On 18 August 1896—more than a quarter century after Imperial Germany was formally unified—the Reichstag finally legislated its first Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch). The code, which took effect in 1900, left little doubt that the gender order in twentieth-century Germany was based not just on a distinction but on a hierarchy between the sexes. While this hierarchy was endorsed in the political, economic, and legal arenas, the Civil Code’s paragraphs on marriage law were particularly revealing:
§1354. The husband is responsible for decisions in all matters affecting joint married life; in particular, he determines where the family is to reside.
The wife is not obliged to follow her husband’s decision if it represents an abuse of his rights.
§1355. The wife assumes her husband’s family name.
§1356. The stipulations of §1354 notwithstanding, the wife has the right and duty to manage the common household.
The wife is obliged to perform tasks in the household and the husband’s business to the extent that such activities are customary in the circumstances in which the spouses live.
§1357. The wife is authorized to take care of the husband’s business affairs and to represent him within her domestic sphere of activity. Legal transactions that she undertakes within this sphere of activity will be considered as undertaken in her husband’s name unless circumstances demand otherwise.
The husband can restrict or exclude his wife from exercising these rights. If the restriction or exclusion represents an abuse of the man’s rights, it can be lifted upon the wife’s petition to the guardianship court.
Final passage of the German Civil Code in 1896 concluded more than two decades of lively public debate, which included the vigorous protests and agitation of the German women’s movement. Legal codification cemented the husband’s authority to make all important decisions within marriage.1 While it was perfectly legal within this framework for spouses to choose to make joint decisions about their lives together, women had no right to equality within marriage. On this point the law was clear.
This document must be seen in its proper European and temporal contexts. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, a European-wide discussion had begun about the proper social order, which continued as industrialization transformed Germany. After 1871, the idea of the nation took centre stage as the unifying element of the newly created empire; more and more Germans also reflected on the future role of their nation state in international affairs. When we say that these twin discourses—on the construction of society and the construction of the nation—addressed and engaged ‘Germans’, one gains the impression that the term referred to the entire population. On closer scrutiny, however, women and men were assigned different roles and functions and differing significance. Men did not always appear in this debate as ‘men’, but often as essentially sexless human beings; by contrast, women were perceived primarily in terms of their gender. The equation of human beings with ‘men’ meant that women were declared a subordinate ‘second sex’.2 Political, economic, and legal reforms that had swept Europe since the Enlightenment seemed to have bypassed German gender relations.
Of course ‘women’ or even ‘Woman’ no more existed in Imperial Germany than ‘men’ or ‘Man’. Like men, women were members of a family and of distinctive social, regional, and religious groups. They belonged to different age cohorts, they sympathized with a particular political milieu (or had no interest in politics), they practised various occupations. They were single, married, widowed, or divorced. Alongside gender, all of these aspects constituted part of the concept of the ‘person’. No matter how diverse their individual identities and experiences, however, women in Imperial Germany had one thing in common: their legal, economic, and political disadvantages in comparison to men. Those disadvantages restricted their opportunities and agency in determining the course of their own lives. Whether one’s name was entered into a church or civil register under the rubric ‘male’ or ‘female’ was an all-important distinguishing characteristic for every inhabitant of the German Empire. From cradle to grave, this single characteristic divided the population into two distinct groups.
This chapter explores how gender distinctions were maintained or challenged in Imperial Germany and their ramifications. It does so by exploring the demographic changes affecting German families and women’s roles within them; women’s experience of childhood, schooling, work, leisure, and politics; organized efforts to expand women’s rights; and the varieties of anti-feminism that those efforts elicited. This analysis will demonstrate that gender distinctions inflected aspects of Imperial Germany discussed in every other chapter of this volume: the economy, class relations, religion, culture, bourgeois reform, political culture, militarism, radical nationalism, Germany’s place in the world, and the experience of ‘total war’ after 1914.
Industrialization, together with advances in medical care and hygiene, produced rapid demographic changes in Imperial Germany. Among those changes with a gender-specific quality, rising life expectancies merit attention. After centuries of female ‘excess mortality’—frequently caused by death in childbirth but also by hard work and poor nutrition, from which women suffered more than men—women now enjoyed a far greater life expectancy. While the average life expectancy of men born between 1871 and 1880 was only 35.6 years, principally because of high infant mortality, men born between 1901 and 1910 could already hope, on average, to reach the age of 44.8 years. In those same periods, the average life expectancy for women was 38.5 and 48.3, respectively.3 The life experiences of women and men were also affected by number of children, age at marriage, household income, increases or decreases in consumption, and the possibility of amassing savings. Among the business-oriented middle class (Wirtschaftsbürgertum) the average number of children per married couple fell from 4.1 to 2.8 children between 1875 and 1914. By the First World War, among the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) the average number of children had dropped further, to 2.1.4
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Germans largely agreed that the ‘Women’s Question’ had demographic roots. The spectre of ‘surplus women’ and the ‘spinster emergency’ exercised the minds of middle-class fathers, who found it increasingly difficult to find suitable husbands for their daughters.5 Population data and marriage quotas, however, offer no clear evidence for the widespread feeling in this class of the population, which persisted into the twentieth century, that it was becoming increasingly difficult to marry. In this case statistics are not particularly helpful, because the alleged undersupply of husbands was not a purely demographic problem. Lily Braun, a leader of the women’s movement at the turn of the century, understood clearly that the ‘surplus daughters of the bourgeoisie’ could not be expected to look for their future husbands among the ‘equally surplus sons of the proletariat’.6 The emphasis middle-class fathers placed on the ‘surplus’ of females and on the diminishing matrimonial chances of their daughters was ‘a clear indicator of the mood of crisis’ among this group—a mood that was not without some basis in reality.7 Indeed, in nineteenth-century Germany, certain segments of the educated middle classes, above all civil servants, had seen their incomes and living conditions decline sharply relative to those of other social classes. A significant gap had opened up between the reality and the image of middle-class comfort, which included demonstrative leisure by middle-class women in particular.
Whereas children living in the countryside and among the urban lower classes were integrated into the everyday life and work routines of adults according to their strength and abilities, among the urban middle classes, childhood became a distinct and privileged stage of life. Children were distinguished sharply from adults and provided with their own nurseries in the home. The emotional relationship between parents and children was cultivated with particular care. Thus the childhood and youth of boys and girls, considered together, varied greatly according to class. However, the increasing polarity and hierarchy of the genders shaped the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt), and thus also childhood and youth, in all strata of society. In general, fathers expected to make the important decisions concerning child-rearing, whereas mothers—together with nursemaids and governesses in well-to-do families—looked after the children’s everyday needs. Girls were prepared for their future role as housewives and mothers, whereas boys were raised with an eye to their future role as a provider (often a professional) and head of their own household. Women were not only expected to manage an orderly household and perform or supervise all the necessary tasks and child-rearing; increasingly they were also held responsible for the family’s emotional well being and social contacts. In order to support the social aspirations of their husbands, especially in the educated middle classes, wives were increasingly expected to have a well-rounded education, artistic talent, and conversational abilities. The curricula of girls’ secondary schools were gradually adapted to meet these demands.
The polarized gender model still offered plenty of room for differentness and ambivalence. Thus, upon closer scrutiny, we can see that nineteenth-century men who wished to fulfil their role in an exemplary fashion faced a wide range of expectations that were difficult to meet. They were supposed to exhibit such typically ‘manly’ qualities as ambition and decisiveness; but at the same time they were also expected to be well educated, cultivated, sensitive, passionate, elegant, and charming. At the turn of the century, with middle-class society’s fixation on hard work and efficient time management, the challenge of being a ‘whole man’ grew enormously. Educated men in particular were criticized for their tendency to become social bores because they spent all their time pursuing business careers.8 In short, gender relations and definitions of femininity and masculinity were negotiated in middle-class circles in complex ways—yet not so complex that gendered models of ‘proper’ middle-class behaviour could not be adopted by both the nobility and the lower classes.
Population increase in Imperial Germany was accompanied by an expansion of primary and secondary education. Although the state sought to limit church influence in education during the Kulturkampf, primary schools generally remained denominational. ‘Simultaneous schools’ (Simultanschulen), in which children of different religions were taught together, remained the exception until the First World War. By and large, compulsory schooling was successfully enforced. In both town and country, boys and girls alike first attended primary school at the age of six and continued thereafter for six to eight years. Especially well-to-do Germans would have liked to enforce gender separation in the primary schools, but schools often had to provide instruction to boys and girls together for reasons of cost and space. For most boys and girls, formal schooling, whether in a state or primary school or (in wealthy families) at home with private tutors, ended at age fourteen, when they were confirmed.
Higher education was reserved for a small male elite. After 1900, some 90 per cent of pupils never went beyond primary school. Of secondary school pupils, even after 1900, 66 per cent attended a so-called humanist Gymnasium, with an emphasis on the Classics. After 1900, the secondary-school leaving certificate (Abitur) that gave pupils access to university studies could also be obtained from the other secondary schools, the Oberrealschulen and the Realgymnasien. Yet classical languages, which as a rule were not taught at girls’ secondary schools, were still considered a special mark of cultivation.9 Further education for girls was available only at the ‘schools for young ladies’ (höhere Töchterschulen) reserved for the offspring of well-to-do families. Because these schools had neither uniform curricula nor textbooks and offered no final examinations, it is difficult to make broad statements about them. Surviving curricula show, however, that the focus was on religion, German, French and English conversation, music, drawing, and needlework. That was the pinnacle of schooling for girls. If no suitable husband could be found after this ‘higher education’, which offered no formal qualification certificate, even intelligent young women full of intellectual curiosity found themselves suspended in ‘temporary retirement’.
Important milestones in the reform of girls’ education included the ‘Yellow Brochure’ on girls’ school reform published by Helene Lange in 1887, the academic secondary school courses for girls she set up in Berlin in 1893, and the girls’ Gymnasium that Hedwig Kettler established that same year in Kassel. In a petition of 1887 to the Prussian ministry of education and the Prussian Landtag, Lange called for academic training for female teachers and more influence for them in the public girls’ secondary schools. She used gender difference as an argument, claiming that only women were in a position to train growing girls in ‘true femininity’.10 In May 1894 a ministerial decree established the first curriculum for girls’ secondary schools and introduced academic examinations for female teachers. A further breakthrough came when a ministerial commission on the reform of girls’ secondary education convened in 1906. It established a ten-year school for girls, known as a Lyzeum. By contrast, the women’s movement’s call for female teachers for girls was only partially heeded. As girls’ schools increasingly resembled boys’ schools, posts in these schools became more attractive for male teachers. The (male) teachers’ associations successfully lobbied Prussian administrators to ensure that both private and state schools for girls had to hire nearly as many men as women.
Meanwhile, a series of reforms provided women with access to German universities in all states of the empire, from 1899/1900 (in Baden) to 1909 (in Mecklenburg-Schwerin). Women’s university studies developed quickly: in 1908/9, 1,132 women were enrolled in German universities, rising to 4,128, or 6 per cent of students, in 1914. This first generation of women students were generally older than their male counterparts. Most came from educated homes. And 87 per cent studied in the philosophical faculties—mainly because after 1909 women in Prussia could enrol in a philosophical faculty after successfully completing a teacher-training course and two years of work experience at a girls’ secondary school but without the Abitur. After six semesters of study they could then take the state teachers examination.11 This so-called fourth path to university offered young women an opportunity to study that could be viewed as a wise investment for future wives and mothers, even if they taught only for a short time. Because families with limited financial resources preferred to invest in the training of sons, they often rejected their daughters’ desire to study with the argument that it was a poor investment: women were expected to marry, not earn an income. Any ambitions women might have had to complete their Habilitation—a sort of second doctoral dissertation required to become a university professor—were nipped in the bud. Applications from female candidates were simply refused. Many professional examinations, such as the state examination for judges, were also closed to women until after 1918.
Overall, the expansion of Germany’s educational system was based on ambivalent motives and produced ambiguous results. Women were incorporated into the system of secondary and academic education, which offered them certain career opportunities. Yet they were accorded a separate role. In the long term the male-orientated system of academic disciplines cemented discrimination against women.
Women’s paid employment rose rapidly in Imperial Germany. However, in 1895 only 6.5 million women were employed, compared to 15.5 million men; thus women made up about 25 per cent of the workforce. Contemporary economists explained this great difference between male and female employment by arguing that women’s occupations did not mean as much to them, since a woman’s ‘true calling’ in life remained her role as ‘wife, mother, and housewife’. Yet the occupational censuses of 1895 and 1907 left one form of work invisible: women’s household and family work. The most basic reality of life for nearly all women, whatever their age, was work. But those who did not earn money were not considered to be working, and census takers used highly restrictive criteria for including women in the rubric ‘helping family members’. For that reason, the tasks of maidservants, cooks, laundresses, and governesses were not considered work if they were performed by an unpaid wife, daughter, sister, or other female family member. This practice existed despite the fact that in the final pre-war years some 44 per cent of family income in the countryside was earned by those working within the household economy. Even if this figure does not reflect the exact proportion of housewives’ income, it shows that these ‘non-employed’ women contributed substantially to supporting the family.12 This disregard for household and family work had crucial ramifications for the way women’s roles within the family and marriage were assessed. Women’s economic inferiority was cemented with the ‘discovery’ and subsequent devaluation of housework, for which payment was rarely demanded because it was ‘priceless’.13
Women worked not just in private households, but in all sectors of the economy: in agriculture, industry, and services. Although the importance of German agriculture steadily waned after 1875, Imperial Germany continued to exhibit the traits of an agrarian state. Female employment in agriculture fell between 1882 and 1907 from 61.4 to 49.8 per cent.14 One thing remained constant: with few exceptions, women always earned less than men. The gap between male and female wages was widened by urbanization. Whereas the male-to-female ratio of average local daily wages in the countryside was 1.53, in the large cities it was 1.60.15
Urban society proved to be a trendsetter in the gender-specific development of the labour market. Many young, unmarried rural women moved to the cities to work as domestic servants, where they performed the household tasks necessary to uphold the middle-class family ideal that relieved the housewife of everyday chores. Domestic servants worked under a wide variety of conditions but usually without fixed working hours, for low wages, and sometimes under the threat of sexual exploitation.16 Understandably, jobs in factories, commercial offices, and retail stores became far more attractive to women. The rate of female employment in domestic service fell between 1882 and 1907 from 18 to 16.1 per cent, whereas it rose during the same period from 12.8 to 19.5 per cent in the industry and trade sector and from 7.7 to 14.6 per cent in the tertiary sector.17
Among the working classes, women and children generally performed the same work in the factories as they did in cottage industries and in manufacturing. Even in these new workplaces a gender-specific division of labour was established. This division varied greatly by region and size of locality, but it assigned women and children subordinate and poorly paid jobs. Female factory workers were viewed with particular suspicion by their middle-class contemporaries, who saw the gender order threatened by women working together with men outside the home. Male workers also resented women’s ‘dirty competition’ because factory owners deliberately made use of female and child labour to depress wages.18 White-collar employment became an attractive occupational field for women. One official gazette registered a total of 312,924 female salaried employees in Germany in 1907. Women were increasingly employed in offices, retail shops, department stores, and telegraph and telephone services. There they operated new machines while male salaried employees secured managerial and supervisory posts. As soon as they were taken over by women, previously highly valued jobs at the till or adding machines were devalued as ‘mechanical tasks’. Women were often accused by their male colleagues of seeking employment merely to escape domestic boredom.
For women of the educated middle classes, ‘socially suitable’ occupations developed slowly. ‘Typically’ female professions that resembled women’s traditional tasks within the family were the first to gain acceptance. The male teachers’ lobby was able to enforce the formalization and professionalization of teaching careers, and in 1907 achieved a parity of rank with judges and higher civil servants for secondary school masters; yet schoolmistresses, though they had gained in qualifications since the mid-nineteenth century, found that their education was still deemed inferior to that of men. To become a schoolmistress primarily meant to be an assistant to a male teacher.19 Here, too, women earned less than their male colleagues and taught in the elementary schools and the overwhelmingly private girls’ schools. In the few state or municipal schools for young ladies, they taught almost exclusively in the lower forms and were not permitted to teach as many hours as male teachers. In Prussia, they were not offered permanent employment in the civil service until 1863. If they married, they were dismissed and lost their claim to a pension. A key difference between male and female work on all levels was the generally held view that women’s paid employment could only be a temporary solution on the way to marriage—the goal of any successful female career. Because this attitude influenced the upbringing and education of girls and boys, employment generally played a subordinate role in women’s identity. In contrast to men, women apparently had no problem adjusting their performance at work to the needs of their family and their specific life phase.20
The nuclear family was the accepted norm in Imperial Germany, the ‘natural’ objective of a successful life. Middle-class men married late, on average at the age of thirty, because of their long period of education and training, whereas women tended to marry by their mid-twenties.21 Although financial considerations and family connections continued to influence matrimonial behaviour, love matches became increasingly important. All men and women faced strong pressures to find a suitable spouse. But not all of them could or wished to choose marriage as a way of life. While women usually felt deficient if they could not follow their ‘natural calling’ as wives and mothers, unmarried men could at least still fulfil part of the role assigned them in their professional lives.22
Where one resided and for how long; the size and furnishings and number of occupants of one’s home; how much rent one paid—all these factors presented Germans with widely varying opportunities for comfort, happiness, health, and a better future for their children. In the cities most people lived in rented accommodation. Working-class families generally had only one or two rooms: in 1905 such flats represented more than half of all dwellings in the large cities. These small flats were often dark and unhygienic. Sinking incomes, rising rents, and the necessity of reaching work-places and schools by public transport meant that poor families had to move house often.23
Even in well-to-do circles, few people in German society lived alone. The unmarried tended to live with their relations, and women frequently kept house for their unmarried brothers or fathers. Many employed women lived with their sisters, aunts, or female friends. Well-off, politically active middle-class women could live an alternative lifestyle largely independent of their families of origin. Among those who adopted same-sex life and work partnerships were Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann, and Ika Freudenberg and Sophie Goudstikker. The middle-class lifestyle and the accompanying notions of sexual morality were so dominant that any serious deviations frequently attracted the attention of the authorities. Many working-class families not only had several children, but also took in lodgers. These were mainly younger workers who had not yet settled down, and some 25 per cent of them were female. They rented beds from families, often only for certain hours of the day if they worked shifts. Under such living conditions, flats offered no privacy. Whereas men could flee to the pub, women had to do the housework in their crowded homes. In order to play, children took refuge in stairwells, courtyards, and the street.
The degree to which the middle classes sought to impose their own values on the working classes is evident in the number and variety of solutions proposed to relieve the distress of alcoholics, widows, orphans, infants, ‘idlers’, and those cohabitating in overcrowded dwellings. Although the German Criminal Code of 1871 contained no penalties for cohabitation between a man and a woman in a domestic relationship similar to marriage, the pressure for people living together to legalize their situation was immense. The individual states declared cohabitation to be punishable if it caused a ‘public nuisance’, offering ample opportunities for denunciation. Local clergymen, neighbours, children, parents who feared for their inheritance, or vengeful abandoned spouses only had to report the couple in order to show that they constituted a public nuisance. The authorities reacted with large fines and prison sentences for cohabiting couples.
The way Germans experienced the final phase of life also varied according to gender, marital status, occupation, and income.24 The gender-specific dimensions of inequality became sharper in old age. Women in Imperial Germany not only had a higher life expectancy, but they were also incomparably more likely than men to live in poverty.25 Although the chances of remarriage rose overall, widowers had far better prospects because they were usually in a more stable financial position. Particularly when the father had died young and left behind several children, drawing the severely reduced widow’s pension usually meant a dramatic worsening of what might already have been a precarious financial situation. For widows who did not inherit money or remarry quickly, the death of a husband usually meant reduced circumstances and, frequently, social isolation or decline.26 The situation of widows made it abundantly clear that even a good marriage did not necessarily provide women with adequate security.
Death and dying were further privatized and enwrapped within the family in Imperial Germany. Ideally, one would die at home, surrounded by one’s family.27 That men and women were unequal even in death is evident not least from an imperial regulation on cremation. Before cremation, women’s corpses had to be checked to see whether they were virgins. The state sought to control women’s bodies and morality even in death. Only in 1912, after fierce protests from the women’s movement, did the Prussian ministry of the interior dispense with this practice.28
After 1871 some Germans yearned for the ‘good old days’ of recognized authorities and apparent certainties; others were dazzled by the possibilities of change and acquired an unlimited faith in progress. These attitudes towards change affected women and men differently. For example, men of all classes over the age of twenty-five benefited from the Reichstag’s direct, secret, equal, and ‘universal’ suffrage—unless they received poor relief. Women, however, were entirely excluded from this ‘universal’ suffrage. In many areas of the empire, it was not until 1908 that women could join the (male) political parties that offered access to ‘high politics’. Until that point, women’s options for participation were mainly in self-help organizations, auxiliary work for the parties, and local charitable and church associations. That women were interested in party work soon became evident. For example, whereas overall membership in the Social Democratic Party rose from 633,309 to 1,085,905 between 1908 and 1914, the increase in the number of female SPD members was even more explosive, rising from 29,458 to 174,754 during the same period.29
In Imperial Germany, the mainstream women’s movement defined itself largely as a women’s education movement.30 In so doing, it distanced itself both from the women active in the labour movement and from a wing within its own ranks that had grown stronger since the turn of the century, which placed greater emphasis on employment and political equality than on expanding women’s education. Women activists in the labour movement had frequently gained their training in the educational projects of the ‘moderate’ women’s movement, and afterwards they tried to develop educational concepts for women workers. They generally focused their efforts on the working women’s educational associations; from the outset they sought to help women cope with the ‘double burden’ of family and workplace.
Members of the women’s movement sought evolutionary rather than revolutionary social change. The foundation in 1865 of the General German Women’s Association by Louise Otto-Peters and Auguste Schmidt marked the inception of the organized women’s movement. This was the German women’s movement’s first supraregional organization. In Otto-Peters’s estimate it already had close to 12,000 women members by 1877. It described its aims as ‘increasing the education of the female sex and freeing women’s work of all the obstacles that hinder its development’. Louise Otto-Peters had championed the democratic movement and political equality as an author of social critical prose and a journalist before and during the Revolution of 1848–49. She felt a special commitment to the working class, particularly women workers, throughout her life. Yet efforts to integrate women workers into the movement as active agents of change, rather than mere targets of relief programmes and other charitable activities, proved difficult. When German women founded an umbrella organization, the League of German Women’s Associations, in 1894, they did not invite the Social Democratic women’s associations to join. Mutual recriminations arose in the wake of this decision, but they obscured the fact that middle-class women concentrated mainly on their own problems, while politically interested working-class women expected more support from Social Democracy. The league was somewhat inflexible because its programme stipulated that it would promote only aims that enjoyed the support of all member associations; it nevertheless conveyed a sense of collective consciousness and solidarity to its activists through national conferences, publications, and committee work.
At first scarcely noticed by the media, by 1900 the lobbying efforts and activities of these women’s associations met with a positive response, especially among the liberal press. The membership of the league rose from 70,000 in 1900 to some 200,000 in 1908. By 1918 the official figure had grown to 328,000. The growth of this umbrella organization could not obscure the fact that the upswing was dominated by professional and welfare organizations. Meanwhile, such ‘general’ associations were forced onto the defensive by larger professional and trade associations that had more clearly defined goals and did not feel bound by political neutrality.
The growth of the women’s organizations also intensified their differences. After the turn of the century, new divisions appeared within the League of German Women’s Associations and its affiliates. Under Gertrud Bäumer as chairwoman (1910–19) the League clung to the unity of the women’s movement and invoked the dogma of impartiality, but it also tried to accommodate conservatives opposed in principle to women’s emancipation. In so doing, Bäumer supported a trend that had begun in 1908 with the admission to the league of the German Protestant Women’s League. The latter league’s founding can be viewed to a certain extent as a conservative reaction to the separate organization of ‘radical’ women that same year (1899) in the Federation of Progressive Women’s Associations. The German Protestant Women’s League, which openly lobbied against women’s suffrage, was accorded special conditions, including a large number of votes in the general meetings of the League of German Women’s Associations. This initially considerably strengthened the position of the ‘moderates’.31 May 1915 saw the establishment of the Federation of German Housewives’ Associations, later known as the Imperial Federation of German Housewives’ Associations. This founding increased the reservoir of members with no interest in women’s emancipation but a deep dedication to traditional gender roles. The entry of the housewives’ associations into the League of German Women’s Associations developed a dynamic of its own, including resistance to women’s suffrage, which the league’s leadership proved powerless to halt. Thus Bäumer’s idea that housewives could be won over to the cause of women’s emancipation proved illusory.
The League of German Women’s Associations saw itself as an interdenominational organization. Regarding the religious affiliation of its members as a private matter, it was extremely sceptical of separate confessional women’s organizations. Nevertheless, after Protestant women had shown the way, in 1903 the Catholic Women’s Association of Germany was established, followed in 1904 by the Jewish Women’s Association.32 These two confessional women’s associations also sought to develop their ideas about women’s proper position in society and marriage by taking into account religious doctrine. The Jewish Women’s Association reportedly enrolled about one-quarter of all Jewish women over thirty years of age. It was particularly active in lobbying organizations within the Jewish community to endorse female suffrage.
As these women’s organizations grew in size after the turn of the century, as they sponsored more events, and as they published more printed material to sway public opinion, their opponents also found it necessary to organize. The German League to Combat Women’s Emancipation was founded in 1912. This organization aimed to secure male dominance on all levels. It rejected women’s suffrage, wanted women to work only in typical female occupations, and opposed equal educational opportunities for women (not to mention co-educational programmes). Its members were recruited largely from aristocratic and upper-middle-class circles, including the new class of salaried employees and teachers. Female members—only about one-quarter of all members—were generally already organized in German nationalist, antisemitic, and völkisch associations. They were already filling traditional roles as wives and mothers and had little interest in changing this situation: raising their daughters to be future wives and mothers, and finding them suitable marriage partners, attracted most of their energy.
There was nonetheless one common denominator in the programmes and activities of both groups: explicit reference to the nation and women’s national duties. The advocates of emancipation deployed nationalism as an emancipatory strategy with such success that the anti-feminists regarded this apparently ‘moderate’ wing of the women’s movement as their main adversary. Because they were more socially acceptable, these women represented a far greater challenge to the opponents of women’s emancipation than the ‘radicals’ did. The anti-feminists stirred up the fears of Germans who placed little trust in women’s new opportunities and who expected that higher education or sport would make girls unfeminine, ruining their chances of marriage. Educated women were often ridiculed and denigrated as ‘bluestockings’ and ‘old maids’ who had missed their ‘natural calling in life’. The anti-feminist defamation campaigns frequently adopted arguments used against socialists. For example, they referred to advocates of emancipation as the ‘enemy within’ and stressed their international connections (thus implying that they lacked national commitment).
As German nationalism grew more strident, questions of citizenship rights and masculinity became closely intertwined. For example, women’s advocates noted that early in the nineteenth century, during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, the ‘second half of the nation’ had joined with ‘men at arms’ to defend the nation. Other occasions were cited when German women had participated in military conflicts, revolutions, and violent uprisings. Yet these visible eruptions of ‘female nationalism’ were not unique to one sex: they were part of German society’s larger process of national self-discovery. It was natural that women’s place in the nation should be contested as nationalism changed its form and function after 1871 and gripped wider circles of society.
Recent research has addressed the themes of nationalism and regional identity, but it has (at best) treated gender issues only in passing.33 This exclusion of women is closely related to a definition of politics that equates it with the activities of governments, parliaments, and parties. These arenas of ‘high politics’ were exclusively reserved for men. Only the Reich Association Law of 19 April 1908 established uniform national regulations that superseded various existing state laws and allowed women to join (men’s) political parties and participate in political meetings. Before 1908, Germany’s political parties—with the notable exception of the SPD—had not seriously addressed women’s political equality. But historians have downplayed the fact that, from the 1860s onwards, mainly middle-class women had founded separate organizations, parallel to the male associations and parties, which presented the parliaments and parties with numerous petitions and educational material. Over time these activities and publications contributed directly to nationalist discourse. After 1900 the League of German Women’s Associations and its affiliated groups supported plans to build a battle fleet and the acquisition of colonies. Other women’s auxiliary organizations included the German Women’s Association for the Eastern Marches (founded in 1895); the Naval League of German Women (1905); and the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society (1907). These women activists were determined to make their own specifically female contribution to the nationalist cause.34
For both women and men, the fascination of nationalism as a concept seems to have been its openness to different possible futures for Germany. Even the ‘purely charitable activities’ allocated to women, such as nursing the sick and wounded, were regarded as the counterpart to male military service; again, proponents of such activities cast their gaze back to the Wars of Liberation around 1813. While some women sought to define or cement the traditional division of labour with their ‘genuinely feminine activities’, others used nationalism as an emancipatory ideology, hoping that it would bring women better educational opportunities, wider choice among professional and other occupations, and real political influence—even, for some, full political equality. Such equality lay far in the distance, however, when the ‘Jubilee Year 1913’ was celebrated with national pathos and a mingling of masculine-military tropes. When the First World War broke out soon thereafter, the League of German Women’s Associations regarded it as the great test of the German people in general and of women in particular. The initial euphoria at the outbreak of war appears to have been equally strong among women and men. Like Germany’s male cultural elites, middle-and upper-class German women hoped the war would revitalize German culture.
In order to concentrate and organize all female energies on the home front, even before mobilization the League of German Women’s Associations proposed to the Prussian ministry of the interior that the National Women’s Service should be established. In contrast to the Red Cross, which was responsible for nursing in the field, the National Women’s Service sought to gather all available women for educational work, organizing the food supply, war relief, and job placement. Although it was not organized along the same lines everywhere—some sixty local initiatives can be counted—and although tensions arose among different factions, this service was successfully launched on a national basis. A network of aid offices, staffed by well-trained women, supplemented the work of public relief agencies and were integrated with institutions of public administration.
Despite women’s strong commitment to the war effort, they were not ‘conscripted’ by the Auxiliary Service Law of 6 December 1916. This law was intended by the Army Supreme Command to mobilize and concentrate all forces behind the war as part of the Hindenburg Programme. Women’s efforts remained voluntary. Nevertheless, in December 1916, a women’s employment office was attached to the government department charged with enforcing the Auxiliary Service Law. In the autumn of 1917, when reformers inside and outside parliament proposed new ways of ‘drawing upon all the energies of the entire people to participate joyfully in the state’, the League of German Women’s Associations called for women’s inclusion in these plans. Despite the hardships of war, in November 1917 the League unequivocally demanded women’s suffrage, which the Council of People’s Commissars then introduced immediately after the revolution of 9 November 1918.
Historians continue to debate what ultimately led to the introduction of women’s suffrage at that time. The Council of People’s Commissars may have been influenced by the general expectation that the female vote would particularly benefit the two leftist parties. But precisely this outcome was deeply feared by many others both within government and outside it. The historian Ute Rosen-busch has pointed out that, even at this point, German society was temperamentally unprepared for women’s suffrage. For many Germans it represented such a great threat to public order that they were unwilling to endorse it for municipal elections, let alone in the national arena. In Rosenbusch’s view, even women’s work on behalf of the war effort had not changed public opinion on this point.35 Historians such as Gisela Bock, by contrast, postulate that the activities of the women’s movement had paved the way for the granting of women’s suffrage.36 Women’s suffrage revolutionized neither society nor the gender order, as would soon become evident. It did, however, provide a foundation for women to gain equal rights in society and promised them opportunities for influence in the Weimar Republic’s new parliamentary institutions.
Imperial German society was marked by numerous forms of inclusion and exclusion. Like ethnic minorities, women had the legal and economic status of social outsiders. At the same time, women could not possibly have enjoyed greater ‘insider’ status among family, class, and confessional groups. How women should and could be integrated as a group defined by their common gender, and how they could also be granted political and legal equality as individuals, remained controversial in all segments of society. Certainly, gender norms were prescriptive: they did not always conform to the everyday experience of men and women. They were also porous: under certain conditions, women could overstep the boundaries imposed on them. Emphasizing gender difference, the women’s movement successfully fought for women’s right to personal growth and individual autonomy.37 But it was an uphill battle. Despite the diversity of women’s actual circumstances and scope of action in Imperial Germany, they were constantly reminded that their chief purpose in life was to be a (house-)wife and mother.
Such reminders took literal form in lithographs that depicted the so-called ‘life staircase’ (Lebenstreppe) that women and men were expected to ascend over their lifetimes. These prints, immensely popular and widely distributed, wholly reduced a woman to her role within the family. They suggested that she would reach the pinnacle of her life, its turning point, at the age of thirty when she became a mother. The ‘life staircase’ for a man, by contrast, de-emphasized his family role; in these prints he was surrounded instead by the symbols of his professional career. The man reached the high point of his life ten years later than the woman; indeed, most versions showed him at his peak at age fifty. These depictions were of course schematic and oversimplified. However, their popular appeal suggests how deeply gender roles were inscribed on Imperial Germany’s girls, boys, women, and men.38