Review of: Monika Kubrova: Vom guten Leben. Adelige Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2011.

Abstract

Monika Kubrova examines ideological constructs and bourgeois categories, such as gender polarity, with regards to the environment of aristocratic women. Her methodological approach is the relationality of the notion of gender, which depends on the particular context, while the concepts of aristocracy, family, gender, and autobiography provide the basic research approaches. There are manifold female life stories at the end of the 19th century, both as a type of normal biography in the framework of family and society as well as in professional relations, which seemed possible for single women. Not until the appearance of biographical conflicts, i.e. with leaving the safe haven of nobility, did gender in itself become a category of disadvantage.