Amalia Holst, née von Justi (baptised Paulina Amalia Johanna Marchand)
*10 February 1758 (Altona)*
†6 January 1829 (Groß-Timkenberg)
Spouse: Dr Johann Ludolf Holst (1756–1825), lawyer and director of a pedagogical institute in Hamburg-St Georg
Children: three — Eduard (b. 1792), Emilie (b. 1794), and Mariane (b. 1796)
Amalia Holst was a teacher, pedagogue, and philosopher active in Hamburg during the late Enlightenment. She is best known for Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung (On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education, 1802), one of the earliest German philosophical works published under a woman’s name.
Holst was the daughter of the Prussian cameralist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, an influential writer on political economy and public administration, and his second wife, Johanna Maria Magdalena Marchand. Her education was unusually extensive for a middle-class girl: her father advocated women’s education and ensured that his daughters received the same education as his sons. Accused of embezzlement, he died in confinement in 1771, leaving the family in financial difficulty. Holst later recalled that she began working as an educator at the age of fifteen and became convinced that the improvement of humankind required the higher education of women. In 1791, Holst moved to Hamburg, and the following year she married the lawyer and educator Johann Ludolf Holst. Together, they ran his pedagogical institute in Hamburg-St Georg, where she served as headmistress of the preschool.
Her first book, Bemerkungen über die Fehler unserer modernen Erziehung (Observations on the Errors of Our Modern Education, 1791), appeared anonymously as the work of a “practical educator”. It was the first critique of the Philanthropinist pedagogy of Johann Bernhard Basedow and Joachim Heinrich Campe to be published by a woman. Holst shared the reformers’ opposition to rote learning but argued that their methods encouraged superficial knowledge and premature maturity. Education should instead proceed gradually and respond to the individual needs of each child. The book was favourably received, although an announced second, more systematic volume never appeared.
In 1799 and 1800, Holst published four signed letters in the journal Musarion in response to Wilhelmine Karoline von Wobeser’s popular novel Elisa, oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte (Elisa, or Woman as She Ought to Be). Rejecting the novel’s ideal of patient feminine self-sacrifice as morally mistaken and potentially oppressive, Holst developed a moral psychology of “rational self-love”: human beings have duties towards others, but they must also recognise their own moral worth.
On the Vocation of Woman intervened in the debate over the Bestimmung des Menschen, or vocation of the human being. Against writers who assigned women both a universal human vocation and a gender-specific one that restricted its scope, Holst argues that women must first be considered as human beings: perfectible creatures with a duty to cultivate their physical, moral, and intellectual capacities. Their roles as wives, mothers, and housewives may shape the circumstances of this development but cannot set its limits. Moving beyond earlier defences of women’s intellectual capacity, such as Dorothea Christiane Erxleben’s, Holst maintains not merely that women can pursue higher learning but that they ought to do so. Because self-cultivation is a universal human duty, women must possess both the right and the means to fulfil it. The book received hostile reviews. Recent scholarship has focused on the tension between its affirmation of moral equality and its retention of women’s traditional domestic roles, as well as on its restriction of higher education largely to the middle and upper classes.
Little is known of Holst’s later life. She directed educational institutions in Boizenburg and Parchim and appears to have lived apart from her husband. In 1824 she unsuccessfully sought a publisher for a further manuscript, now lost. She died in the household of her son Eduard at Groß-Timkenberg on 6 January 1829.
*Holst’s precise birthplace has been disputed. Her marriage announcement describes her as originating from Berlin, while some scholarship has given Mecklenburg as her birthplace. Altona is supported by her father’s residence there at the time and, more decisively, by the baptismal register of St Trinitatis, which records her as Paulina Amalia Johanna Marchand.
-
Primary Sources
[Holst, Amalia]. 1791. Bemerkungen über die Fehler unserer modernen Erziehung von einer praktischen Erzieherin: Herausgegeben vom Verfasser des Siegfried von Lindenberg [Johann Gottwerth Müller]. Leipzig: Carl Friedrich Schneider.
Holst, Amalia. 1799–1800. “Briefe an eine Freundin über Elisa, oder das Weib, wie es seyn sollte.” Musarion 1(4) (1799): 345–61 (Erster Brief), 1(5) 30–52 (Zweyter Brief); 2(7) (1800): 213–27 (Dritter Brief), 2(8) 326–34 (Vierter Brief).
Holst, Amalia. 1799–1800. “Briefe an eine Freundin über Elisa, oder das Weib, wie es seyn sollte.” Musarion 1 (1799): 345–61 (Erster Brief), 30–52 (Zweyter Brief); 2 (1800): 213–27 (Dritter Brief), 326–34 (Vierter Brief).
Holst, Amalia. 1802. Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung. Berlin. New edition with introduction and epilogue by Berta Rahm, Zurich, 1983; 2nd ed., 1984. English translation: On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education, translated by Andrew Cooper. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Digitized: https://books.google.it/books?id=O2cPAQAAIAAJ
Holst, Amalia. 1802. Letter to August Hennings, 29 May 1802. Nachlass August Hennings, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Handschriftensammlung. Digitized: https://digitalisate.sub.uni-hamburg.de/recherche/detail?tx_dlf%5Bid%5D=37640. Transcription and translation: https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/nnhp/article/view/8171/7802
Holst, Amalia. 1824. Letter to Franz August Gottlieb Campe, 31 October 1824. Campe-Sammlung, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Handschriftensammlung. Digitized: https://digitalisate.sub.uni-hamburg.de/recherche/detail?tx_dlf%5Bid%5D=37158. Transcription and translation: https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/nnhp/article/view/8171/7802
-
Secondary Sources
“Rezension von Bemerkungen über die Fehler unserer modernen Erziehung.” 1792. Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen 55 (7 April): 545–47.
“Rezension von Ueber die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung.” 1802a. Kaiserlich-privilegirte hamburgische Neue Zeitung 34 (27 February): 3–4.
“Rezension von Ueber die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung.” 1802b. Hamburg und Altona: eine Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Zeit, der Sitten und des Geschmacks 3 (7–9): 95–97, 205–12, 356–60.
“Rezension von Ueber die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung.” 1802c. Beilage des Hamburgischen Correspondenten 23 (9 February): 2.
Cooper, Andrew. 2023. “Introduction.” In On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education, by Amalia Holst, ix–lviii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooper, Andrew. 2024a. Amalia Holst. Cambridge Elements in Women in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, Andrew. 2024b. “Amalia Holst.” In The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition, edited by Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar, 25–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooper, Andrew, and Simon Gansinger. Forthcoming. “Amalia Holst and the Paradox of Public Reason.” Journal of the History of Philosophy.
Dölemeyer, Barbara. 2020. “Holst, Amalia Johanne Pauline: Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung.” In Kindlers Literatur Lexikon, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
Dyck, Corey W. 2024a. “Amalia Holst on the Education of the Human Race.” In Vom Recht der Frau zu Frauenrechten im Europa der Aufklärung, edited by Isabel Karremann, Anne-Claire Michoux, and Gideon Stiening, 161–83. Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler.
Dyck, Corey W. 2024b. “Towards a More Inclusive Enlightenment: German Women on Culture, Education, and Prejudice in the Late Eighteenth Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition, edited by Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar, 349–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dyck, Corey W. 2025a. “Enlightening Women: Pedagogy and Philosophy in Late 18th-Century Germany.” In Shaping Women Philosophers, edited by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, 111–39. Leiden: Brill.
Dyck, Corey W. 2025b. “Two New Letters of Amalia Holst.” Journal for New Narratives in the History of Philosophy 1.
Dyck, Corey W. 2026. “Amalia Holst on Kantian Morality, Immortality, and Women’s Enlightenment.” In Interpretationen der Aufklärung, edited by Marion Heinz, Dieter Hüning, Stefan Klingner, and Udo Roth, 393–412. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Framke, Gisela. 1984. “Amalia Holst: Bemerkungen zur Pädagogik der Aufklärung.” In Beiträge zur deutschen Volks- und Altertumskunde, edited by Jörgen Bracker, vol. 23, 31–46. Hamburg.
Fronius, Helen. 2007. Women and Literature in the Goethe Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gansinger, Simon. 2025. “Amalia Holst, geb. von Justi (1758–1829).” Aufklärung: Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts und seiner Wirkungsgeschichte 37: 377–91.
Gerhardt, Andrea. 2017. Wenn die Frau Mensch wird: Campe, Holst und Hippel im Vergleich. Norderstedt: Books on Demand.
Greif, Stefan. 2012. “Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel und Amalia Holst: Kritisch-emanzipative Gegenentwürfe zur bürgerlichen Geschlechterordnung.” In Geschlechterordnung und Staat: Legitimationsfiguren der politischen Philosophie (1600–1850), edited by Marion Heinz and Sabine Doyé, 199–217. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Jacoby, Karl. 1911. “Amalia Holst, geb. von Justi, Hamburgs erste Frauenrechtlerin.” In Beiträge zur deutschen Litteraturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, 1–32. Hamburg.
Kleinau, Elke. 2000. “Pädagoginnen der Aufklärung und ihre Bildungstheorien.” In Tugend, Vernunft und Gefühl: Geschlechterdiskurse der Aufklärung und weibliche Lebenswelten, edited by Claudia Opitz, Ulrike Weckel, and Elke Kleinau, 309–38. Münster.
Louden, Robert B. 2021. “A Mere Skeleton of the Sciences? Amalia Holst’s Critique of Basedow and Campe.” In Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany, edited by Corey W. Dyck, 72–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nissen, Martin. 2002. Die Frage nach dem sicheren Geschlecht: Entwürfe von Männlichkeit bei Joachim Heinrich Campe, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge und Amalia Holst. Norderstedt: Grin.
Rahm, Berta. 1984. “Nachwort.” In Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung, by Amalia Holst, expanded ed., 157–64. Zurich: Ala Verlag.
Rampinini, Federico. 2025. “Contro lo ‘pseudo-Illuminismo’ che esclude ‘un’intera metà del mondo’: Riflessioni per un possibile accostamento di Amalia Holst a Kant.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 81 (4): 619–36.
Rampinini, Federico. Forthcoming. “Historical Development and Human Agency in Amalia Holst.” Journal of the History of Philosophy.
Schmid, Pia. 1996. “Weib oder Mensch, Wesen oder Wissen? Bürgerliche Theorien zur weiblichen Bildung um 1800.” In Geschichte der Mädchen- und Frauenbildung, vol. 1, Vom Mittelalter bis zur Aufklärung, edited by Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz, 327–45. Frankfurt and New York.
Sotiropoulos, Carol Strauss. 2004. “Scandal Writ Large in the Wake of the French Revolution: The Case of Amalia Holst.” In Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture, edited by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Marjorie Gelus, vol. 20, 98–121. Lincoln and London.
Spitzer, Elke. 1994. “Amalia Holst (1758–1829): Eine selbstbewußte Pädagogin, die ‘besseren Köpfen’ einen ‘Fingerzeig’ gab.” Metis: Zeitschrift für historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 3: 29–38.
- Online Sources
-
Quotes
“In the name of our sex, I challenge men to justify the right they have presumed for themselves, which holds back an entire half of humankind, barring them from the source of the sciences and allowing them at most to skim their surface” (On the Vocation of Woman, ch. 1)
“Before we are man or woman, male or female citizen, husband or wife, we are human.” (On the Vocation of Woman, ch. 1)
“Surrounded by trivialities from youth onwards, tied up with trinkets, chastened by coercion, and held back by an idleness that feels like comfort, how can, how should, a woman’s mind penetrate through this fourfold fog and find the light?” (On the Vocation of Woman, ch. 1)
“In the course of their higher education women may think of calling to account the many injustices they have had to endure.” (On the Vocation of Woman, ch. 2)
You cannot copy content of this page