Writing (about) Love?
Historical Analyses regarding the Negotiation of Gender Relations and Positions in Couple Correspondences of the 19^th and 20^th Century

Abstract

With its questions, methodological and theoretical premises the project is positioned at the interface of gender history, the history of love, and the history of private writing. At the centre lie couple relationships, gender positions, and love in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, analyzed on the basis of correspondence between women and men. Changes and continuities over time will be studied in the longitudinal perspective from the 1870s to the 1970s, linked to gender historical caesurae and to the concept of romantic love, as well as to the hegemonic bourgeois model of marriage and love. Geographically the focal point will be Austria.

To pursue these goals, the project team has access to an extensive collection of unpublished personal correspondence from collections and archives, in particular the Sammlung Frauennachlässe (The Collection of Women's Estates); in order to fill in gaps in the source material selectively targeted calls for further sources will be launched.

The letters, regarded as ‘situated sources', will be methodologically reflected upon and researched with reference to suggestions for a qualitative content analysis and within the context of discourse-analytical procedures. The project will investigate the forms whereby relations are established and configured through the medium of the letter, as well as the processes of reproduction, modification and re-interpretation of the social concepts of relationships, love and gender. It will further analyze the potential proportions of power and the gender hierarchies which are displayed in the letters, and mechanisms of gendered self-reassurance and self-construction in interaction between the correspondents. Last but not least we are interested in the scopes for action of the letter writers in the tension between discourse and experience. We aim to open up the self testimonies included via an overview in longitudinal perspective, and we intend to go into detail and compile case studies with the aid of significant examples. The basis of all this will be milieu-specific differentiations as well as consistent contextualisation, including the historic-social - political as well as biographical - frameworks.

Possibilities for national and international networking are provided among others by research on letters and self testimonies - especially active in the Anglo-American area - conducted from a gender perspective, as well as by the history of emotions which has increasingly been established during the last years. Researching the meanings of love and the emotions for relations between the genders is a particularly important desideratum.