Love in Couple Correspondences of the 19th and 20th Century

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 19th and 20th 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 To pursue these goals, the project team has access to an extensive collection of unpublished personal correspondence from collections and archives, in particular the Sammlung Frauennachlässe (The Collection of Women`s Estates); in order to fill in gaps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.

The project Couple Correspondences of the 19th and 20th Centuries has analysed a large collection of such letters from different social milieux in order to explore closely intertwined issues on the history of gender relations, love and private writing. Based on these examples of communication by letter, which we were able to access via the Sammlung Frauennachlässe (Collection of Womens Personal Writings), historians of the universities of Vienna and Salzburg (project leaders: Christa Hämmerle and Ingrid Bauer) investigated the role of the letter as a medium to take up, design and continue or break up a relationship which always involved emotions, expectations, ideals and categorisations of the counterpart, female and male self-perceptions and positionings, concepts of love and marriage. These questions were fathomed from a longitudinal perspective for the period investigated producing a vast amount of results. The project consisted of nine single studies based on an extensive range of comparative categories systematically investigated by using the software ATLAS-ti. The study on the language of sexuality for instance revealed that in contrast to previous research findings sexual desires played an important role in the epistolary communication between couples even before the Sexual Revolution, even though only linguistically coded and by using imagery such as metaphors. The so called bridal letter written to initiate marriage, usually considered the epitome of the often similarly defined love letter, was common and worked until the 1960s showing the significance of epistolary communication. Other studies of the project chose a narrower time frame for a more differentiated analysis such as the one on emotional practices of courting men in the second half of the nineteenth century, on jealousy in war letters of the Great War and on romantic love in context with the Nazi war of extermination. Analysing letter collections of both world wars reveals how much private correspondence was shaped and influenced by the moral and political regimes of emotions propagated by the war administrations. Thus the historical situation was inscribed in the epistolary communication about love and gender relations to a large extent. This is also true for the period of the Fin de Siècle and the secure conditions of the welfare state, from the 1960s onwards the frame of a considerable change of societal and structural patterns as well as personal perceptions and experiences regarding love, gender roles and sexuality. The epistolary correspondence of couples enabled new insights into the intimate interior of these processes, also from the perspective of mens history. Comparing the complete letter collections revealed the degree of the erosion of formerly valid discourses, ideas and practices regarding the hierarchic concept of marriage and love of the nineteenth century. However, two studies of the project show that this shift already took place during the period of changing gender roles around 1900 and during the 1920s respectively, at least to some extent and in specific milieux. However, differently adopted aspects of the concept of romantic love were still efficacious.