ABSTRACT
I T was in the spring or summer of 1907 that girls took part in a Wandervogel outing for the first time. This was a truly revolutionary event, as for the first decade of its existence the youth movement had been exclusively a boys’ society. Karl Fischer in particular took a dim view of the presence of girls in these groups; he thought they would be a distracting and disruptive element. Personal relations in the groups were apt to be somewhat rough and uncivilized: the style of the medieval vagrant scholars, which they frequently imitated, made no allowance for the presence of the gentler sex. Moreover, this was a time when German women were not fully emancipated in other respects either. Co-education was almost unheard of, and there was no outside pressure upon the Wander vogel to revise its original opinion of what was to become known, later on, as ‘the problem of girls’ rambling.’
