The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O'Connor Page A

They were needed to treat Muslim women in the former Ottoman-ruled regions of Bosnia and Serbia.
    Emperor Franz Joseph agreed.
    Emil quickly called in a protégée, bright youngGertrud Bien. She passed the entrance exam, and under the reluctant gaze of the university administration, Emil escorted Fräulein Bien into anatomy class.She was ordered to sit in the last row, ask no questions, and wear men’s clothing so she would blend in. Shock settled over the room, then murmurs, as the young men realized that “Herr Bien” was a Fräulein.Emil had to call security to escort hecklers from the hall.
    Emil made Fräulein Bien his assistant. In a few years, young Dr. Bien was Vienna’s first female pediatrician, and a member of Adele’s growing circle.
    Berta’s salon was a magnet for Viennese who were fascinated by the latest trends in psychology, politics, and art. Visitors likeAuguste Rodin dropped in, and playwrightArthur Schnitzler watched Klimt pursuing women like a “faun” there. Adele’s friend Alma got to know her future husband,Gustav Mahler, at Berta’s salon. Johann Strauss, a regular, had fallen to his knees and gratefully proclaimed her “the most marvelous and witty woman in Vienna.”
    If art was a way to liberate minds, salons gave unusual women the social support to exercise aspirations that would not have been welcomed by Vienna institutions. They offered an alternative to stuffy circles closed to Jewish women byanti-Semitism and sexism. But what gave salons gravitas was the fact that in the days before mass media, salons were indispensable to the spread of ideas.
    The fashion sense of the women in Adele’s circle was set by Klimt’s sister-in-law and companion,Emilie Flöge, a dress designer and early Vienna career woman. Flöge’s fashion house freed women from the confines of corseted Victorian dresses. She replaced them with loose, caftan-style dresses that allowed women to move comfortably, and were something of a feminine counterpart to the tunic worn by Klimt. Klimt and Flöge sometimes collaborated on the design of women’s dresses, giving the clothes added cachet. For women in Adele’s circle, the unfettered style of Flöge’s designs was a symbol of their liberated lifestyle.
    Other constraints were more difficult to elude.
    Adele’s friend Alma had made an enviable marriage with the composer Gustav Mahler, and had not waited for the wedding to consummate the union. But Mahler had demanded before they wed that his fiancée abandon her ambitions to be a composer. During their courtship Mahler wrote:
    A husband and wife who are both composers: How do you envisage that? Such a strange relationship between rivals: Do you have any idea how ridiculous that would appear, can you imagine the loss of self-respect it would later cause us both? If, at a time when you should be attending to household duties or fetching me something I urgently needed, or if, as you wrote, you wish to relieve me of life’s trivia—if at such a moment you were befallen by “inspiration”: what then?
    From now on you have only one vocation: to make me happy. You must give yourself up to me unconditionally, make the shaping of your future life, in all its facets, dependent on my inner needs, and wish nothing more in return than my love.
    Ambitious women were policed by stigma. They were brazen, unnat-ural, mad, or, in Freudian terms, hysterical. Or simply irrelevant. Fellow intellectualKarl Kraus derided Berta Zuckerkandl as a “cultural chatterbox.”
    In more conservative circles, women whose behavior violated feminine “nature” were labeled with a fashionable new term: “degenerate.” Women who pushed for higher education were “degenerate.” Women who agitated for the right to vote were having a “degenerate women’s emancipation fit.”
    A best-selling book of the era, Otto