Library, KLEIN Dr. Viola, PC/08/K-01: The Times, 11 Jan. 1960. [↩]

Lena Spickermann

Lena Spickermann studied sociology and social psychology at Ruhr University Bochum. Since October 2023, she has been a doctoral candidate… Read more

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