Women in the Weimar Republic

Helen Boak

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526101624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book is the first comprehensive survey of women in the Weimar Republic, exploring the diversity and multiplicity of women's experiences in the economy, politics and society. Taking the First World War as a starting point, this book explores the great changes in the lives, expectations, and perceptions of German women, with new opportunities in employment, education and political life and greater freedoms in their private and social life, all played out in the media spotlight. Engaging with the most recent research and debates, this book portrays the Weimar Republic as a period of progressive change for young, urban women, to be stalled in 1933.This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of German women in the early twentieth century, and will also appeal to anyone interested in the Weimar Republic and women's history.

1

Women in the First World War

The German people’s capacity for suffering must certainly be above the average. They proved it during the war years of starvation and sacrifice.¹

‘The war’, claims Angelika Schaser, ‘was a great mobiliser of women.’² As millions of men went off to war, women mobilised themselves out of economic necessity or patriotism, replacing men on local transport, volunteering for nursing training and organising welfare as they sought, in the words of Empress Auguste Victoria, ‘to help’, ‘to lighten the struggle for our husbands, sons and brothers’ and ‘to dedicate all our energies to the Fatherland in its decisive struggle’.³ Germany was rapidly transformed into a nation at war as spy fever raged, patriotism was displayed in shoe laces and hair ribbons and the German language was militarised while French and English words were banned and early victories were celebrated with holidays. Trains took troops to the front and brought refugees from East Prussia, prisoners of war and wounded soldiers. In schools, girls knitted socks and gloves to send to the front, and children followed the German advance on maps, began to collect metals for the war effort and encouraged their parents to subscribe to the first war loan.⁴ All believed that the war would soon be over. Instead, it lasted four long years, during which women’s relationship with the state and the gender order was transformed in the world of work, in the family and in society. Women were granted opportunities and faced challenges in both the public and the private spheres, and they had to endure enormous hardships and sacrifices. Inequalities were exacerbated and women’s confidence in the state’s administration was severely dented. Kathleen Canning has lamented the lack of scholarship exploring the significance for the post-war gender order of the transformations in women’s lives wrought by the war, though Benjamin Ziemann has challenged the appropriateness of the word ‘transformation’, an indication that the war’s legacy for women in the Weimar Republic is contested.⁵ In general, historians divide into three schools of thought over the impact and legacy of the First World War on women’s role in German society: some see the Great War as a catalyst for change, some believe it merely accelerated social, economic and cultural trends already underway before 1914, and others contend that any changes wrought during the war were purely temporary, ‘emancipation on loan’ as Ute Daniel has claimed.⁶ This chapter will explore women’s role in the economy and society during the First World War, in an attempt to ascertain which of these schools of thought is most appropriate and to assess the war’s significance for the roles and perceptions of women in the Weimar Republic.

Women’s contribution to the war effort

The First World War affected individual German women, as it did women in all the warring countries, in different ways, depending on their age, class, employment status, education, marital status and place of domicile, and on whether a male family member served at the front and if so, whether he was wounded, taken prisoner or killed. German women’s reaction to the outbreak of war varied, too. The leader of the moderate middle-class women’s umbrella organisation, the Federation of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BdF), Dr Gertrud Bäumer, pre-empted the outbreak of war in her plans to mobilise German women on the home front, while the Women’s League of the German Peace Society sent a telegram to the Kaiser asking him, in the name of all Germany’s mothers, to maintain peace. Social democratic women took to the streets in 163 towns across Germany in demonstrations for peace.⁷ Many women, particularly from the middle class, were, however, carried along on the wave of patriotic fervour that swept across Germany in early August 1914, accompanying loved ones to call-up offices or handing out chocolates, food, flowers and cigars to soldiers in transit at railway stations.⁸ Middle- and upper-class women, some 40,000 in Berlin alone, rushed to volunteer for first-aid courses offered by the Red Cross, while aristocratic women donated buildings for hospitals.⁹

The German government had not planned for women’s participation in the war effort, nor for the impact of a long war or a blockade on Germany’s economy, industry and civilian society. The initial impact was, of course, the removal of men to the front, resulting in what Richard Bessel has termed the ‘feminisation of German society’.¹⁰ Women began to replace men as counter clerks on Berlin’s underground and as conductors on its trams, and in Brunswick, the Duchess assumed control as regent.¹¹ They were to be the first of many in an overturning of the sexual division of labour which, according to Barbara Franzoi, was ‘the fundamental condition of women’s work in Imperial Germany’, with gendersegmented industries and tasks ensuring that women did not compete with men.¹² The war was to offer women unprecedented opportunities to enter jobs and industries previously closed to them, and even to attain positions of responsibility within agencies of the state. While working-class women sustained the German war effort in factories, middle-class women, marshalled by the women’s movement, took responsibility for welfare. Initially, however, the impact of the outbreak of war for many working women was unemployment, caused by the dislocation to German industry and transport networks brought about by the mobilisation, the reduction in production in the consumer industries where women’s industrial work was concentrated, and the dismissal of domestic servants as middle-class families’ incomes fell with the call-up of the male heads of household.¹³ Contemporary perceptions were of large numbers of women, following a brief period of unemployment or coming onto the labour market for the first time, replacing conscripted male workers for the duration of the war. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, for example, wrote in 1918 of an additional two million women joining the workforce since 1914.¹⁴ Historians disagree over the increase in the numbers of women working during the war, according to the sources they use.¹⁵ All agree, however, that women unable to find work in the textile and clothing industries, which dominated female industrial employment, found it in war-related industries, once industrialists’ initial reluctance to employ them had been overcome. Between 1913 and 1918 the numbers of women working in textile concerns overseen by the factory inspectorate fell by 42 per cent and in clothing concerns by 20 per cent, while those employed in engineering firms rose by 544 per cent.¹⁶ These former workers in the consumer industries were joined in the armaments industry by young women entering the labour market for the first time, by former domestic servants and agricultural workers, and by working-class soldiers’ wives and widows, the last of whom constituted an untapped reservoir of labour and could not manage financially on their war allowance (see below).¹⁷ In December 1916 70 per cent of married women working in the Bavarian armaments industry were soldiers’ wives.¹⁸ One chemical factory in Leverkusen reported that it had employed no married women before the war but that by 1917 half of its female workforce was married.¹⁹ Soldiers’ wives often had the first refusal of a job, and some took on their husband’s jobs for the duration of the war. In mining, where the number of women employed rose from 15,969 in 1913 to 109,622 in 1918, some wives of conscripted miners were forced to work in order to keep their mine housing.²⁰

More conspicuous were the many women who took over jobs as varied as chimney-sweeping, window-cleaning, road-sweeping and construction work, digging the new Berlin underground, for example, and those who joined the transport sector as tram, train and coach conductors and drivers, stokers and signal operators, though they received less training than the men they replaced.²¹ On the Prussian-Hessian railway, for example, some 9,167 women were employed in 1914, mainly as cleaners, though a few held white-collar positions. This figure rose to 22,700 in 1915, 36,000 in 1916 and 107,000 in March 1918.²² There were concerns about the visual masculinisation of women, in both musculature and dress. Women began to wear uniform and trousers.²³ Speaking in a Reichstag committee in March 1917 Dr Helfferich, at the time the State Secretary of the Interior and Deputy Chancellor, noted: ‘When one looks at the women who are so active in all these heavy services, women in munitions, driving vans, cleansing the streets, one sometimes has to gaze hard to know whether it is a man or a woman.’ ²⁴ Robert Nelson notes the attempts to counterbalance the visible physical masculinisation of working women in pictures in soldiers’ newspapers with photographs of them, attractively and femininely dressed when not at work.²⁵

The public sector’s attitudes towards the employment of women, both single and married, had to change in order to ensure an adequate workforce. The Imperial Post and Telegraph Service and regional education authorities allowed women civil servants who married during the war to stay in post, and those who had been forced to leave their posts on marriage but who had been widowed during the war were allowed to return.²⁶ To replace men from the public sector who had been called up, women entered branches previously closed to them. Berlin appointed its first female registrar, albeit in a deputising capacity, in 1916, while female architects were commissioned to design municipal buildings and structures.²⁷ During the war those women with a degree in medicine were allowed to take over the practices of male medical practitioners working at the front, apparently enhancing women’s reputation with both patients and medical authorities.²⁸ For the first time women were allowed to teach in boys’ junior and grammar schools, while in the Imperial Post and Telegraph Service women were now employed in senior positions as postal secretaries and head secretaries and in post offices of the third class, serving behind the counter, as well as collecting and delivering the post, jobs which made them far more conspicuous to the public than those in the telegraph and telephone service which had previously been their domain.²⁹ By July 1918 the Imperial Post and Telegraph Service had taken on 86,926 female war-time assistants.³⁰

In the first years of the war, the mobilisation of women for the war effort tended to be independent of government planning, but the manpower and materiel demands of the battles of Verdun and the Somme on the Western Front and the entry of Romania into the war led to the call by the Third Supreme Army Command, established on 29 August 1916 under Field Marshal von Hindenburg and General Ludendorff, for all Germany’s economic and social resources to be mobilised behind the war effort.³¹ Hindenburg believed that there were ‘thousands of women and girls … running around who do not do anything, or at most practise some useless trade. The principle “who does not work, shall not eat” is, in our situation, more than justified, also with regard to women.’³² However, the Auxiliary Service Law of 5 December 1916 did not include conscription for women, as it was believed that there was a reserve of female labour.³³ The newly created War Office set up a Women’s Section to encourage women to take up employment and release men for the front, and appointed as its head a well-known social worker, Dr Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, recently returned from her post within the civilian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Women in the First World War
• 2 Women and politics
• 3 Women and work
• 4 Women, the family and sexuality
• 5 Women in the public realm
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index