Lina Eckenstein

Lina Dorina Johanna Eckenstein (23 September 1857 – 4 May 1931) was a British polymath and historian who was acknowledged as a philosopher and scholar in the women's movement.

Life

Eckenstein's father was a Jewish socialist from Bonn who had fled Germany following the failed revolution of 1848. Eckenstein was born in Islington, London, in 1857; the highly independent mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein was her younger brother. Eckenstein had a large range of languages which she is thought to have obtained at some educational facility in Switzerland or Germany.

She came to notice after joining a club started by the mathematician (and in time eugenicist) Karl Pearson which allowed middle-class radicals to talk about sex. The club, called the Men and Women's Club, operated during the late 1880s. Eckenstein was seen as a "new woman" and she presented studies she had made of the sexual relations of the Romans and of Swiss men and women during the Reformation. The club discussed feminist and liberal issues including ending any state legal interference in prostitution and whether motherhood should be reimbursed. Karl and Maria Pearson and their children, Sigrid, Helga, and Egon, were to permanently remain as Eckenstein's friends.

Scholar

She supported herself financially with conducting research, proofreading, teaching, and translation. She undertook significant work on Albrecht Dürer for Pearson's friend Martin Conway for which she was credited on the title page of his book. Eckenstein's family were German, but she also knew French and Italian, Middle High German, Middle English, and classical and medieval Latin and European history. This scholarly achievement made her overqualified to be a governess, but she became the governess to Margery Corbett. In 1896 she published Woman Under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent Life between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500, which she dedicated to Karl and Maria Pearson. This work drew a large number of sources together, some that she translated, to argue that many of the aspirations that women sought in the twentieth century were in some ways achieved by women in religious institutions a thousand years before. She describes the rebellion of the nuns at Poitiers after the death of Radegund. For two years the nuns refused to accept a new abbess who had been appointed by the male Catholic hierarchy. Eckenstein's work is credited with recovering Caritas Pirckheimer from historic obscurity. This work is thought to be the most scholarly of her publications despite the inclusion of some doubtful or mythical German history. It was read by the late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing in July 1896.