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The Return of the New Woman and Other Subjects of Weimar Gender History

Review products

VictoriaHarris, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 205 pp. (pb), £24.99, ISBN: 0199578573.

Eric N.Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 184 pp. (pb), £16.00, ISBN: 0199311242.

MichelleMouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 310 pp. (pb), £22.99, ISBN: 0521145740.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2015

MARTI LYBECK*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin La Crosse, Department of History, 1725 State Street, La Crosse, WI 54601, USA; mlybeck@uwlax.edu

Extract

After a drought of more than a decade, a substantial group of recent works has begun revisiting Weimar gender history. The fields of Weimar and Nazi gender history have been closely linked since the field was defined thirty years ago by the appearance of the anthology When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Following a flurry of pioneering work in the 1980s and early 1990s, few new monographs were dedicated to investigating the questions posed in that formative moment of gender history. Kathleen Canning, the current main commentator on Weimar gender historiography, in an essay first published shortly before the works under review, found that up to that point the ‘gender scholarship on the high-stakes histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany has not fundamentally challenged categories or temporalities’. Weimar gender, meanwhile, has been intensively analysed in the fields of cultural, film, and literary studies. The six books discussed in this essay reverse these trends, picking up on the central question of how gender contributed to the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of National Socialism. In addition, four of the books concentrate solely on reconstructing the dynamics of gender relations during the Weimar period itself in their discussions of prostitution, abortion and representations of femininity and masculinity. Is emerging gender scholarship now shaping larger questions of German early twentieth-century history? How are new scholars revising our view of the role of gender in this tumultuous time?

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Bridenthal, Renate, Grossmann, Atina, and Kaplan, Marion, eds, When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

2 A major exception to the Weimar gap is Sneeringer, Julia, Winning Women's Votes: Politics and Propaganda in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2002)Google Scholar, an important study of how Weimar politics were gendered. This is not to say that German gender history in general was inactive. But most important works traced their gendered histories across several regimes rather than focusing intensively on the Weimar era: Wildenthal, Lora, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reagin, Nancy, A German Women's Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1995)Google Scholar; Grossmann, Atina, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 Canning, Kathleen, ‘Claiming Citizenship: Suffrage and Subjectivity in Germany after the First World War’, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

4 The most in-depth and historical of these was Petro, Patrice, Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press 1989)Google Scholar. Also notable: Tatar, Maria, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997)Google Scholar; Gleber, Anke, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and the articles in these anthologies: von Ankum, Katharina, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar and Meskimmon, Marsha, ed., Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995)Google Scholar.

5 Canning, Kathleen, ‘The Politics of Symbols, Semantics, and Sentiments in the Weimar Republic’, Central European History, 43, 4 (2010), 567–80, 572CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 A recent review essay in this journal reviewed the importance of Lüdtke's methods and concepts for the study of society under socialism: Sammartino, Annemarie, ‘We are the State We Seek: Everyday Life in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1945–1989’, Contemporary European History, 21, 3 (2012), 477–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In English, see Lüdtke, Alf, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

7 Burleigh, Michael and Wippermann, Wolfgang, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Weindling, Paul, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

8 Crew, David, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Young-Sun, Hong, Welfare, Modernity and the Weimar State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Dickinson, Edward Ross, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Harvey, Elizabeth, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Canning, ‘Claiming Citizenship’.