ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents case studies to address some of the most important social changes of modernity through fiction by women who themselves often struggled against their own lack of education and had to confront the prejudices of male-dominated publishing institutions. It shows how Gabriele Reuter and Helene Bohlau pioneered the writing of deliberately provocative novels, confronting their readership with aspects of women's experience usually excluded from fiction. The chapter explores the ideology of extended motherliness as an ethical response to modernity through the novel Christa Ruland by the feminist campaigner Hedwig Dohm, as well as women's confrontation with questions of sexual morality in the city, through Eine fur Viele, a little-known novel by Betty Kurth, calling for men to alter their sexual behaviour.
