The project will examine selected (married) couples who addressed and negotiated traditional gender relations in their partnerships and in public during the upheaval of industrialisation, i.e. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - a central phase in the history of Western modernity. The starting point is the observation that industrialisation made social relations more dynamic. In addition to an increase in social mobility, for example, bourgeois gender role models, in which women were mostly excluded from the public sphere, were also set in motion. The opening of universities and new academic appointments gave middle-class women an opportunity that had already been open to women in the arts, for example, namely to gain independence in a profession and realise their own potential. At the same time, however, the pressure on women in the lower middle class to contribute to the family income by working increased.

The example of married and unmarried couples will be used to analyse how partners, who were trained by their profession to reflect on personal and social relationships and to think of both sides in a relationship, negotiated the upheavals in gender relations within the framework of their partnership. It is therefore about a narrowly localised practice of the gender role debate between, as a rule, two people. This debate often took the form of women trying to utilise the new opportunities encountering resistance from their male partners (and their environment) and having to fight for their space of possibility in lifelong and sometimes bitter disputes.

However, these processes were fundamentally more complex. The conflicts could only take place if the male partners were at least prepared to negotiate the upheavals. Moreover, not all women were to be found on the "progressive" side; some consciously championed "traditional" role models or designed "progressive" gender roles, which in fact cemented the traditional role models. Depending on the partnership, profession, generation and country, the negotiation practice could therefore be quite different. Reflection, the life practice within the partnerships and the demonstration of this debate in public - which did not necessarily have to be decidedly political, often just the example of a successful woman was enough - are analytically linked in this project, i.e. the internal climate of a partnership with the macro level of society.

The project is currently in preparation and will be applied for together with Melanie Unseld (musicology) and Anja Zimmermann (art history).