ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Ilse Frapan and Else Jerusalem positioned their own novels alongside contemporary works. It analyses the emotive appeal of motherliness as a strategy common to both women's works. The chapter shows how socially critical novels later met with increasingly nationalistic protests from the literary establishment. The novel Arbeit by Ilse Frapan provoked widespread outrage for its depiction of the medical profession in Zurich. Else Jerusalem's Der heilige Skarabaus also created a furore, and is sometimes misremembered as a pornographic novel as a result of being set in a brothel. The novel Der heilige Skarabaus highlights prostitutes' longing for bourgeois respectability and family life. The engagement of women's fiction with urban modernity and its protest movements such as feminism and Socialism made it at the same time popular with readers and deeply questionable for the establishment figures who in Germany had such an important influence on the writing of literary histories and the long-term reception of works.
