The irst comprehensive survey of women in the Weimar Republic, this book explores the diversity and multiplicity of women’s experiences during fourteen years of political, economic and cultural turbulence. The Weimar Republic marked great changes in the lives, expectations and perceptions of German women in the form of new opportunities for employment, education and political life, as well as greater social freedoms, all played out in the media spotlight. Drawing heavily on archival and primary source material, and engaging throughout with the most current WomWeonm ienn t ihne the research, this book examines these changes, opportunities, expectations, perceptions and prejudices, and media and WeiWmeairm Raerp Ruebpliucblic cultural representations of the ‘new woman’, within a single, coherent analysis of women’s role. HelenH Beoleank Boak As a starting point, the book discusses the signiicance of women’s experiences in the First World War for their subsequent position in Weimar Germany, before detailing the contribution to political life and culture that was formally opened to them by the revolution. Subsequent chapters explore women’s role in employment, the family and reproduction, and as producers and consumers of Weimar’s mass culture. It portrays the Weimar Republic as a progressive period for young, urban women which was stalled in 1933. This book is essential reading for students and researchers of German women in the early twentieth century and will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Weimar Republic and women’s history. Helen Boak is Head of History at the University of Hertfordshire Cover image: A young woman standing over an air vent from the Berlin underground, 1930. Bildnummer 00395593 IMAGNO Images/Austrian Archives (S) This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Contents List of igures vii List of tables ix List of abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 Women in the First World War 13 2 Women and politics 63 3 Women and work 134 4 Women, the family and sexuality 200 5 Women in the public realm 254 Conclusion 292 Bibliography 300 Index 345 This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction The Weimar Republic, fourteen years of turbulent political, eco- nomic, social and cultural change, has attracted signiicant attention from historians, primarily because they are seeking to explain the Nazis’ accession to power in 1933. In their search for continuities in German history, German historians in the 1960s and 1970s espoused the view that Germany had followed a special path, a Sonderweg, in which, following the failure of bourgeois liberals to unify Germany in 1848, the German nation-s tate created by Prussian military might in 1871 remained a politically and socially backward country with an authoritarian monarch and inluential pre-i ndustrial elites as the country underwent rapid economic and industrial develop- ment.1 The late Detlev Peukert challenged this view and emphasised Germany’s modernity, rather than its backwardness. He portrayed the Weimar Republic as ‘a critical phase in the era of “classical modernity”’ which began in the 1890s, and as ‘a crisis- racked, mod- ernising society’.2 As Edward Ross Dickinson has noted, ‘Germany appears here not as a nation having trouble modernising, but as a nation of troubling modernity.’3 Peukert’s interpretation stimulated further historical engagement with the semantics and notions of crisis and, to a lesser extent, modernity, and as a corollary encour- aged historians to explore the Weimar Republic for its own sake, rather than as a precursor to the Third Reich.4 In 2005 German historians noted that the word ‘crisis’, which featured in the titles of more than 370 books published during the Republic, was under- stood by contemporaries to mean a ‘time of decision’, with a choice between possible outcomes, and this openness about the future was, according to Rüdiger Graf, fundamental to the Republic which he describes as ‘an open space of multiple developmental opportuni- ties’.5 Peukert himself noted that ‘in a mere fourteen years nearly This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 Women in the Weimar Republic all the possibilities of modern existence were played out’, and Peter Fritzsche has also referred to the Republic as ‘a series of bold experi- ments’ and as a time when ‘nothing was certain and everything pos- sible’.6 This book seeks to explore the opportunities and possibilities that the Weimar Republic offered women. Since the early 1970s, stimulated by the second-w ave feminism of the 1960s, there has been a considerable increase in the number of works exploring women’s experiences in the Weimar Republic, and many them have focused on the ‘new woman’. For many, during the Republic and subsequently, the ‘new woman’ was a potent symbol of both Weimar’s modernity and its crisis.7 For some, she symbolised the opportunities offered by the Republic, for others its degeneracy, indicative of the contradictions inherent in modernity. Sporting a page- boy haircut, known in German as a Bubikopf, and a short skirt over her androgynous igure, she was economically independ- ent and sexually emancipated. Her image featured prominently in popular culture, leading some to question to what extent the image relected the actuality of women’s lives during the Republic. Atina Grossmann is adamant: ‘This New Woman was not merely a media myth or a demographer’s paranoid fantasy, but a social reality that can be researched and documented.’8 But who, precisely, was this ‘new woman’? For Eric Weitz she was ‘a class- bound image of middle- and upper- class women who had the independence and the means to pursue their interests and desires’, while Grossmann comments: ‘The “new woman” was not only the intellectual with masculine haircut and unisex suit or the young white-c ollar worker in lapper outit so familiar to us from 1920s movies. She was also the young married factory worker who now cooked only one meal a day, no longer baked or canned, cut her hair short into a practi- cal Bubikopf, and tried by all available means and at any price to keep her family small.’9 Elizabeth Harvey has noted that ‘any and every facet of “modern womanhood” became incorporated into the “new woman”: “she” was both a devouring femme fatale and a cross-d ressing lesbian, a sportswoman and an eficient housewife, a movie- going typist and a bluestocking student.’10 Grossmann has seen in the ‘new woman’ a challenge to the ‘old woman’, who was the mother of several children, or the single feminist.11 Cornelie Usborne, too, has emphasised the fundamental differences in the values and behaviour of women of different generations during the Republic.12 This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction 3 The proliferation and multiplicity of images of the ‘new woman’ in the middle years of the Weimar Republic attest to the increas- ing visibility of women in the workplace, outside the home, in the media, ilms, newspapers, illustrated magazines and political posters and on advertising hoardings. These images are more acces- sible to the historian than is the actuality of women’s lives during the Republic, and this is one reason why there has been such a focus on the ‘new woman’ in the historiography and why cultural and art history studies of the representation and construction of women in popular culture abound, stimulated by Patrice Petro’s exploration of the German cinema’s attempt to address women as spectators.13 The ‘new woman’, made lesh in the images of young, independent women working as shop assistants or typists and enjoying a myriad of leisure pursuits while being targeted by the advertising indus- try, was an urban phenomenon particularly prevalent in Berlin, a city which provides a wealth of resources for the historian. Julia Sneeringer’s study of party- political propaganda aimed at women is based on Berlin, and Weitz has claimed in his history of Weimar Germany that ‘Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar.’14 A concen- tration on Berlin downplays the signiicance of regionalism and religion in German history, and this book attempts to go beyond the boundaries of Berlin to seek evidence of the variety of women’s experiences during the Weimar Republic, which were inluenced not just by location, religion and age, but also by class, employment and marital status. The ‘new woman’ is emblematic of a generation of young women who were able to take advantage of a range of opportunities and the relaxed social mores of the Weimar Republic to pursue the career of their choosing, to beneit from improved access to birth control so that they could control their fertility and plan their families, to venture unchaperoned outside the home, perhaps to partake of a range of recreational activities, to enjoy platonic friendships with members of the opposite sex, to talk openly about sexual matters with their partners and to participate fully in political life. The concept of the ‘new woman’ was a convenient target for those con- cerned about the continuing challenges to the pre-w ar gender order, which had irst been undermined during the First World War, and in Birthe Kundrus’s view, these challenges were perceived as ‘an attack on male power and male identity’.15 Other historians have alluded to a ‘crisis of masculinity’ brought about by the humiliation This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4 Women in the Weimar Republic of the defeat in the war, the physical and psychological scars caused by the war and fears and anxieties about the changes in the relation- ship between the sexes, in the home, the workplace and society at large.16 The ‘new woman’ was also the target for nationalists who believed that her selish reluctance to have children endangered the future of the German race. Historians disagree on the extent to which the Weimar Republic was an emancipatory experience for women. ‘Emancipation’ is here understood to mean the setting free of women from all legal, moral and intellectual restraints which barred them from total equality with men. The early years of the Republic, 1918 and 1919, have been portrayed as a period of opportunity and great optimism for women, who now enjoyed full suffrage rights and whose equality with men was, in principle, enshrined in Article 109 of the Constitution of the German Reich of 11 August 1919.17 This has been contrasted with both the ‘intense unrelenting attack on women’ towards the end of the Republic and the move to the right of the middle-c lass women’s movement and the liberal parties.18 With regard to employment, Renate Bridenthal believes that ‘“progress” for women in this era was dubious indeed’, and that women were pushed ‘even further toward the bottom of the skills- and- pay pyramid than before’.19 She sees in the myth of women’s economic emancipation a reason why women voted for conservative parties that promoted women’s traditional role within the home. Elizabeth Bright Jones has linked women’s economic exploitation to voting behaviour. In her exploration of female farm labour in Saxony she has noted how the government’s failure to address the overburdening of farm wives was exploited by right- wing agrarian parties.20 Jill Stephenson, Ursula Nienhaus and Doris Kampmann have explored the dificulties encountered by women wishing to pursue professional careers.21 Historians who have researched population policy, abortion, contraception and sex reform have, however, highlighted the improvements in women’s access to birth control and in their reproductive rights during the Republic.22 Weitz regards the promotion of a responsible and pleas- urable sex life for all as one of the Republic’s radical accomplish- ments, though Grossmann has emphasised that most sex reformers were concerned primarily with improving the sex lives of married couples, attempting ‘to reconcile the New Woman to marriage and motherhood by improving her sex life’.23 They wished to stave off This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction 5 the crisis in marriage and the family, as ‘satisfying sex produced a better quality of offspring’.24 Grossmann believes that ‘birth control, abortion and sex education were irst and foremost class and health issues, not women’s issues’.25 Julia Roos has, however, seen in the 1927 Law for Combating Venereal Diseases signiicant improvements in prostitutes’ and women’s rights.26 It is perhaps in the area of politics that most studies of women in the Weimar Republic are to be found. For many years Gabriele Bremme’s 1956 study remained the only exploration of women’s political role in the Weimar Republic.27 In the 1970s historians began exploring the role of female politicians in the national parlia- ment, the Reichstag, women’s role in the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) and the pre- 1933 Nazi movement, and the female vote, principally from the perspective of women’s electoral contribution to the rise of the Nazis.28 It was to be the 1990s before historians began inves- tigating the role of women in the other major parties, the liberal German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP), the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP) and the right-w ing German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP).29 In the 2000s several studies by female German historians focused on conservative women within the political parties and in nationalist organisations, and in his 2004 study of women within the DVP and DNVP, the American Raffael Scheck highlighted the differing responses of right- wing women to the rise of the Nazis, but noted that ‘the efforts of DVP and DNVP women to mobilise conservative women for the nation and, in particular, the DNVP women’s demonstrations that racial hygienic thought and Christianity were compatible may well have eased many women’s decision to vote for the Nazis’.30 In 2002 Sneeringer’s study of party-p olitical propaganda revealed how the parties constructed women as political actors, and Thomas Mergel explored the impact on Weimar’s political culture of women’s entry into parliament.31 It is one of the aims of this book to provide a synthesis of recent research in German and to make it accessible to an English- speaking audience. This book aims to build upon the existing scholarship to produce a comprehensive survey of women in the economy, politics and society of the Weimar Republic.32 Eve Rosenhaft has suggested This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 6 Women in the Weimar Republic that ‘women are invisible unless we are looking straight at them’,33 and this book seeks to explore the diversity and multiplicity of women’s experiences in Weimar Germany. The Republic was a post- war society, and an understanding of the signiicant impact that the First World War had on women and their roles in the economy and society is crucial for any interpretation of women in the Weimar Republic; this book, therefore, begins with a chapter on women and the First World War. It then seeks to explore to what extent the Weimar Republic was ‘an open space of multiple devel- opmental opportunities’ for women and to consider the changes in women’s roles, status and behaviour during the Republic and how these impacted on the gender order. Richard McCormick has argued that it was ‘the blurring of traditionally gendered roles and behaviour’ that ‘was most emancipatory about Weimar culture’, for women as well as men.34 How accurate is Bridenthal’s thesis that women actually made no progress, indeed went backwards, in the ield of employment? What use did women make of their newly granted political rights? To what extent was the ‘new woman’ representative of women’s experiences in the Weimar Republic? At its end, did German women experience the Nazi accession to power in 1933 as a rupture in their lives, as the outbreak of war in 1914 or its end and the revolution of 1918 had been? These are some of the questions to which this book hopes to provide the answers. The archival material for this book has been collected over a number of years, principally from the Federal Archives in Koblenz and Berlin, the Zentrales Staatsarchiv Potsdam in the former German Democratic Republic, the Helene- Lange- Archiv, now housed in the Landesarchiv Berlin, the archives of the German Protestant Women’s League, now housed in the Archiv der Deutschen Frauenbewegung in Kassel, the archives of the German Catholic Women’s League in Cologne and a variety of smaller archives.35 Historians of modern Germany are fortunate to have a range of oficial statistical publications at their disposal, and during the Weimar Republic several surveys, by professional organisations, trade unions and social scientists, were conducted into the lives of working women. In addition, numerous women’s magazines give information about women’s position in society, the activities of various women’s organisations and issues of topical interest. These primary sources, together with the considerable number of second- This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction 7 ary studies that have appeared since 1970, form the basis for this interpretation of women in the Weimar Republic. Notes 1 The key text is H.- U. Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985). The German edition appeared in 1973. Wehler’s thesis attracted criticism from British and American historians: R. J. Evans (ed.), Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1978); D. Blackbourn and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-C entury Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 2 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. R. Deveson (London: Allen Lane, 1991), p. xiii. For Peukert the Third Reich was ‘one of the pathological development forms of moder- nity’: Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. R.  Deveson (London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 249. 3 E. R. Dickinson, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Relections on our Discourse about “Modernity”’, Central European History, 37:1 (2004), 5. 4 For the ambiguities of modernity see A. McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also P. Fritzsche, ‘Did Weimar Fail?’, Journal of Modern History, 68:3 (1996), 629–56. 5 M. Föllmer and R. Graf (eds), Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005), p. 10; R. Graf, ‘Either-O r: The Narrative of “Crisis” in Weimar Germany and its Historiography’, Central European History, 43 (2010), 593. 6 D. Peukert, ‘The Weimar Republic – Old and New Perspectives’, German History, 6:2 (1988), 139; Fritzsche, ‘Did Weimar Fail?’, 633, 647. 7 A. Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. 8 A. Grossmann, ‘Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalised Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?’, in J. Friedlander, B. W. Cook, A. Kessler- Harris and C. Smith- Rosenberg (eds), Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 64. 9 E. D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 307; A. Grossmann, ‘Crisis, Reaction, and Resistance: Women in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s’, This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 8 Women in the Weimar Republic in A. Swerdlow and H. Lessinger (eds), Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1983), p. 61. 10 E. Harvey, ‘Culture and Society in Weimar Germany: The Impact of Modernism and Mass Culture’, in M. Fulbrook (ed.), German History since 1800 (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 282. 11 Grossmann, ‘Girlkultur’, p. 67. 12 C. Usborne, ‘The New Woman and Generational Conlict: Perceptions of Young Women’s Sexual Mores in the Weimar Republic’, in M. Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conlict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 137–63. 13 P. Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); K. von Ankum (ed.), Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); R. W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and New Objectivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); V. R. Petersen, Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany: Reality and its Representation in Popular Fiction (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001). Studies of women writers and artists include: M. Meskimmon and S. West, Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995) and M. Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and  the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 14 J. Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Weitz, Weimar Germany, p. 41. This claim has most recently been refuted by Benjamin Ziemann: B. Ziemann, ‘Weimar was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic’, German History, 28:4 (2010), 545–7. 15 B. Kundrus, ‘Gender Wars: The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic’, in K. Hagemann and S.  Schüler- Springorum (eds), Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth- Century Germany (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), p. 169. 16 Petro, Joyless Streets, p. 109; Graf questions the scale of the ‘crisis of masculinity’: R. Graf, ‘Anticipating the Future in the Present: “New Women” and Other Beings of the Future in Weimar Germany’, Central European History, 42 (2009), 648–9. 17 K. Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. This content downloaded from 131.94.16.10 on Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:23:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms