Citation/Abstract

This dissertation investigates the strategies women editors in eighteenth and nineteenth century pursued to attain power within the German editorial world. I position Marianne Ehrmann, Therese Huber, and Sophie Mereau against mid-nineteenth century editor Louise Otto-Peters and closely analyze their editorial work, applying Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework of power. In relation to this framework, I show that the editorial world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany was a field of power relations in which editors' agency was determined by their monetary, social, and technical resources. By closely analyzing the assets Ehrmann, Huber, Mereau, and Otto-Peters possessed as they began their editorial endeavors and the strategies they employed to defend and increase these goods, I found that Mereau had the highest level of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital due to the literary network Mereau had formed in Jena, her success as author and her experience as editor of several noted periodicals. In addition, my research shows that the editorial role still lacked a stable definition in the eighteenth century and that both male and female editors were thus able to shape the profession as it developed. Editors in mid-nineteenth century Germany had become professionals in that their work had a more journalistic character, informed by the realpolitik of their living and working conditions.