Winning Women's Votes

Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany

Julia Sneeringer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807860519
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

In November 1918, German women gained the right to vote, and female suffrage would forever change the landscape of German political life. Women now constituted the majority of voters, and political parties were forced to address them as political actors for the first time. Analyzing written and visual propaganda aimed at, and frequently produced by, women across the political spectrum--including the Communists and Social Democrats; liberal, Catholic, and conservative parties; and the Nazis--Julia Sneeringer shows how various groups struggled to reconcile traditional assumptions about women's interests with the changing face of the family and female economic activity. Through propaganda, political parties addressed themes such as motherhood, fashion, religion, and abortion. But as Sneeringer demonstrates, their efforts to win women's votes by emphasizing "women's issues" had only limited success. The debates about women in propaganda were symptomatic of larger anxieties that gripped Germany during this era of unrest, Sneeringer says. Though Weimar political culture was ahead of its time in forcing even the enemies of women's rights to concede a public role for women, this horizon of possibility narrowed sharply in the face of political instability, economic crises, and the growing specter of fascism.

Chapter 1: Onward, My Sisters!:
Winning Women for Politics, 1918–1920

Forward, onward my sisters! Suffrage is the gate through which you’ll enter the land you’ve so ardently sought. With conviction of titanic power, explode like dynamite the fetters that have chained you for centuries to superstition!

—Hedwig Dohm, late 1918, in Bärbel Clemens, “Menschenrechte haben kein Geschlecht”

[Election day is] an important day for the German woman. For the first time she [may] put her mark on the nation and show that her interests go beyond fashion, home, art, and socializing.

—Paul Block, “Die Frau an der Urne,” Berliner Tageblatt, 20 January 1919

Amid the tumult of the November Revolution, the Council of Peoples’ Deputies passed a law that allowed all women over the age of twenty to vote, starting with the January 1919 National Assembly election. Henceforth, German political culture was forever changed, as women became the majority of eligible voters. All political parties—including those that had opposed female suffrage—had to confront women as political actors for the first time. Recognizing women’s numerical power, they vigorously set out to win their vote. But uncertainty over how women would behave politically led parties in the immediate postwar years to bombard women with often contradictory messages as they searched for the key to unlock this new constituency.

Bombardment is an apt metaphor here, as political campaigns had been likened to battles since the 1870s. This was even more the case after the revolution, which utilized the streets as a public forum like never before in Germany. Public space became the staging ground for the “propaganda wars” that became the Alltag, or everyday life, of Weimar politics.¹ Between November 1918 and late 1920, the parties faced off in three major campaigns: the National Assembly contest of 19 January 1919, state elections in Prussia (which comprised three-fifths of the Reich) on 26 January 1919, and the Reichstag election of 6 June 1920. In this period, Germany was reeling from a military defeat for which the public had been wholly unprepared. The cease-fire terms kept a blockade in place until July 1919, stoking a black market and inflation that would burst into hyperinflation by 1923. These conditions bequeathed a crisis of legitimacy to the republic, and eventually, the parties identified with the new form of state. Despite some initial enthusiasm, such as that conveyed in the remarks of eighty-five-year-old feminist Hedwig Dohm, this republic would find few friends, coming under attack from both the Right and the radical Left, who treated it like an unwanted stepchild.

In these early years, broad national issues such as the peace settlement and continuing revolutionary unrest weighed heavily on the minds of all voters. Women, for their part, faced the particular problems of climbing consumer prices, the loss of their men in the war, and the uneasy reintegration of those who did return from the front. Women, whose waged work in “male” sectors such as transport and heavy industry had mushroomed during the war, found themselves unwanted competitors as the men came home. This resentment was codified in the March 1919 demobilization decree, which demanded working women’s dismissal in favor of returning veterans, starting with married women and eventually including all female workers (though the industrial resurgence of the early 1920s would prevent the order being carried this far). Thousands lost their jobs in transportation, civil service, the metal and chemical industries, and even the restaurant business. These firings were already envisioned in the November 1918 Stinnes-Legien accord between labor and management and had broad support, not least among the working class. Few women openly protested the measure, and many in fact joined the postwar marriage boomlet, voluntarily leaving jobs many had seen as only temporary. But the issue of gender competition for jobs—one of “the wars after the war”—would continue to smolder, reigniting in times of economic crisis throughout the Weimar period.²

In 1918–20 women faced new political rights, shifting economic roles, and social dislocation. The promise and the shock of the new sparked an unprecedented flurry of political activity nationwide; women too set out to find their place in this new Germany. The parties for their part had to reorient themselves to a new regime in which women’s interests would be impossible to ignore. How would parties process these considerations into propaganda that could resonate with the masses? Would the brave new postrevolutionary world dissolve inherited gender assumptions, or would fears of chaos promote the invocation of seemingly eternal notions of female nature? As the parties reached out to women by addressing issues such as their legal and economic rights, motherhood, religion, and culture, they worked to construct the woman voter herself. Through this process they also articulated their visions of the greater political and social order. During 1918–20 this meant giving meaning to democracy, the revolution, the welfare state, and women’s place in all of them.

To reach the masses of new female voters, parties had to build mobilizing organizations. The socialist movement already had decades of experience including women in the business of mass politics; other parties had to catch up quickly. During the republic’s first days, these other parties often relied on existing women’s groups while their own women’s committees (Frauenausschusse) were being set up.³ By 1919 all major parties but the Catholic Center had founded Frauenausschusse headed by female notables and usually installed as a branch of the party executive (Vorstand) alongside committees for civil servants, employees, the Mittelstand, farmers, industry, white-collar workers, small business, and youth. Parties quickly added women to their larger national committees (Reichsausschusse), of which they tended to comprise roughly 10 percent of members. To varying degrees, members of the executive and the heads of interest group committees comprised a party’s nominal leadership, but a party’s most powerful body tended to be its executive board (Geschäftsführende Ausschuss). Women were infrequently represented on this or other committees not seen as directly related to “women’s issues.” The process of naming women to the executive was the one (and sometimes only) occasion during Weimar where party organizations showcased women and touted their political importance. As one DVP man put it, to have no woman on the executive would not be a crime, but it would be a blunder.⁴ It would subsequently be incumbent upon female activists to remind their parties of commitments made on those occasions to political work among women.

What were the women’s committees’ responsibilities?⁵ Largely run by women for women but financed by the Vorst and, their task was to win female voters and enroll new members. They were to educate and recruit through personal contact and mass propaganda. The bourgeois parties in particular saw social gatherings such as teas and family evenings as more likely to attract women than “strictly political” meetings; this view also penetrated SPD thinking in the 1920s. The committees also reported to the party on the morale of female voters and on “women’s issues.” They were largely responsible for writing propaganda for women,⁶ as well as newsletters or “women’s pages” in party journals. Naturally, the content of these had to dovetail with the general party line—no party wanted to win female votes at the expense of men’s. This literature was offered to regional branches to distribute or tailor to local conditions. Circulation of major campaign flyers regularly reached 100,000 or more. The production of propaganda for women was most intensive in Weimar’s first major campaigns: the DNVP produced at least forty-four flyers and posters for women between late 1918 and 1920, the DDP fifty-three, the DVP twenty-seven, and the Center twenty.⁷

Socialist organizations differed slightly in form. While there were variations between the SPD, USPD, and Communist Party (the latter will be examined more closely in chapter 2), each established a women’s bureau charged with recruitment, agitation, coordination of local women’s groups, and education in theory and praxis. In addition to propaganda through rallies, courses, house visits, and film or slide shows, a steady stream of pamphlets, flyers, posters, and publications for women appeared. More than the bourgeois parties, socialists presented women’s mobilization as a concern of the party at large, in accord with the Marxist dictum that women’s emancipation was integral to that of the entire proletariat. Organizational statutes ordered women’s inclusion in leadership at all levels, from national executive to district cell. However, the Marxist parties also believed that centuries of women’s exclusion from politics necessitated unique tactics as well. Party dues, which were pegged to a worker’s hourly wage, were reduced for female members. Different forms and content for their political schooling were also mandated. For example, in addition to factory agitation, housewives were to be reached with events on consumer issues, housing, and welfare, the last seen particularly by the SPD as a “natural” area for female activism and recruiting.⁸

Another key function of all parties’ women’s bureaus was nominating female candidates, as the same law that granted women suffrage also allowed them to seek office. Largely ignorant of the world of female activism, parties relied on their women’s committees to supply women fit to tackle political office, especially in 1919 and 1920, when they hoped to lure women voters by putting female candidates high on the party slate. This coincided with the bourgeois parties’ postrevolution forays into populism, in which they put forth candidates from a wide variety of occupations, establishing a trend that would force women to jockey with these groups for favorable list spots. A party’s stance on whether women should be treated like occupational or other groups informed the ways they appealed to female voters, as did the debate over whether parties could most effectively appeal to women through their material and personal interests—jobs, reproduction, legal status—or through invocation of their female essence.

The issues parties invoked in their first propaganda blitzes to female voters would remain staples of Weimar political discourse. But the tenor of the republic’s first campaign, the election of delegates to the constitutional National Assembly, would never be matched for its sense of possibility and the optimism promoted, especially by the parties allied with the new democracy. That hopefulness had everything to do with the excitement—and anxiety—caused by women’s debut as full-fledged participants on the political stage.

The German Democratic Party (DDP) was formed in late 1918 as the successor to the left liberal Progressives. In 1919 the financially strong party distributed 15.5 million flyers to a broad range of groups, promoting free democracy and republicanism.⁹ More than any other non-Marxist party in 1918–20, the DDP made support for women’s new constitutional rights the focus of its appeals to them. It addressed them as “equal citizens” and scorned parties that had previously blocked female suffrage (omitting the Progressives’ own opposition as late as October 1918). DDP appeals assumed that women greeted the republic for the “gifts” it brought them and strove to reach progressive-minded women whose bourgeois identity alienated them from socialism. They sought to educate women in the exercise of their rights and pledged to defend the economic, political, and cultural demands of all women.¹⁰ This stress on equal rights (Gleichberechtigung), however, was shot through with talk of women’s “special duties and nature,” reflecting bourgeois feminist notions of citizenship rooted in the idea of “social motherhood.”¹¹ The women who wrote these appeals did not limit their vision to a female citizenship rooted solely in maternal values but tried to reconcile the implications of women’s new power in the “masculine” world of politics with prevailing notions of the feminine.

Perhaps the most striking demonstration of the DDP’s campaign commitment to civil emancipation was its adoption of the “party of women” (die Partei der Frauen) slogan in its 1919 women’s propaganda.¹² The DDP hoped to capitalize on the fact that it had attracted nearly all the leaders of the bourgeois feminist movement, among them Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders and Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, who coordinated female labor during the war; social work pioneer Alice Salomon; education reformer Helene Lange; and her companion Gertrud Bäumer, disciple of DDP founder Friedrich Naumann.¹³ These women figured prominently as both authors and subjects of women’s flyers, indicating that the party expected female voters to follow their “leaders” into the DDP. Clearly, the DDP assumed that enough women identified their own goals with those of the women’s movement to make this a profitable campaign motif.

Another source of the DDP’s belief that it could win female votes with a stress on equal rights lies in what Thomas Childers has called its bid to create a language of democracy for the young republic.¹⁴ Pamphlets aimed at both sexes in 1919 consistently linked democracy with social reconstruction, freedom for all citizens, the right to work, a community of nations, and the civil equality of women.¹⁵ Women were urged to support the DDP because its democratic agenda encompassed protection of the individual, career advancement based on merit, freedom of religion, and equality of all people’s comrades (Volksgenossen). Women’s new rights gave them not only the opportunity but also the duty to help build a “people’s state” and end the conflict perpetuated by men (Männergezank).¹⁶ “Women’s rights are human rights. We women now embrace the great responsibility of citizenship—but our rights carry duties. Therefore, we choose the party that strives to build spiritually [im Innern], the DDP. This party calls us not merely to use our votes to boost their numbers—it truly recognizes that female cooperation is crucial at all times. We women feel it, despite all the privations and chaos of our times: the epoch of humanity has dawned. Democracy is humanity! Therefore give your vote to the DDP, the party of women!”¹⁷ By equating women’s rights with human rights, the DDP wished to convince women that the fortunes of their civil liberties rose and fell with those of the republic and its advocates. This linkage of gender and human rights, penned by a woman, also constitutes a response to critics who saw advocacy of women’s rights as mere special-interest politics. Drawing on arguments advanced by the women’s movement since the nineteenth century, DDP women presented civil rights not as mere tools for individual advancement but as the means to a greater female role in reforming the nation.¹⁸

To best serve the common good, women needed instruction in the use of their political righ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Winning Women’s Votes
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Political Mobilization of Women
• Chapter 1: Onward, My Sisters!: Winning Women for Politics, 1918–1920
• Chapter 2: Stabilization and Stability: Women and the 1924 Elections
• Chapter 3: Culture versus Butter: Women in the Campaigns of the Golden Twenties, 1925–1928
• Chapter 4: Saviors or Traitors?: Women in the Campaigns of the Early Depression Years
• Chapter 5: Baby Machine or Herrin im Hause?: Women in the 1932 Campaigns
• Conclusion: Women and the Language of Weimar Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index