Mothers of the Nation

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Mothers of the Nation

Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany

Raffael Scheck

Oxford • New York

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Dedicated to Anselm and Adelia Scheck

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First published in 2004 by

Berg

Editorial offices:

First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK

838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003–4812, USA

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form

or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scheck, Raffael, 1960–

Mothers of the nation : right-wing women in Weimar Germany/Raffael

Scheck. ––1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-85973-707-2 –– ISBN 1-85973-712-9 (paper)
1. Women in politics––Germany––History––20th century. 2. Deutsche

Volkspartei (Germany) 3. Deutschnationale Volkspartei. 4. Germany––Politics
and government––1918–1933. 5. National socialism and women. I. Title.

HQ1236.5.G3S33 2004
320'.082'0943––dc22

2003019625

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 707 2 (Cloth)

1 85973 712 9 (Paper)

Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks

Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn.

www.bergpublishers.com

01 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:39 pm Page vi

Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Women’s Entry into Party Politics

Hostility to Women in Politics

Women’s Rights and Housewives’ Power

Family, Youth, and Morality

Small Rentiers

107

Foreign Policy

117

Women’s Local Politics

137

The Nazi Challenge

157

Conclusion

183

Reference Sources

187

Bibliography

191

Index

225

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Preface

This book examines the work of women in the German People’s Party (DVP) and
the German National People’s Party (DNVP) – parties that covered the range
from the moderate to the radical right of the Weimar Republic. Unlike the Nazi
Party (NSDAP), these parties offered women seats in the national and local
parliaments and in the party leadership. The book introduces the leading women
from these two parties and traces the organizational structures that they created
on the national and local level. It further analyzes their policies in fields ranging
from social welfare to foreign policy and ends with a discussion of their reaction
to the dramatic growth of the Nazi Party after 1930. The central theme is the
women politicians’ attitude toward interest politics. Mothers of the Nation shows
that right-wing women, in keeping with the tradition of the German bourgeois
women’s movement, refused to stand up primarily for women’s interests and
instead invoked the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), a vision of
harmony and cooperation of the groups involved in production. They believed
that German women should use their newly won political rights to strengthen the
Volksgemeinschaft by reconciling the divided nation and by infusing it with a
higher morality. This stance helped right-wing women to achieve impressive
success in mobilizing conservative women, but it did not help them prevent the
fragmentation along economic-interest lines that ultimately rendered their
parties defenseless against the Nazis. Most of the conservative women mobilized
by the DVP and DNVP (over a third of the women’s vote by 1924) sooner or later
supported the Nazis.

Until recently the study of women in the two parties that form the subject of

this book had received little attention.

The works by Andrea Süchting-Hänger

and Kirsten Heinsohn have begun to fill this gap, however, at least for the
German Nationalist People’s Party and some organizations associated with it.

Julia Sneeringer’s thorough analysis of party propaganda directed toward
women, although not limited to parties of the right, also offers important
insights.

Johanna Gehmacher’s book on the Austrian Großdeutsche Volkspartei

has enriched the field with a study of a party that shows many similarities to the
two parties discussed in this book, particularly the DNVP.

Greater breadth has

been added to the field by studies of organizations that cooperated with the DVP
and DNVP. This is true for the housewives’, colonial, anti-feminist, and
Evangelical movements.

Biographies of some right-wing women, such as Käthe

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Schirmacher, Magdalene von Tiling, and Guida Diehl, have deepened our knowl-
edge, as has the study on women in German parliaments by Heide-Marie
Lauterer.

Yet, there are still major gaps in the picture of right-wing women

during the Weimar Republic, particularly with respect to women in the DVP.

The present study focuses on politics within the parties. Its most valuable

primary sources are party newspapers or newsletters. They offer articles and
speeches by the women politicians as well as a treasure trove of information on
the parties themselves, on associated women’s organizations, and on parliamen-
tary proceedings. Private papers have been consulted wherever possible so as to
put public pronouncements into a more critical context, and various collections
of documents from the parties and from women’s organizations have further
broadened the documentary base. The divisions of the Staatsbibliothek
Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin hold the richest deposits, including party news-
papers, pamphlets, and books by the women from the two parties. Among the
private-paper collections, the holdings of the Schirmacher Nachlass at the
University Library in Rostock, the Katharina (Kardorff-) von Oheimb and
Eduard Dingeldey papers at the Federal Archives in Koblenz, and the Paula
Mueller-Otfried papers at the archive of the German Evangelical Women’s
League were the most useful.

The structure of the book stresses first the ideological and organizational

parameters of women’s work within the two parties. The first chapter introduces
the context, background, and mind-set of the main players. The next chapter
delineates the structure of women’s politics in the two parties, and the third
chapter is devoted to the hostility women felt from men and women in their
parties and looks at their reaction to it. Next, the book turns to the politics of
right-wing women. The following three chapters are organized thematically
rather than chronologically because many legislative issues were debated repeat-
edly from 1919 to 1930. Chapter Four focuses on women’s issues, contrasting the
DVP and DNVP women’s rather limited engagement for women’s rights with
their receptiveness to housewives’ concerns. Chapter Five deals with legislative
work in social and cultural policy – areas in which nobody questioned the
expertise of women. The small-rentiers topic, covered in Chapter Six, belongs to
the same general field but warrants separate treatment because of its complexity.
Chapter Seven shifts the focus away from parliamentary politics to the women’s
stands on foreign policy, the one area that divided the two parties more than
anything else for much of the 1920s. Chapter Eight concludes the section on
women’s policies with a look at right-wing women’s activity at the local level to
assess how national and local politics interacted. The final chapter deals with the
changed parameters of politics in the last years of the Weimar Republic and the
right-wing women’s reaction to the rise of the Nazis. The conclusion then evalu-
ates the effect of the female politicians’ activities and puts the results of this

Preface

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study into the context of broader questions regarding women in politics and
Germany’s political culture. The focus throughout the book is on the leading
women who sat in the national parliament (Reichstag) and some state diets as
well as on those women who were important in the women’s committees within
the parties. Wherever appropriate, connections will be shown to the men in the
party, particularly the leaders, and to the rank-and-file women, who are the
subject of Chapter Eight. The analysis, when involving Germany’s federal states,
will concentrate most often on Prussia, which was important not only by virtue
of its size (more than 60 percent of the German population and territory) but also
because it included most of the strongholds of the two parties.

The present study would have been inconceivable without the generosity of

archivists, librarians, research assistants, and colleagues. The staff at the
German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz and Berlin were particu-
larly helpful. In Koblenz, Mr. Alois Fischer helped me to go through the parties’
propaganda materials, and Mr. Gregor Pickro even sent me copies of the
archive’s research guides and some documents. Members of the Landesarchiv
Berlin, particularly Frau Schumacher, as well as their colleagues at the
Geheimes Staatsarchiv in Berlin were resourceful over many years. I am also
grateful for the hospitality and advice of members of the archives of the German
Evangelical Women’s League in Hanover and of the Catholic Women’s League
of Germany in Cologne. Ulrike Gebhardt in Rostock and Kerstin Wolff of the
Archive of the German Women’s Movement in Kassel generously shared their
knowledge of the field, and the staff of the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer
Kulturbesitz in Berlin, particularly in the old building Unter den Linden,
worked tirelessly to support my research. I still feel bad about my loud Hurrah
that echoed through the reading rooms of this pristine building when one staff
member found a volume that closed a two-year gap in my research materials
(the volume had been listed as missing in the catalog). I am grateful to Amy
Bongard for having come to Berlin with me during my sabbatical in 1997/98,
and I thank the German state for its generous Erziehungsgeld that helped make
our stay affordable. Peter Scheck (my brother), Dora Wache (my step-grand-
mother), my parents, and my friends Stephan March, Elke Krüger, and Rudi
Thurner helped to make my time in Berlin one of the happiest of my life. For
twenty years, the friendship of Stephan Scharfenberger and Marco Guerini in
Zurich has been a source of support and humorous inspiration.

At Colby College, several research assistants performed much appreciated

work: Amalie Gosine, Jody Beznoska, Yuliya Komska, Kerry West, Rebecca
Downing, Gregory Robinson, Camille Dugan, and Alexis Frobin (in chronolog-
ical order). Yuliya Komska established a biographical database on right-wing
women’s politicians, Kerry West counted and tabulated the members of a local
DNVP branch, Gregory Robinson did much useful work on an earlier version of

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Preface

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the text, and Alexis Frobin helped getting the last version of the manuscript ready
for the publisher. The interlibrary loan librarians at Colby have done their utmost
to track down some obscure texts for me. My prolific and friendly colleagues in
the History Department (Peter Ditmanson, Ben Fallaw, Paul Josephson,
Elizabeth Leonard, Howard Lupovitch, Richard “Pete” Moss, Larissa Taylor, Jim
Webb, and Robert Weisbrot), as well as the secretaries Sarah Ward and Dianne
LaBreck, graciously put up with me as department chair and have created a
supportive work atmosphere that has helped me to keep up my spirits. The
funding from the Social Science Division of Colby College was critical to this
project, as was the generously funded sabbatical.

Input from colleagues has much improved the manuscript. Subscribers to the

electronic discussion list H-GERMAN responded to my inquiries about small
rentiers and the legal ramifications of alcohol abuse in Germany. In Berlin, Karin
Hausen and the members of the colloquium on gender history at the Technische
Universität Berlin provided much appreciated criticism, as did Angelika Schaser
who also let me borrow many books from her rich private library. Nancy Reagin
commented on the chapter on women’s issues and housewives’ power. Ute
Planert generously shared her ideas on women and nationalism with me. Eva
Schoeck-Quinteros and Christiane Streubel allowed me to present parts of the
present work at a conference on women and nationalism at the University of
Bremen in 1999 and provided important feedback. Julia Sneeringer shared with
me her insights on DNVP propaganda, and Larry E. Jones on many occasions
helped me with his expertise on Weimar politics. Elizabeth Leonard, Kirsten
Heinsohn, Christiane Streubel, and Andrea Süchting-Hänger read the entire
manuscript and made many useful comments. A reputed historian of women in
the American Civil War and dear friend, Elizabeth Leonard used her great insight
and stylistic experience to help me enhance the book’s structure and eliminate
Germanisms. I also wish to thank professors Josef Mooser, Regina Wecker, and
Peter Fritzsche for evaluating the manuscript as part of a Habilitation procedure
at the University of Basel. Several anonymous manuscript reviewers carefully
read the manuscript and provided helpful critique. I particularly want to thank
my editor Kathleen May and Ken Bruce at Berg; they have been wonderful
examples of professionalism and expediency. Finally, I thank my children,
Anselm (8 years old) and Adelia (6), for putting up with a messy house as I was
finishing this book and, most of all, for understanding that some professional
commitments, including the work on this book, have occasionally prevented me
from spending the entire day playing with them.

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Preface

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Notes

1. In an article from 1990, Helen Boak observed: “Women’s participation in the

Catholic, conservative and liberal parties and these parties’ attitudes to their
female members have not been investigated.” (Helen Boak, “Women in
Weimar Politics.” European History Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1990): 369–99).
There is now good work on the Democratic Party: Angelika Schaser, Helene
Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne,
Vienna, Weimar: Boehlau Verlag, 2000), and Schaser, “Bürgerliche Frauen
auf dem Weg in die linksliberalen Parteien (1908–1933).” Historische
Zeitschrift 263, no. 3 (1996): 641–80.

2. Andrea Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”: Nationales

Engagement und politisches Handeln konservativer Frauenorganisationen
1900 bis 1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002); Kirsten Heinsohn, “Im Dienste
der deutschen Volksgemeinschaft: Die ‘Frauenfrage’ und konservative
Parteien vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation,
Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der
Moderne. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000. See also Raffael
Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the Early
Weimar Republic.” German History 15, no. 1 (1997): 34–55; Scheck,
“Women Against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female
Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic.” German Studies Review
22 (1999): 21–42; Scheck, “Zwischen Volksgemeinschaft und Frauenrechten:
Das Verhältnis rechtsbürgerlicher Politikerinnen zur NSDAP 1930–33.” In
Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegungen und
Nationalismus in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus,
2000; Scheck, “Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of Female Politicians
in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP).” Journal of Contemporary
History 36, no. 4 (2001): 547–60; and Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi
Right during the Weimar Republic: The Case of the German Nationalist
People’s Party (DNVP).” In Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds., Right-
Wing Women Across the Globe. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

3. Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar

Germany (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
2002).

4. Johanna Gehmacher, Völkische Frauenbewegung: Deutschnationale und

nationalsozialistische Geschlechterpolitik in Österreich (Vienna: Docker,
1998).

5. See the works by Nancy Reagin and Renate Bridenthal on housewives cited

below. For colonial women, see Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire,
1884–1945 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), and for

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a history of anti-feminism that sheds much light on the contribution of
women to this movement, see Ute Planert, Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich:
Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen:
Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1998). For the Protestant women’s movement, see
Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Frauen in der Kirche: Evangelische Frauenarbeit
im Spannungsfeld von Kirche und Gesellschaft 1890–1945 (Düsseldorf:
Schwann, 1985); Ursula Baumann, Protestantismus und Frauenemanzipation
in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1920 (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus,
1992); and Doris Kaufmann, Frauen zwischen Aufbruch und Reaktion:
Protestantische Frauenbewegung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Munich: Piper, 1988).

6. Anke Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher: Eine deutsche Frauenrechtlerin auf dem

Wege vom Liberalismus zum konservativen Nationalismus, Frauen in
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft,
1991), pp. 26 and 79; Gury Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling:
Ordnungstheologie und Geschlechterbeziehungen – Ein Beitrag zum
Gesellschaftsverständnis des Protestantismus in der Weimarer Republik
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2001); Silvia Lange, Protestantische
Frauen auf dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus: Guida Diehls Neuland-
bewegung 1916–1935, Ergebnisse der Frauenforschung 47 (Stuttgart and
Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1998); and Heide-Marie Lauterer,
Parlamentarierinnen in Deutschland 1918/19–1949 (Königstein: Ulrike
Helmer Verlag, 2002).

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Preface

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List of Abbreviations

German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv)

BDF

Federation of German Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher
Frauenvereine)

DDP

German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei)

DEF

German Evangelical Women’s League (Deutsch-evangelischer
Frauenbund)

DFBS

German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie (Deutscher
Frauenausschuß zur Bekämpfung der Schuldlüge)

DNVP

German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei)

DVP

German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei)

IAW

International Alliance of Women

ICW

International Council of Women

LFA

Provincial Women’s Committee (Landesfrauenausschuss) of the
DNVP

NLC

Nationalliberale Correspondenz

NSDAP Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
RFA

National Women’s Committee (Reichsfrauenausschuss)

RHV

National Housewives’ League (Reichsverband der
Hausfrauenvereine)

RLB

National Rural League (Reichslandbund)

RLHV

National Rural Housewives’ League (Reichsverband der land-
wirtschaftlichen Hausfrauenvereine)

SPD

Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands)

VdL

Verhandlungen des Preußischen Landtags

VdR

Verhandlungen des Reichstags

VEFD

Federation of German Evangelical Women’s Leagues (Vereinigung
evangelischer Frauenvereine Deutschlands)

VRPT

Union of the Female Postal and Telegraph Workers (Verband der
deutschen Reichspost- und Telegraphenbeamtinnen)

WkFA

Electoral District Women’s Committee (Wahlkreisfrauenausschuss) of
the DVP

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–1–

Introduction

Nationalism has drawn women into a dialectic process. On the one hand, it has
held out the promise of participation and entitlement. Nationalism is about the
people, about men and women. Beginning with le peuple of the French
Revolution, it has pulled women into the political process and by doing so has
slowly eroded the legitimacy of law codes that discriminate against women. On
the other hand, nationalism has often reaffirmed traditional gender divisions and
hierarchies particularly through its tendency to seek confrontation with other
peoples and nationalisms. In national emergencies and wars, men have tradition-
ally gone to the front and women have been cast back into maternal and caring
roles.

This dialectic reached a crucial stage during the First World War and its

aftermath in many European countries, particularly in Germany. The First World
War helped to make the boundaries between the private and the public sphere
porous and thus to undermine the association of private with female and public
with male. This happened not only through the influx of women into industrial
and administrative jobs held by men. Given the prolonged absence of millions of
men and the steadily worsening food supply due to the British blockade, women
in Germany also became the backbone of the home front, where stability and
holding out mattered as much as they did in the murderous trenches. With their
social services, their labor, and their frugal housekeeping, women made an essen-
tial contribution to the war effort.

Right after the war, Germany’s revolutionary

socialist government recognized this contribution when it decreed the introduc-
tion of women’s suffrage on 30 November 1918. Beginning with the elections to
the National Assembly on 19 January 1919, German women were for the first
time allowed to vote and be elected in all national, state, and local elections.

Although the suffrage broadened women’s political opportunities, the

momentum for reform quickly weakened due to a reaction already visible during
the war. The war losses and the decline of the birthrate typical for modern soci-
eties heightened the role of women as bearers of children and exerted pressure
on them to reproduce in the service of the nation. This happened at a time when
individual choice was increasingly replacing religious morality in reproductive
issues and when economic constraints induced many couples to have fewer chil-
dren than their parents. Given that Germany needed a large army to rise as a great

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 1

power again, the birthrate was a national concern of the highest order.

Moreover,

the double threat from a revolutionary left and vengeful war enemies as well as
the widespread feeling of chaos and moral decline in postwar Germany made
middle-class constituencies yearn for a reweaving of the social fabric according
to Christian and conservative values. Women were essential for this project –
particularly in their role as mothers and housewives.

The women politicians of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei,

DVP) and the German Nationalist People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei,
DNVP), who are the focus of this book, generally affirmed these reactionary
goals. Yet, they also believed that the national emergency after the German defeat
in 1918 had undercut the legitimation for excluding women from a range of
political and social opportunities. Comparing the nation with a damaged ship in
a storm, the journalist Emma Stropp (DVP) argued: “One cannot hold back the
larger part of the crew and ask them to clean the deck when it is necessary to
flush the joints, hold together breaking parts, and reconstruct in a storm and
emergency all that was exhausted, old, or willfully destroyed.”

Leading right-

wing women thus established a connection between the national emergency and
an expansion of their rights by claiming that a beleaguered nation on the verge
of civil war could not survive without opening new opportunities to women with
their allegedly inborn reconciling, “maternal” qualities.

While accepting a tradi-

tional definition of women as different from men, these women activists pointed
out that the war had dissolved the borders between private and public sphere and
that women therefore needed to play a more public and political role. They
argued, in historian Doris Kaufmann’s words, that the “inner front” of the war,
guarded mostly by women, had become the “outer front” through Germany’s
military collapse and disarmament.

This book explores the main themes and activities of leading right-wing

women in Weimar Germany. It argues, first, that the priority of these women was
to mobilize the large pool of previously politically dormant conservative women,
who were told to use their new political rights to rescue the nation, unite it, and
make it strong again. Second, it shows that their self-definition and also the tools
used to achieve their mobilization goal were shaped by a belief in essential
gender differences. While reaching out to Germany’s conservative women, the
leading women of the DVP and DNVP appealed to this belief and cast it in the
powerful rhetoric of Volksgemeinschaft, a term that became notorious through its
racist meaning under the Nazi regime but was used long before the Nazis and not
always in a racial context.

Together with the majority of the German women’s movement, right-wing

women believed that men and women are essentially different.

Among the

typical qualities they ascribed to all women were compassion, social responsi-
bility, and a refined sense of morality and culture. Women, so the theory ran,

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Mothers of the Nation

02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 2

were more loyal to basic ideas than men and were good at mediating conflicts.
They had natural moral authority and greater talent for self-restraint than men,
and this made them ideally suited to preserve culture and morality. Consequently,
women would, if given more political power, increase social responsibility,
ennoble the tone of politics, rally the nation behind the most important issues,
and raise morality and culture. These maternal qualities were assumed to exist
regardless of whether a woman was a mother in a biological sense. The idea
about women’s innate maternal qualities was called “spiritual motherhood.” The
general ideology of gender difference stressing these qualities was called “mater-
nalism.”

Whereas the maternalist ideology was shared by most women active in the

political parties of the Weimar Republic, different shadings existed with respect
to its consequences for women’s roles in society. Here a more emancipatory
interpretation competed with a more conservative one. Helene Lange and
Gertrud Bäumer, the key theorists of the bourgeois German women’s movement
who both joined the German Democratic Party (DDP), represented the emanci-
patory position by claiming that maternalism did not justify a strict separation of
roles for women and men; women should be allowed to do almost everything
men did, but they would do it differently, and they would thus make the shared
work more complete than it was when carried out by men or women alone. This
position, though based on differences of the sexes, was reconcilable with equal
status for women and men.

As Anny von Kulesza, a DVP deputy in the Prussian

state diet, wrote: “To assign only certain fields to women in public and political
life would be wrong. It will not be possible for the woman to insert into political
work the necessary complement to the work of the man without applying her
judgment to all fields, as is necessary given the interconnectedness of our polit-
ical and economic life. In foreign policy, too, women should be heard in addition
to men, even if the man may continue to make the decisions.”

Many women on

the right, however, endorsed a more restrictive interpretation of maternalism by
wanting to tie women’s political work more closely to the sphere of mothers and
housewives. These women also tended to put a higher value on biological moth-
erhood and the family and thus welcomed women particularly in roles that were
compatible with being a mother and housewife – while recognizing that profes-
sional careers for women were an economic and social necessity, particularly
after the losses of the First World War had increased the majority of women in
the German population from over one million to over two million.

This inter-

pretation was probably most powerful at the grass-roots level of both parties,
whereas most of their women activists shifted between the two positions.

In Weimar politics, the leading women of the DVP and DNVP merged the

older idea of spiritual motherhood with their claims to work for the
Volksgemeinschaft. This mirrored a powerful concern of the German bourgeoisie

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Introduction

02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 3

in 1918–19 that was soon ignored by the men in the bourgeois parties while the
women and the youth groups tried to uphold it. Articulated most notably by the
bourgeoisie in its response to the German Revolution of 1918–19, the
Volksgemeinschaft idea implied hope for reconciliation between the classes,
national unity, and harmonious cooperation between the groups involved in
production – all the things that right-wing women believed they could achieve
best. Privilege and party conflict should be overcome by a focus on the common
(national) good. The Volksgemeinschaft appealed to the increasingly mystical
feeling of national unity of August 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm II claimed not to
know any parties any more and when German men of all classes marched united
into the trenches, while women hastened to organize a broad range of auxiliary
services on the home front.

After the defeat, Volksgemeinschaft was meant to

overcome the harshness of domestic conflict. When the bourgeois parties
regrouped in November and December of 1918, they all appealed to the
Volksgemeinschaft in their programs, and the DVP and DNVP did so even in
their party names (Volkspartei).

Yet, while the women politicians in the DVP

and DNVP continued to appeal to the Volksgemeinschaft and tried not to behave
as mere representatives of women’s interests, the fragmentation of middle-class
economic interests and the related competition of special-interest groups tore
Germany’s bourgeois parties apart. This prepared the ground for the proliferation
of small-interest parties and, ultimately, the rise of the catchall National Socialist
German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The women of the DVP and DNVP thus held
up a vision that was increasingly discredited by the developments in their own
parties. In the end, that portion of the female electorate which they had success-
fully mobilized (over a third by 1924) found little difficulty in transferring its
loyalties to the NSDAP, which, according to historian Peter Fritzsche, in the early
1930s conveyed a more credible commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft than the
bourgeois parties by appearing to be socially more inclusive and less bound to
special interests.

The stress on the Volksgemeinschaft, with the concomitant rejection of

interest politics, helped the leading women of the DVP and DNVP to achieve
their mobilization goal. By casting the nation as an enlarged family in need of
women’s help and by representing the right to vote as a national duty, they over-
came the reservations of many conservative women toward their new rights and
provided a justification for previously shunned political activity.

This ensured

that women provided the majority of votes for the DVP and DNVP. This was true
already in January 1919 and remained so in every major election of the Weimar
Republic. Although votes were never counted separately by sex in the entire
country, those districts that did count them separately are diverse enough to
constitute a statistically meaningful sample.

Whereas the DVP drew about 52

to 55 percent of its votes from women, the share of women in the DNVP elec-

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torate (about 56 to 60 percent) was the second highest in the nation. Only the
predominantly Catholic Center Party together with its Bavarian sister, the
Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei, BVP), had a slightly higher
percentage of women voters.

Without this boost to conservative and religious

positions provided by women’s participation in elections, the Weimar Republic
would have been significantly more left-leaning – for better or worse. This
becomes visible particularly in those fields in which conservative women
showed strong interest: education, public morality, social politics, and the status
of the churches. As Cornelie Usborne has shown, the women of the DNVP and
– to a lesser extent – the DVP often aligned with their colleagues from the Center
Party and BVP to leave a powerful conservative imprint on legislation in these
areas.

A widespread explanation of Weimar women’s statistical preference for

right-wing parties stresses that the conditions for women’s liberation (such as
jobs making women independent of men) were not present in Weimar Germany.
This argument implies, however, that women would have voted for the Left if
these conditions had existed. Given the powerful ideological ties of conservative
women to the right-wing parties (in terms of religion and nationalism, for
example), this seems highly unlikely. But conservative women would in that case
have forced the right-wing parties to take a more welcoming position toward
women’s rights.

As will be shown below, a commitment to the Volks-

gemeinschaft did not rule out insistence on women’s rights.

By referring to the Volksgemeinschaft, the women activists of the DVP and

DNVP were also able to gloss over tensions within their own ranks. The claims
of academic and professional women in both parties differed from those of urban
and rural housewives, whose interests also were not identical – with urban house-
wives being consumers and rural housewives usually being both, producers and
consumers. The housewives, the largest and best organized women’s con-
stituency of both parties, wanted above all to upgrade their economic situation
and status and showed little interest in women’s professional rights. Women
teachers, however, saw their work as a lifelong vocation and therefore aimed to
strengthen women’s rights in the professions and ease the double burden of work
and family. Yet, many women in the postal service were more interested in end-
of-contract benefits than in professional rights because they hoped to quit when
they got married. Many of these groups used the Volksgemeinschaft to mask
their own particular economic interests. Sometimes, groups with downright
contradictory economic interests found themselves in the same party. In the
DNVP, for example, urban housewives’ representatives clashed with representa-
tives of domestic employees over social legislation for the employees, who in
1925 still made up one-ninth of Germany’s female workforce.

Right-wing

women also disagreed on political issues such as participation in government and
reparations agreements with the victors of the war. One finds nostalgic monar-

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 5

chists and conservative Christian women of the “old right” shoulder to shoulder
with women associated with the radical nationalist leagues of the “new right”.

Sometimes these political fault lines followed the border between the DVP and
DNVP, but often they did not. Yet, the Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric provided a
screen behind which many of these tensions could be mediated or hidden. It gave
political women an alibi to stay out of divisive disputes within their party.
Women in the DNVP, for example, were largely able to circumvent the most
disruptive inner-party conflicts with reference to their reconciling and idealistic
mission for the Volksgemeinschaft – although their acquiescence often implied
tacit support for the dominant faction in the party.

The Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric also contained some ambiguities, however.

One of them had to do with the relation between national interest and party
interest. In their appeals to the Volksgemeinschaft, right-wing women implied that
women, with their allegedly “natural” aversion to special-interest politics,
observed a greater loyalty than men to party principles and national interest.
Obviously, the professions of loyalty to party principles clashed with the women’s
claims to uniting the nation by overcoming party divisions. How might insistence
on the party program – rather than compromise across party lines, even at the
expense of the program – rally a nation shaken by defeat in the First World War
and internal turmoil? The women’s equation of their party’s principles with
national interest was therefore partisan and not conducive to creating a
Volksgemeinschaft across party lines. A second ambiguity arose from the fact that
their ideology forced the women politicians to fight for women’s interests while
denying the legitimacy of interest politics. To allow women’s expected reconciling
influence to work, parties had to accord more parliamentary seats to women and
strengthen their position in the nation. If male party leaders refused to recognize
this, the women politicians would be forced to do exactly what they denounced:
to fight for the special interests of women. Oddly, the representation of women’s
interests was thus consistent with the female politicians’ anti-interest rhetoric. The
Volksgemeinschaft concept could be used to advance women’s interests, but it
could also come to haunt the women politicians of the two parties.

Perhaps the most profound ambiguity of the Volksgemeinschaft idea resulted

from a problem of definition. Who belonged to it, and who did not? This was
largely a question regarding the status of German Jews, most of whom were
assimilated and patriotic. The war and the trauma of defeat in 1918, however, had
fuelled German anti-Semitism, and many people on the Right excluded the Jews
from their vision of the Volksgemeinschaft and demanded that the civil rights of
German Jews be restricted. Whereas the DVP did not embrace this cause, the
DNVP leadership welcomed anti-Semites while refusing to let anti-Semitism
dominate its agenda. This led to the secession of the party’s most radical racists
in October 1922.

Right-wing women were divided on this issue along similar

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 6

lines as those of right-wing men. Some of them emphatically included German
Jews in the Volksgemeinschaft. The DVP politician Emma Ender, for example,
claimed in 1920 that “it is completely unjustified to construct a contradiction
between ‘German’ and ‘Jewish’.”

Not all leading women in the DVP took such

a clear stand, but they did not promote anti-Semitism either. In the DNVP, the
chair of the National Women’s Committee, Margarethe Behm, agreed with
Ender. In a speech to the DNVP party convention of 1919, she praised the patri-
otism of German Jews during the war and asked them to join her party, provoking
angry heckling from some men.

At the same time, however, Käthe

Schirmacher, a DNVP deputy in the National Assembly, wrote in her diary: “The
only thing uniting us with Poland is our common hatred of Juda.” The propa-
ganda leaflets published by the DNVP women’s committees, moreover,
contained anti-Semitic messages, particularly in their attacks against the
Democratic Party, which was believed to be directed by Jews.

When Anna von

Gierke, one of the most active DNVP deputies in the National Assembly, was
denied a promising place on the party ballot for 1920 presumably because her
mother was Jewish, the leading DNVP women did nothing to defend her.

At a

national meeting of DNVP women in 1922, Johanna Richter, a deputy from the
state diet of Baden, claimed that Jewish influence on German culture represented
a problem but asked that it be fought with spiritual methods and not with the anti-
Semitic outbursts typical for the radical racists. Her talk met with widespread
approval, even though in the discussion following it some women pointed out
that Jews had passionately supported the German cause in the contested border
areas with Poland.

No notable DNVP women joined the racist secession in

1922, but several of them became active in the DNVP’s National Völkisch
Committee (Völkischer Reichsausschuss), which continued to stress anti-Semitic
and racist arguments after the split.

While most women’s activists in the DVP

and some in the DNVP continued to see the Volksgemeinschaft as the national
solidarity of all Germans regardless of race, a growing number of women in the
DNVP defined the Volksgemeinschaft in racial terms as the community of Aryan
or Nordic people. This tendency became dominant among the DNVP women
during the last years of the Weimar Republic.

It should be noted that the Volksgemeinschaft discourse of bourgeois women,

which was shared by women from the moderate left all the way to the Nazis, has
inspired the thesis that the German bourgeois women’s movement as a whole
drifted consistently toward Nazi positions after giving up its left-leaning agenda
in 1908. In his pioneering work on the German bourgeois women’s movement
1890–1933, Richard Evans advanced this thesis with respect to the largest
umbrella organization of bourgeois women, the Federation of German Women’s
Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF). The surrender of the BDF
to the Nazi regime and the ambivalent role of its former leader, Gertrud Bäumer,

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 7

in the Third Reich seemed to add credibility to this argument. Following Evans,
other historians have accused the bourgeois women’s movement of preparing the
ground for Nazism, mostly through its adherence to a strict separation of gender
roles and a motherly image of woman. But this argument has also drawn criti-
cism.

Undoubtedly, the BDF opened itself more to the right after 1918, partic-

ularly under the influence of the recently founded housewives’ leagues, its largest
member organizations. But I have previously argued that party political differ-
ences mattered for women’s stance and that the emphasis of the women’s move-
ment on gender difference and motherhood mixed with a broad range of political
programs from the moderate left to the radical right. It left room for both oppo-
sition to Nazism and support for it.

Even women in the DVP and DNVP related

differently to the rapidly growing NSDAP from 1930 on, particularly to its
racism and anti-Semitism.

A comparative study of the DVP and DNVP reveals that both parties

appealed largely to the same constituency. Both recruited the bulk of their
supporters from a predominantly bourgeois, nationalist, and Protestant milieu.
The DVP, formed out of the National Liberal Party of the Wilhelmine Empire,
rallied a variety of business groups, industrialists, housewives (mostly urban),
civil servants, representatives of the Evangelical Church, and other sections of
the middle classes.

Its program included a commitment to monarchism but

also expressed the party’s willingness to participate in the Weimar system.

Nevertheless, rejection of the democratic Weimar Constitution remained strong
in the DVP, as was shown when it joined the DNVP in voting against the
Constitution on 12 July 1919 and when high-ranking DVP members supported
plans for a coup d’état in October 1923.

The DVP’s antidemocratic stands

mattered less on the national (Reich) level, where the party entered numerous
government coalitions, than on the state level. In Prussia, by far the largest
single state, the left-to-center “Weimar Coalition” of Social Democrats (SPD),
Center Party, and Democratic Party ruled for most of the period 1919 to 1932,
and the DVP constituted the right-wing opposition together with the DNVP
until the victory of the Nazis in the state elections of April 1932. The DVP expe-
rienced its strongest phase in 1920–22, when its vocal opposition role attracted
many disillusioned voters of the Democratic Party. In June 1920, the DVP
received 14 percent of the national vote, up from 4.4 percent in January 1919.
Yet, the DVP remained a party dominated by influential men (Honoratioren)
and without effective grass-roots support. It never built a stable financial base
through membership fees and instead remained dependent on contributions
particularly from German big industry, which helped to alienate some of its
middle-class constituencies.

The DVP therefore experienced losses at the

polls even while its leader Gustav Stresemann (Foreign Minister 1923–29) won
widespread recognition for his moderate and pragmatic foreign policy. The

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 8

decline of the party was accelerated dramatically after Stresemann’s death on 3
October 1929.

The DNVP was formed out of the conservative, Christian-social, and anti-

Semitic parties of the Wilhelmine Empire. Its program was reactionary, anti-
republican, and monarchist. The DNVP rallied many factions on the right
including anti-Semites, monarchist officials and officers, large landowners, busi-
nessmen, representatives of the Evangelical Church, housewives (rural and
urban), as well as a section of the non-socialist workers’ movement.

In its social

base the DNVP thus resembled the DVP, except that it drew more support from
the large landlords and rural workers east of the Elbe River, particularly in
Pomerania and East Prussia.

The DNVP captured about 10 percent of the vote

in January 1919 but doubled its share until 1924 through its strict opposition to
the Weimar system and its advocacy of a confrontational foreign policy. Yet its
hesitant and frustrating participation in government in 1925 and 1927–28 exposed
a rift in the party between moderate pragmatists and radical anti-democrats that
resulted in the election of hard-liner Alfred Hugenberg as party chairman on
20 October 1928.

In his efforts to transform the party into a battering ram

against Weimar democracy, Hugenberg alienated the DNVP’s working-class
constituencies and pushed out the moderates.

Although the DNVP experienced

a less dramatic electoral decline than the DVP after 1929, it was still too weak to
become more than a junior partner of the NSDAP after Hitler’s accession to power
on 30 January 1933.

Although the leading men of the DNVP and DVP had either opposed women’s

suffrage or supported it only at the very last moment, they did invite women to
run for parliamentary seats in late 1918 and supported the buildup of a nation-
wide structure of women’s committees headed by a National Women’s
Committee (Reichsfrauenausschuss, RFA) in each party. They encouraged
women’s participation within areas that were deemed typical women’s issues,
such as family and motherhood, education, religion, and women’s professions.

Women were allowed to write those sections of the party program relating to
women’s and family issues, and the leading right-wing women found avenues to
inscribe their views on the legislative process touching on these areas. The
women tried to broaden their sphere of influence particularly by addressing
foreign policy, a traditional preserve of men. Occasionally they criticized their
relegation to stereotypically “female” fields, and often they complained about
too little consideration for women candidates on the party ballots. Yet, the
women of the DVP and DNVP in general conceded to work within the confines
set for them by their parties. This meant that their input on the major issues
dividing the party leadership was often marginal despite the fact that the chair of
the RFA was also a member of the party’s leading committee. With their stress
on the Volksgemeinschaft and women’s “innate” maternal abilities, they tended

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 9

to stay at the periphery of inner-party battlefields, trying to exert a reconciling
and uniting influence.

Like most men in their parties, almost all prominent women in the DVP and

DNVP came from the bourgeoisie, often from the educated professional classes
(the Bildungsbürgertum), while a few women came from the nobility. The predom-
inant professional group were teachers, which was due to the fact that a school-
teaching diploma was one of the few avenues in higher education open to German
women before 1914. Most women in the teaching profession were unmarried
because a law abolished only in 1919 demanded the dismissal of married women
in the civil service, including teachers. Some women used their teacher’s diploma
as a springboard for a higher education once German universities began to open
their doors to women (after 1900), and acquired doctorates. Many of the women
who were not teachers identified themselves as housewives, but their extensive
activities for their organizations meant that they spent little time in their own
homes. Almost all of the notable women in the two parties were born between 1859
and 1881. They therefore belonged to two generations of politicians identified by
historian Detlev Peukert as the Wilhelmine generation (the age group of emperor
Wilhelm II, who was born in 1859) and the generation of the Gründerzeit (the first
decade after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871). For the members of
these generations the Wilhelmine Empire provided the formative experiences.
Members of these age groups were predominant in the political and economic life
of the Weimar Republic.

Given that women were not allowed to join political

organizations until 1908, the differences between these two generations were less
important for women than for men. For women, the decisive rupture was therefore
1908 or perhaps the outbreak of war in 1914. Altogether, the leading right-wing
women displayed a broad range of personalities and interests that contrasts with the
relative homogeneity of their social background, which they shared with most
women active in the BDF, the Democratic Party, and the Center Party.

These

women certainly did not fit the stereotype of the bespectacled, lifeless spinsters that
antifeminists liked to portray when they spoke about politically active women.

One may wonder about the absence of younger women, given that members of the
bourgeois women’s movement often complained about young women’s lack of
appreciation for the ideas and accomplishments of the prewar movement.

But the

age bracket of leading DNVP and DVP women was very similar to the age bracket
of leading male politicians in the Weimar Republic – except for the extremist
parties, whose leadership had a more youthful profile. Promising younger women
were present in the women’s committees of the DVP and DNVP, but they had no
chance of winning parliamentary seats once the electoral fortunes of their parties
began to decline in the second half of the 1920s.

Aside from the importance of anti-Semitism and racism among DNVP

women, the worldview of the leading right-wing women was remarkably

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 10

similar. Whether they focused on school reform, public morality, housewives’
issues, sports, or foreign policy, the women of the DNVP and DVP always
assumed essential differences between the sexes, as expressed in the theory of
spiritual motherhood. A look at the most popular idols of women from the two
parties confirms this. The most celebrated woman was Auguste Viktoria, the
wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918). Auguste Viktoria was a weak polit-
ical figure but dearly remembered as the patron of many women’s charity organ-
izations.

Her birthday (22 October 1858) and the anniversary of her death (11

April 1921) were ritually commemorated in the DVP and DNVP women’s press
– at both the national and local level. The articles and speeches produced for
these occasions were almost identical. Auguste Viktoria appeared as the passive
sufferer, the compassionate mother of her children and “her” people, the self-
sacrificing wife, the charitable and religious woman – in short: the incarnation
of German women’s loyalty and selfless grandeur. Commemorating her birthday
and her death continuously offered right-wing women new opportunities to
contrast the supposedly lax morality of the present with her high-standing
figure.

Festivities for Auguste Viktoria belonged to the standard activities of

women in the local party sections, so much so that the National Women’s
Committee of the DNVP in 1928 published a blueprint for these celebrations.

Many women from both parties undertook pilgrimages to Auguste Viktoria’s
grave in Potsdam to lay wreaths, pray, and sing patriotic songs, and leading
women promoted her as the best possible role model for German youth and as
the ideal of German womanhood.

Right-wing women also used Auguste

Viktoria’s enormous popularity among conservative women in their efforts to
reconcile conservative women with their new political rights after 1918. A
DNVP speaker in East Prussia, for example, argued that women’s suffrage was
a precious thing because it contained the three pearls fallen out of Auguste
Viktoria’s crown during the revolution: family, church, and fatherland.
Previously, the empress had cared for them; now, it was the duty of all German
women to protect them.

Another widely revered woman was Queen Luise of Prussia (1776–1810),

who had played a political role in the wake of Prussia’s defeat against Napoleonic
France in 1806. Like Auguste Viktoria, she was the wife of a male ruler, not a
ruler in her own right. But Luise, whose birthday (10 March) was frequently
commemorated by right-wing women, potentially represented a different ideal of
womanhood. With an energy and courage that contrasted with the helplessness
of her husband and his ministers, Luise had tried to induce Napoleon I to grant
mild peace conditions to Prussia. She had thus assumed an independent and
active role at a time when the leading men of her country were weak and the
kingdom in disarray. To right-wing women of the Weimar Republic, Luise
appeared as a woman who had quietly rallied the defeated and demoralized

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 11

nation against the invader – although she did not live to see Prussia’s liberation
in 1813.

Käthe Schirmacher, a prominent DNVP activist, claimed that Luise

was not simply a loving wife and mother but a mother of the country and the
people with “strong, combative mother love.”

Another woman from the DNVP

considered Luise the “soul” of Germany’s resistance against Napoleon and called
her the “genius of Prussia’s liberation.”

Yet Luise’s self-assertive role was often

watered down by right-wing women. In the same breath with which they praised
Luise for inciting German resistance to Napoleon, they also described her as the
perfect loving wife and mother, the graceful woman, and the generous queen.
One DNVP woman, for example, stressed that Luise had achieved much while
preserving her femininity – unlike the more imperious English queen Elizabeth
I and the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great. The author claimed that German
women were never imperious – conveniently ignoring that Catherine the Great
was of German origin.

The DNVP and DVP women competed with their claims to Luise. The DVP

women’s committees in the Berlin and Potsdam area, for example, regularly laid
wreaths and flowers at Luise’s grave or her monument in Berlin’s Tiergarten
(central park), while national DVP women’s politicians insisted that Luise would
have supported the DVP. They argued that Luise had promoted the Prussian prag-
matic reformers over the reactionaries – the political ancestors of the DVP over
those of the DNVP – and conducted Realpolitik in Stresemann’s sense.

The

DNVP also promoted a rich array of Queen Luise festivities and named Luise’s
birthday the “Day of the German Woman.” A women’s organization associated
with the veterans’ league Stahlhelm and with ties to the DNVP called itself Bund
Königin Luise.

References to Luise were made by DNVP women in connection

to Weimar politics, as when Käthe Schirmacher claimed that Luise would never
have signed the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno.

Luise was,

according to historian Andrea Süchting-Hänger, part of an “invented tradition”
(Hobsbawm) of right-wing women. Her image stressed national heroism in
combination with motherly character.

Another object of women’s admiration, though less ritually celebrated, was the

figure of the great male leader. Many women politicians from both parties
expressed their longing for a powerful national leader, a male authoritarian
savior. The DVP Reichstag deputy Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb, for example,
hoped that women’s reconciling mission might prepare the German people for
the acceptance of a charismatic man as the national savior, who would presum-
ably complete the unifying work of women and free the Germans from the Treaty
of Versailles.

Other women in the DVP expressed similar feelings, as did many

DNVP women who made no secret of their dislike for the mechanics of parlia-
mentary majorities. Although the women longing for a great man and national
savior often envisioned a new Bismarck or Frederick the Great, they also revered

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 12

some male figures associated with Weimar politics. Women from both parties
venerated Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, war hero and German president
1925–1934, who received a majority of his votes from women in 1925 and at his
reelection in 1932.

The leading women of the DVP expressed much admiration

for their party leader Gustav Stresemann that turned into worship after his death,
and women in the DNVP adored Karl Helfferich, the party’s leading financial
expert who died in a train accident in April 1924. The DNVP women considered
German women particularly indebted to Helfferich because they saw him as the
heroic conqueror of hyperinflation in 1923 and thus as the savior of many threat-
ened German households. In 1928, DNVP women established a yearly Helfferich
prize for the best article on a suggested topic. After 1928, women in the DNVP
were instrumental in fostering the cult of their new leader, Alfred Hugenberg, in
competition with the Hitler cult of the NSDAP.

That activists in both parties endorsed such a passive and suffering role model

as Auguste Viktoria is revealing. Except for some charitable activities, she really
did not do much, and all the aspects for which she was praised must have been
poison to all claims to women’s rights. Luise, a much more energetic and colorful
personality, had emancipatory potential, but that aspect of her persona was so
domesticated that she often appeared merely as a more fortunate Auguste
Viktoria. It is plausible that the veneration of male leaders, together with the
Auguste Viktoria cult, expressed a nostalgic monarchism prevalent among many
right-wing women.

This monarchism is tangible enough, although DVP and

DNVP women never made restoration of Wilhelm II to his throne a priority of
their political work. Through his erratic personality and his flight to the
Netherlands at the end of the war, the former Kaiser had discredited himself even
in the eyes of many monarchists – although they would never have criticized him
openly. Indeed, the Auguste Viktoria cult sometimes implied a muted critique of
Wilhelm II in suggesting that the empress had suffered at his hands, too.

In any

case, the longing for a great male leader shows that right-wing women, after
rallying the nation together, still expected men to lead.

Notes

1. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation (London: Sage, 1997), chapters 1 and

5; Ute Planert, “Vater Staat und Mutter Germania: Zur Politisierung des
weiblichen Geschlechts im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” In idem, ed., Nation,
Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der
Moderne Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000, pp. 17–19; Ute
Planert, “Zwischen Partizipation und Restriktion: Frauenemanzipation und
nationales Paradigma von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.” In
Dieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt, eds., Föderative Nation.

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 13

Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.
Munich: Oldenburg, 2000; Dieter Langewiesche, “Nation, Nationalismus,
Nationalstaat: Forschungsstand und Forschungsperspektiven.” Neue
Politische Literatur 40 (1995), pp. 216–17.

2. See Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life

in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000), and Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegs-
gesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen:
Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1989).

3. Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933 (London

and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), pp. 228–30.

4. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 16–32.

5. Emma Stropp, “Der neue Reichstag,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 26, 1

July 1920; see also Stropp, “Friede und Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2,
no. 3, 15 January 1920.

6. Raffael Scheck, “Women Against Versailles, Maternalism and Nationalism

of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic.” German
Studies Review 22 (1999): pp. 22 and 33.

7. Doris Kaufmann, “Die Ehre des Vaterlandes und die Ehre der Frauen oder

der Kampf an der äusseren und inneren Front: Der Deutsch-Evangelische
Frauenbund im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik.”
Evangelische Theologie 46 (1986): 277–92. See also Scheck, “Women
Against Versailles,” pp. 21–2 and 30.

8. Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the

November Revolution.” In Larry E. Jones and James Retallack, eds.,
Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of
German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945. Providence and Oxford: Berg,
1993; Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political
Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990); and Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and
Mobilization in Germany, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of
Modern Warfare 10 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2000). On the use of the Volksgemeinschaft idea in the German
People’s Party, see Stephen G. Fritz, “The Search for Volksgemeinschaft:
Gustav Stresemann and the Baden DVP, 1926–1930.” German Studies
Review 7, no. 2 (1984): 249–80, which stresses Gustav Stresemann’s life-
long commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft idea. See also Peter Lambert,
“German Historians and Nazi Ideology: The Parameters of the
Volksgemeinschaft and the Problem of Historical Legitimation,
1930–1945.” European History Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1995): 555–82.

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9. Karen Offen claims that this view has been more prevalent in Continental

European than in American (and to some extent British?) feminism, which
for a long time tended to stress gender equality and to downgrade theories
of gender difference as conservative and anti-emancipatory: Karen Offen,
“Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach.” Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988): 119–57 (particularly pp. 123–25
and 135–37).

10. See, in particular, Christoph Sachße, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozial-

arbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung 1871–1929, Edition Suhrkamp,
Neue Folge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 115–16; Ann Taylor
Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 2–13; Bärbel Clemens,
Menschenrechte haben kein Geschlecht: Zum Politikverständnis der bürger-
lichen Frauenbewegung, Frauen in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988), pp. 79–101; Ute
Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Bürgerlicher Verbesserung und
Neuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 166. See also
Irene Stoehr, “ ‘Organisierte Mütterlichkeit’: Zur Politik der deutschen
Frauenbewegung um 1900.” In Karin Hausen, ed., Frauen suchen ihre
Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Munich:
C.H. Beck, 1983; and Irene Stoehr, Emanzipation zum Staat? Der
Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein – Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnenverband
(1893–1933), Forum Frauengeschichte 5 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990).

11. Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politische

Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, Vienna, Weimar: Boehlau Verlag, 2000), pp.
81–3; see also Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, pp. 2–9.

12. Anny von Kulesza, “Sonderaufgaben der Frauen im neuen Reichstag,” NLC

51, no. 65, 3 April 1924.

13. See the perceptive observations derived from a local study in Nancy Reagin,

A German Women’s Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880–1933
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), chap-
ters 8 and 11. On the demographic aspect of the crisis, see Atina Grossmann,
Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion
Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–8.

14. See Verhey, The Spirit of 1914, pp. 1–11, on the importance of this myth.
15. See Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough?,” pp. 305 and 311, and

Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, p. 23. For the youth movement, see
Elizabeth Harvey, “Serving the Volk, Saving the Nation: Women in the
Youth Movement and the Public Sphere in Weimar Germany.” In Larry E.
Jones and James Retallack, eds., Elections, Mass Politics, and Social

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Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.

16. Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1998), pp. 209–10. See also Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and
the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and Thomas Childers,
The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

17. See Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the

Early Weimar Republic”, pp. 40–1.

18. Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), pp. 139–40.
19. Jürgen Falter, Thomas Lindenberger, and Siegfried Schumann, Wahlen und

Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik: Materialien zum Wahlverhalten
1919–1933, Statische Arbeitsbücher zur neueren deutschen Geschichte
(Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986), pp. 81–5. See also Gabriele Bremme, Die poli-
tische Rolle der Frau in Deutschland: Eine Untersuchung über den Einfluß
der Frauen bei Wahlen und ihre Teilnahme in Partei und Parlament
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 25–30, 70–1, 243, and 248,
and Joachim Hofmann-Göttig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel: 70 Jahre
Frauenwahlrecht in Deutschland (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986),
pp. 28–35.

20. Usborne, Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany, p. 72.
21. For an example of this argument, see Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz,

“Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work
(Revised version).” In Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman and Marion
Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi
Germany. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984.

22. Ute Frevert, Women in German History (Oxford: Berg, 1989), p. 334.
23. Geoff Eley, “Conservatives and Radical Nationalists in Germany: The

Production of Fascist Potentials, 1912–28.” In Martin Blinkhorn, ed.,
Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in
Twentieth-Century Europe. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

24. See Raffael Scheck, “Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of Female

Politicians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP).” Journal of
Contemporary History 36, no. 4 (2000), p. 551.

25. Werner Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei, 1918–1924, Beiträge zur

Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, 8
(Düsseldorf: Droste, 1956), pp. 61–73; Lewis Hertzman, DNVP. Right-Wing
Opposition in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1924 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 124–64. The most detailed work on the DNVP
and anti-Semitism is Jan Striesow, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die

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Völkisch-Radikalen 1918–1922. 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Haag +
Herchen Verlag, 1981).

26. Emma Ender, “ ‘Nationaler Frauenbund’ Eine Erwiderung von Emma

Ender, Hamburg,” Die Frau in der Politik. Monatsbeilage der “Deutschen
Stimmen,” 3, no. 2, 18 January 1920, pp. 16–18, in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–42
(DVP), vol. 5.

27. “DNVP-Parteitag, 12. und 13. Juli 1919,” Die Post 1919 (Sonderausgabe).

See also Striesow, pp. 114, 121, and 128.

28. “Ostmark u. Auswärtige Politik,” Nachlass Schirmacher, Universitätsbiblio-

thek Rostock, vol. 948/014. For examples of anti-Semitic propaganda, see “An
die deutschen Frauen,” in BA Koblenz, ZSG 1–44 (DNVP), Band 8 (Flug-
blätter); “Wir Landfrauen” and “An die weiblichen Hausangestellten!”, in GStA
Berlin-Dahlem, XII Hauptabteilung, IV, Flugblätter und Plakate, vol. 187.

29. Indeed, they put the blame on her because she had allegedly refused to take

a place on the ballot for the Prussian state diet offered to her by the party
leadership: “Zum Austritt der Abgeordneten Anna von Gierke,” Korres-
pondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 3, no. 115, 29 May 1920;
Scheck, “German Conservatism,” p. 51; and Striesow, p. 62.

30. “Tagung des erweiterten RFA,” Frauenkorrespondenz der Deutsch-

nationalen Volkspartei (henceforth: Frauenkorrespondenz), vol. 3, no. 25,
20 September 1922. Striesow, pp. 114, 121, and 128. For Behm’s speech, see
“DNVP-Parteitag, 12. und 13. Juli 1919,” Die Post 1919 (Sonderausgabe).

31. Of the more prominent women, only the writer Pia-Sophie Rogge-Börner

joined the secessionists, but she had not played an important role in the
DNVP and became known only later on. See Hans Jürgen Arendt, Sabine
Hering, and Leonie Wagner, eds., Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik vor
1933. Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: dipa-Verlag, 1995), p. 342. The
adjective “völkisch” is impossible to translate into English. In the context of
DNVP activists, it usually implied a commitment to a racial and anti-
Semitic definition of the Volksgemeinschaft, but it was sometimes used by
people from other parties without a racist underpinning – as a mere adjec-
tive to Volk (people).

32. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933, particularly pp.

235–37, where Evans equates the Volksgemeinschaft with völkisch-racist
thought, an equation that I think is too narrow given the broad appeal of this
concept in the revolution of 1918–19, as shown in the works of Peter
Fritzsche; for an argument compatible with Evans’s thesis, see Claudia
Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). See my summary of this debate in
Scheck, “Women against Versailles,” pp. 22–3. Critical of Evans’s thesis are
Angelika Schaser, “Gertrud Bäumer – ‘eine der wildesten Demokratinnen’

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oder verhinderte Nationalsozialistin?” In Kirsten Heinsohn, Barbara Vogel
and Ulrike Weckel, eds., Zwischen Karierre und Verfolgung: Handlungs-
räume von Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Frankfurt am
Main, New York: Campus, 1997, and Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud
Bäumer, pp. 314–36. For evidence that even SPD women used the
Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric, see Heide-Marie Lauterer, “Republikanerinnen
des Herzens? Sozialdemokratinnen und Nation 1914–1933.” In Ute Planert,
ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus
in der Moderne. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000.

33. Scheck, “Women against Versailles,” pp. 22–3.
34. Jones, German Liberalism, pp. 20–7; Arnold Ruge, “Deutsche Volkspartei

(DVP) 1918–1933.” In Dieter Fricke et al., eds., Lexikon zur Partei-
engeschichte 1789–1945: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien
und Verbände in Deutschland. Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut,
1981–86, vol. 2, pp. 422–5; Wolfgang Hartenstein, Die Anfänge der
Deutschen Volkspartei 1918–1920, Beiträge zur Geschichte des
Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien 22 (Düsseldorf: Droste,
1962), pp. 19–28; Ludwig Richter, Die Deutsche Volkspartei 1918–1933
(Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), chapter 10. See also Detlef Lehnert and Klaus
Megerle, “Identitäts- und Konsensprobleme in einer fragmentierten
Gesellschaft – Zur politischen Kultur der Weimarer Republik.” In Dirk
Berg-Schlosser and Jacob Schissler, eds., Politische Kultur in Deutschland.
Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,
1987), and Karl Rohe, Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland:
Kulturelle Grundlagen deutscher Parteien und Parteiensysteme im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert, Neue Historische Bibliothek (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1992). I should note that, for simplicity’s sake, I spell
Evangelical Church with two capitals although I am aware that there were
only provincial churches (Landeskirchen) but no unified national church.

35. Ruge, “Deutsche Volkspartei,” pp. 425–28; Hartenstein, Die Anfänge der

Deutschen Volkspartei, pp. 106–20.

36. Günter Arns, “Die Krise des Weimarer Parlamentarismus im Frühherbst

1923.” Der Staat 8 (1969): 181–216. See also Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei,
pp. 88 and 92.

37. Jones, German Liberalism, pp. 47–54.
38. Lewis Hertzman, “The Founding of the German National People’s Party

(DNVP), November 1918–January 1919.” Journal of Modern History 30
(1958): 24–36.

39. An excellent study of DNVP politics in Pomerania is Shelley Baranowski,

The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar
Prussia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Amrei

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Stupperich, Volksgemeinschaft oder Arbeitersolidarität: Studien zur Arbeit-
nehmerpolitik in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918–1933 (Göttingen
and Zurich: Musterschmidt Verlag, 1982), on the often overlooked right-
wing workers.

40. Robert P. Grathwol, Stresemann and the DNVP: Reconciliation or Revenge

in German Foreign Policy (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980),
which delineates carefully the conflicts regarding DNVP participation in
government and, in particular, its agonizing relationship to Stresemann’s
foreign policy. See also Manfred Dörr, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei
1925 bis 1928” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Marburg, 1964).

41. For this period, see Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, “Die

Deutschnationale Volkspartei.” In Erich Matthias and Rudolf Morsey, eds.,
Das Ende der Parteien 1933. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1960.

42. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” pp. 53–4.
43. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Edition

Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 26–9. Older women in the entire bourgeois women’s
movement in the 1920s often complained about the indifference of the
younger generation, which took for granted rights for which the older gener-
ation had fought. See Irene Stoehr, “Neue Frau und alte Bewegung? Zum
Generationenkonflikt in der Frauenbewegung der Weimarer Republik.” In
Jutta Dalhoff, Uschi Frey, and Ingrid Schöll, eds., Frauenmacht in der
Geschichte. Düsseldorf, Schwann, 1986.

44. Claudia Koonz, “Conflicting Allegiances: Political Ideology and Women

Legislators in Weimar Germany.” In Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 1, no. 1 (1976): 663–83 (here pp. 668–9).

45. For one of the most notorious examples, see the speech of the Bavarian

Landtag deputy Dr. Rudolf Herrman Buttmann (NSDAP), as quoted in
Arendt, Hering, and Wagner, eds., Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik vor
1933, p. 152.

46. Stoehr, “Neue Frau und alte Bewegung?”
47. See Andrea Süchting-Hänger, “ ‘Gleichgroße mut’ge Helferinnen’ in der

weiblichen Gegenwelt: Der Vaterländische Frauenverein und die Politisier-
ung konservativer Frauen 1890–1914.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik
und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne.
Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000, pp. 136–42.

48. See for example Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum 22. Oktober,” Deutsch-

nationaler Volksfreund 5, no. 23, 28 October 1923.

49. RFA, “Kaiserin-Gedächtnisfeier,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 37, 13

September 1928. See, for example, Der Parteifreund for many references to
commemorative celebrations of East Prussian DNVP women’s groups in
1920–22 and beyond.

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50. For two examples of many, see the appeal to lay wreaths in Berliner Stimmen

8, October 1931, and the report about a celebration of the DNVP’s Provincial
Women’s Committee of Hamburg: Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 16, 15
November 1931. See also Clara Mende, “Auguste Viktoria zum Gedächtnis,”
DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 14, 7 April 1922, and the report from the third
party conference in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, nrs. 48/49, 9 December 1920.
When Marie Bernays at this conference spoke of Auguste Viktoria as the last
German empress, hecklers contradicted her by calling “not the last one!”

51. “Kaiserin-Geburtstagsfeier in Cranz,” Der Parteifreund. Amtliches Blatt der

deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Landesverband Ostpreußen 1, no. 26, 4
November 1920.

52. Annagrete Lehmann, “Was bedeutet uns deutschen Frauen der 10. März?”

Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 13, 1 March 1924.

53. Käthe Schirmacher, “Zum 19. Juli, dem Todestag der Königin Luise,” Die

Deutschnationale Frau 12, no. 28, 10 July 1930.

54. Annelise Spohr, “Königin Luise,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 14, 4 March

1925, and Spohr, “Gekröntes Leid,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 9, 3 March
1927.

55. A. Ritthaler, “Johanna von Puttkamer. Zu ihrem Todestag am 27.

November,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 88, 20 November 1925.

56. “ ‘Unsere’ Stellung zu Locarno,” NLC 52, no. 232, 15 December 1925; M.

S. [Martha Schwarz], “Königin Luise in ihrer Beziehung zur Gegenwart,”
NLC 53, no. 43, 5 March 1926. For the celebrations in the Berlin-Potsdam
area, see Berliner Stimmen 2, no. 11, 14 March 1925.

57. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” pp. 51 and 54. More research has

convinced me that I overemphasized the self-assertive and emancipatory
aspect of Luise’s historical persona for the DNVP women in this article. The
Bund Königin Luise figures prominently in Süchting-Hänger, Das
“Gewissen der Nation”.

58. “ ‘Unsere’ Stellung zu Locarno,” NLC 52, no. 232, 15 December 1925.

Schirmacher was in the DNVP but the NLC was a DVP newspaper.
Occasionally women from the DNVP and DVP published articles in the
other party’s media.

59. Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation,” pp. 286–98. For the term

“invented tradition,” see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983). Süchting-Hänger considers Luise the most important idol of
right-wing women. This may be true for the radical nationalist women’s
leagues, but my reading of the women’s party press in both the DVP and
DNVP leads me to conclude that Auguste Viktoria was even more present
than Luise.

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60. See Katharina von Oheimb, “Was will der Nationalbund Deutscher Frauen

und Mädchen?” and “Ziele und Aufgaben des Nationalbundes Deutscher
Frauen,” both in ADEF, vol. O 12, and the materials in BAK, Nachlass
Kardorff-von Oheimb, volumes 19a, 25, and 37. For von Oheimb’s general
outlook, see her autobiography, Politik und Lebensbeichte.

61. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, p. 83.
62. Clara Mende, “Deutschlands Hoffnung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 52,

30 December 1920, and Mende, “1871–1921,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no.
3, 20 January 1921; Elsa Matz, “Zum Tode unseres Führers Stresemann”
and “Abschied von Stresemann,” both in NLC 56, no. 202, 9 October 1929.
For the DNVP, see “Weimarer Brief II,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 7, 16
February 1928, and Hannah Brandt, “Der Bismarck in uns!”
Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 30, 26 July 1928; Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum
Todestage Helfferichs,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 26, 15 April 1925; and
Lehmann, “Der Helfferich-Preis der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 30, 26 July 1928. For the Hugenberg cult of
DNVP women, see chapter 9.

63. Even DDP member Elly Heuß-Knapp, on an electoral campaign tour in late

1918, saw it necessary to acknowledge the monarchism in her female audi-
ence: Elly Heuß-Knapp, Die Deutsche Demokratische Partei und die Frauen
(Berlin: Boll, 1918), pp. 5–6.

64. See Süchting-Hänger’s comments on Schirmacher’s monarchism, which did

not exclude criticisms of Wilhelm II (Das “Gewissen der Nation,” pp.
147–8). Süchting-Hänger errs, however, when she claims that Schirmacher
decorated Wilhelm II’s bust in the Reichstag building in 1919. The bust
under consideration represented Wilhelm II’s grandfather, Wilhelm I, a
much less controversial Kaiser. See Walzer, p. 88. Some right-wing women
(and men) found it hard to accept that Wilhelm II remarried quickly after the
death of Auguste Viktoria: see Beda Prilipp, “Entweihtes Märtyrertum,” in
Die deutsche Frau, 1922, no. 19, p. 26. I owe this reference to Christiane
Streubel.

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 22

–2–

Women’s Entry into Party Politics

We [the women] want to try to reconcile and mediate, as should be the
nature of women, who are not meant to hate with others but to love with
others. Party strife has to cease whenever the big common interest of
Germany is on the line.

An anonymous DVP woman in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, 15 January 1920.

Although women had received a formal – albeit extremely constrained – place in
the predecessor parties of the DVP and DNVP only shortly before the First World
War, they had been active within a wider spectrum of associations connected to
right-wing politics for a long time. Charity organizations and the women’s section
of the Red Cross (Vaterländischer Frauenverein) had already tied many middle-
and upper-class women to the German dynasties and the nation in the course of the
nineteenth century.

Church-based organizations had also done much to mobilize

conservative Protestant women, above all the Evangelische Frauenhilfe and the
German Evangelical Women’s League. The former was a large charity organization
for women led by men, whereas the latter emphasized women’s participation in the
Church and advocated broader rights for women – though not the suffrage at the
national level. Nationalist leagues for women had also been founded before the
war. Although they were much smaller than the Vaterländischer Frauenverein or
the Evangelische Frauenhilfe, they helped to put foreign-policy issues such as the
colonies and the navy on the minds of conservative women.

Yet, the introduction

of women’s suffrage created a situation for which conservative women were poorly
prepared. Most of them had either opposed the suffrage or seen it as a desirable
reform only in the distant future. Any discussion of suffrage reform before 1918
inevitably brought up the demand to democratize Germany’s highly unequal state
suffrages, which supported the privileges of the very social groups to which many
conservative women belonged. After the introduction of the suffrage, however, the
leading men and women of both parties encouraged a rapid mobilization of their
potential female supporters because they feared a victory of the Social Democratic
Party (SPD) together with the more radical Independent Socialists (USPD) at the
election for the National Assembly.

The buildup of a women’s structure in the DNVP and DVP started in an impro-

vised fashion during the campaign for the elections to the National Assembly, the

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 23

first elections in which German women were allowed to vote. The circumstances
of the campaign were chaotic. The provisions of the peace treaty were still
unknown, and the reintegration of the returning soldiers posed enormous prob-
lems. Socialist unrest rocked the cities and industrial regions, and a second, more
radical, revolution by the Independent Socialists or the Communists was threat-
ening. While preparing for the elections, the parties of the right faced serious
organizational challenges. They had done almost nothing to prepare conservative
women for voting, and it was expected that, in addition to women’s suffrage, the
lowering of the voting age from twenty-five to twenty would benefit the left. The
new proportional voting system, moreover, canceled many advantages the old
majority vote had given to their predecessors in the Wilhelmine Empire. The
newly formed DVP and DNVP also had no time to build up a solid organization
and party statutes before the elections; rallying their supporters for the national
and state elections in early 1919 took priority. Only after the elections to the
provisional Prussian state diet (Landtag) on 26 January 1919 did the DVP and
DNVP begin to formally constitute themselves, a process that lasted well into
1920. Because of its failed attempts to form a united liberal party with the
Democratic Party, the DVP got off to a later and more difficult start than the
DNVP.

As a consequence, the mobilization of women and the buildup of a

women’s organizational structure proceeded faster in the DNVP than in the DVP.

The accounts of DNVP members on the foundation of the party and its first

activities directed toward women reveal a spirit of adventure, danger, and excited
improvisation. Although some observers expected that a majority of German
women would sympathize with religious or conservative parties rather than with
the socialists, the question was whether these women would vote in large enough
numbers to prevent an absolute majority of the socialist parties, which conserva-
tives saw as a fundamental threat to the capitalist order, the churches, and the
integrity of the nation. The SPD, as the only party having advocated women’s
suffrage for a long time, had begun to integrate the socialist women’s movement
several years before the war.

The newly formed Democratic Party had the elite

of Germany’s bourgeois women’s movement in its ranks, including Gertrud
Bäumer, one of the leading personalities in the BDF, whereas the Center Party
could rely on a network of Catholic women’s groups to mobilize Catholic women
for the elections.

The DNVP’s founding manifesto, released on 24 November

1918, stated, “The cooperation of the woman in public life is called for,” but the
party leaders were pessimistic about the possibility of mobilizing right-wing
women in great numbers.

Their spirits were lifted, however, by a woman with

much experience in organizational life and a burning will to mobilize conserva-
tive women: Margarethe Behm. Behm requested to be invited to a party board
meeting, and the party leaders gave her a warm welcome and, according to
Behm, immediately accepted the work of women as of “equal value.” Behm

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received the green light to constitute a National Women’s Committee
(Reichsfrauenausschuss, RFA) for the DNVP and was offered a seat on the
seven-member executive party board. The RFA of the DNVP got funds, an
office, and some space in the official party newsletter where it could publish its
own news. On 6 December 1918 it held its first meeting.

The DNVP leaders were lucky to have found Margarethe Behm. An approach-

able and good-humored politician, she became the most popular woman from the
DNVP. Her concern for socially disadvantaged women and her open-mindedness
won her admiration from people in different political camps. Born in 1860,
Behm came from a wealthy land-holding family in Eastern Germany. She was an
unmarried teacher who had gained a national reputation before 1918 as a skillful
organizer and leader of the Gewerkverein der Heimarbeiterinnen (Union of
Female Home Workers), a pressure group for pre-industrial cottage workers.
These workers, predominantly women, were left out of the state insurance legis-
lation that covered factory employees. With the vocal support of Empress
Auguste Viktoria, Behm lobbied the prewar Reichstag to pass a sickness-
insurance bill for the home workers. Her interest in workers induced her to get
involved in Adolf Stoecker’s Christian Social Party, one of the DNVP’s prede-
cessors, which aimed at wooing Germany’s working class with a mixture of
social welfare, Christian values, and anti-Semitism – which she rejected after
1918.

Behm won great respect for her buildup of the RFA and her work in the

election campaign for the National Assembly. At the first national party conven-
tion in July 1919, she was given the honor to report on the DNVP’s work in the
National Assembly right after the initial address by chairman Oskar Hergt. Behm
pointed out the historic importance of that moment: “For the first time in
Germany, possibly for the first time in the whole world, a woman stands up to
report on the work of a parliamentary group.”

Behm enlisted dedicated helpers, above all Margot von Bonin, a wealthy

landowner, Countess Emma von Westarp, the niece of Kuno von Westarp, the
leader of the Conservative Party, and Margarethe Wolff, the secretary of Behm’s
Union of Female Home Workers. Together they designed pamphlets and skill-
fully organized party propaganda toward women. Behm wrote to a myriad of
bourgeois women’s organizations and to Protestant ministers’ wives all across
Germany to spread DNVP propaganda and enlist help at the local level. Having
only a small number of trained female speakers at its disposition, the RFA relied
heavily on door-to-door propaganda by women who sympathized with it. Behm
further initiated the foundation of Provincial Women’s Committees and local
women’s committees in some areas. Whereas a nationwide net of these commit-
tees materialized only slowly between 1918 and 1923, Behm’s pleas to women’s
organizations and the wives of ministers elicited a strong and immediate
response from Protestant women, above all from the DEF and its umbrella organ-

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ization, the VEFD. The main messages of the RFA’s propaganda must have
resonated with these groups: by working and voting for the DNVP, women would
help defend the church against the anticlerical policies of the socialists, protect
family and marriage against disintegration, and ensure that Germany would
adopt a proud and defiant posture toward its enemies.

The chaotic events in

early Soviet Russia and the anticlerical policy of Prussia’s education minister,
Independent Socialist Adolf Hoffmann, seemed to endow these messages with
credibility. Right-wing newspapers supported the propaganda of the RFA by
publishing summonses to women to vote and by giving practical suggestions on
how women could interrupt their work and vote even in remote places. Some
newspapers even suggested that landowners organize common trips to ballot
offices to ensure that all rural workers, particularly the women, would vote.

was essential to convince conservative women that they had to make use of the
right to vote even if they had opposed it so far. The DNVP propaganda never
tired of stressing that, given the threat to Church and the family, voting was a
duty, not a right, for the German woman.

Altogether, the RFA of the DNVP

under Behm engineered an impressive propaganda campaign and soon became
the envy of other parties.

The party’s guidelines for the elections, released on 27 December 1918,

reflected the influence of Behm and her staff. Women now received a warmer
welcome than the founding manifesto had afforded them: “Through her
admirable wartime performance the German woman has gained a full right to
cooperation in the shaping of our public life. We heartily welcome the woman,
with equal rights, as a co-worker for the recovery of our people.” The guidelines
defined the religious and moral education of the young as women’s primary task
but also demanded protection for professional women.

By justifying women’s

rights with their performance in social services during the war, the DNVP
rejected the idea of the suffrage as a natural right of women. Behm must not have
objected to this, since she sat on the executive party board that released this
proclamation, and party leaders tended to leave the formulation of clauses on
women to the RFA.

The elections to the National Assembly appeared to reward the DNVP

women’s efforts. Particularly encouraging were the estimates on women’s voting
behavior, generalized from a number of districts with separate voting. They indi-
cated that the DNVP had received a majority of its votes from female voters,
whereas the socialist parties had fared poorly among women.

To the relief of

all bourgeois parties, the SPD and Independent Socialists together received only
45.5 percent of the vote. Without women’s suffrage, Joachim Hofmann-Göttig
argues, the socialist parties might have won an absolute majority tempting them
to impose a socialist rather than democratic political system on Germany. Yet,
even if these calculations are correct, a common policy of SPD and Independent

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Socialists was hardly a practical possibility any more after police under SPD
orders had shot at workers associated with the Independent Socialists in the
weeks preceding the elections.

The disproportionate support of women for the

DNVP (and, to a lesser extent, the DVP) set a pattern that was confirmed at every
major election for the national parliament and the Prussian state diet. The surplus
of women’s votes for the DVP and DNVP was highest in Protestant regions,
whereas both parties tended to attract slightly fewer women than men in Catholic
regions, where the Center Party or BVP were strong.

Given that women’s

participation in elections was – except for January 1919 – significantly lower
than men’s, the share of the DVP and DNVP in the general women’s vote must
have been considerably higher than their share in the general male vote. This
provoked much irony in the right-wing press, because the party most instru-
mental in introducing women’s suffrage, the SPD, fared poorly among women,
whereas the parties least supportive of women’s suffrage, such as the DNVP,
benefited most from it. It was also noted that the Democratic Party did not
receive a significant surplus of female votes, although it liked to call itself the
“Party of Women” because the most famous representatives of the BDF,
including Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, supported it. With glee, the right-
wing Deutsche Tageszeitung wrote in 1924: “The electoral statistics illuminated
the family life of the left-wing parties in a rather funny way. The members of the
majority SPD and even more the Communists had to realize with anguish that a
large number of their wives had committed ‘political adultery’ and cuckolded
them most wonderfully.”

The newspaper ignored, however, that the massive

surplus of women in the German population made it impossible to ascribe with
certainty the strong women’s vote for the right-wing parties to the wives of left-
wing men.

The elections of 1919 brought three DNVP women into the National

Assembly: Margarethe Behm herself, Anna von Gierke, and Käthe Schirmacher.
Von Gierke (1874–1943) was perhaps the most outspoken DNVP woman in the
National Assembly. She was well known as director of a model youth institution
in Charlottenburg, a town incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920.

In the

National Assembly, she fought for the recognition of housekeeping as a profes-
sion and addressed an impressive range of social policy questions. The DNVP
lost a versatile and eloquent politician when she left the party in response to its
anti-Semitism in 1920 (her mother was from a Jewish family that had converted
to Protestantism).

Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930) was an unusual figure in

DNVP politics. Coming from a wealthy merchant family from the east German
port city Danzig (today Gdansk, Poland), she had studied French literature at the
Sorbonne in Paris and later at the University of Zurich, where she received her
doctorate in 1895. Schirmacher had played a prominent role in the left-wing
women’s movement before 1914, serving for many years as secretary of the

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International Council of Women, and she maintained a lesbian relationship with
Klara Schleker, who was a DNVP deputy in the state diet of Mecklenburg-
Strelitz in 1919–20.

After 1900, Schirmacher had begun to embrace an increas-

ingly fanatical and racist German nationalism even while maintaining her
commitment to women’s rights. At the same time, she expressed hatred of
democracy, whose weakness and decadence she claimed to have observed in
France. Schirmacher’s move to the right isolated her in the women’s movement,
so that she had resigned, or been urged to resign, from all of her positions in
international and German women’s organizations by 1914.

During the war, she

called for a compulsory women’s service that would drill young women in the art
of housework, gardening, and childcare and instill strict discipline and nationalist
values in them.

When her home town was threatened by Poland at the end of

the war, Schirmacher rallied Danzig’s German majority behind a posture of
national defense and joined the DNVP. Her energetic work won her instant admi-
ration, and she was elected as a representative of West Prussia to the National
Assembly in 1919. In the National Assembly, Schirmacher spoke mostly on
foreign policy issues.

Her stay in the national parliament was cut short because

she did not receive a place on the party ballot for the Reichstag elections in June
1920. Her electoral district (Danzig-West Prussia) had ceased to exist because of
Germany’s territorial losses in the Treaty of Versailles, and the party leadership
did not offer her a promising spot elsewhere. Her feminist past may have influ-
enced this decision.

Schirmacher remained active, however, in the RFA and

other party committees until her death in 1930. In the elections to the provisional
Prussian Landtag on 26 January 1919, only one DNVP woman was elected:
Elisabeth Spohr. Spohr was a teacher who addressed a broad range of topics in
parliament, ranging from education to the status of midwives. She remained in
the Prussian Landtag without interruption until its replacement by an all-male
Nazi body in the spring of 1933.

After these elections the DNVP developed statutes that refined the structure

and purpose of the RFA. Its chair automatically received a seat in the executive
board of the party.

According to the 1925 budget, the administrative leader

(Geschäftsführerin) of the RFA got a yearly salary of 3816 marks, a substantial
salary. Also salaried were an archivist (1920 marks), a secretary (Schreibkraft;
1320 marks), and an auxiliary secretary (912 marks). For its administrative needs
the RFA could draw on 1200 marks per year.

The RFA also included ten to

twenty members who were paid from a different budget or performed voluntary
service. The RFA chair was probably paid as a member of the party’s executive
board, whereas some RFA members were parliamentarians and thus had an inde-
pendent income as long as they retained their seats. Other RFA members were
paid by related organizations to which they belonged (for example the Union of
Female Home Workers). After a while, the RFA constituted a larger committee

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with less executive power, the “Enlarged National Women’s Committee”
(Erweiterter RFA), to which it invited representatives of the provincial women’s
committees. To expedite policy decisions, the RFA also formed a smaller execu-
tive committee of eight members.

A proclamation of the RFA from January

1919 named twenty-three members, but the size of the RFA varied in the
following years.

The RFA occupied a room in the party headquarters in Berlin.

The members of its executive committee were in almost daily contact whenever
the Reichstag or the Prussian Landtag were in session. Usually the RFA organ-
ized a national women’s meeting preceding the annual national party conference,
and a leading RFA member spoke on the status of women’s work in the party
during the national party conference.

According to its statutes, the primary tasks of the RFA were to organize prop-

aganda among women and to advise the party leadership in all matters
concerning women and children.

The RFA was also to act as a coordinator of

similar activities by regional and local women’s committees, whose buildup it
had to encourage and supervise. Thus every DNVP organization in a Prussian
province or non-Prussian state should receive a Provincial Women’s Committee
(Landesfrauenausschuss, LFA), every district a Kreisfrauenausschuss, and every
town or village an Ortsfrauenausschuss. By analogy to the RFA, these regional
and local women’s committees were funded by the corresponding party organi-
zation, to which they were accountable. The chair of the women’s committee
always had a seat and a vote on the board of the corresponding party organiza-
tion. But the women’s committees also were responsible for keeping in touch
with the women’s committees on other levels and, in particular, with the RFA.

They were expected to subscribe to the newsletter of the women in the party,
which the RFA began to publish in September 1919 as Frauenkorrespondenz der
DNVP, after 1925 as Frauenkorrespondenz für Nationale Zeitungen, and from
April 1931 on as Die Deutschnationale Frau. Thus all women’s committees in
the DNVP were integrated into two different structures, a horizontal party struc-
ture including the men, and a vertical structure of women’s committees from the
local level up to the RFA. The primary allegiance of the local and regional
women’s committees was not to the RFA but to the corresponding party organi-
zation, which was usually dominated by men. The party statutes of 1920 stated
that LFA members were to be elected by the general party organization in the
area, the Landesverband. The same applied to women’s committees on the local
level. The chair of the RFA was appointed by the party’s executive board, but the
RFA co-opted its members and was not responsible to the party at large for its
selections.

This structure treated the women like an economic or professional interest

group in the party. The workers, for example, also had their national committee
(with a slightly smaller budget than the RFA), their local committees, and their

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newsletter.

From the start, DNVP women doubted that this structure was

adequate for the representation of women’s interests. Women, for one thing, were
economically and professionally about as diverse as men. As RFA member and
Reichstag deputy (1920–1932) Paula Mueller-Otfried stated, a female factory
worker would not likely consider herself represented by a female academic in
parliament.

It made little sense subsuming these groups under one women’s

structure while men received a say in all the other committees organized
according to economic and professional interests. The DNVP leadership did
make some concessions to this concern by stating that women should belong to
all party institutions “in adequate numbers” and by granting women representa-
tion in the DNVP Professions Committee, which had subcommittees for nurses,
midwives, housewives, female domestic servants, and other professions domi-
nated by women. Incidentally, the first chair of the subcommittee for housewives
was party chairman Oskar Hergt!

Yet “adequate numbers” was an elusive

formulation, and the problem remained that the few women with seats in parlia-
ments could hardly cater to the diversity of women’s professional groups. A
woman writing to the DNVP program committee thus argued that, if indeed
separate structures were to be founded (which she did not consider a good solu-
tion), the party should be consistent and set up women’s structures fully parallel
to men’s.

This proposal aimed at building gender equality into the party rather

than making the women’s committees an appendix of a party that as a whole was
still dominated by men. Some local women’s committees that had formed spon-
taneously at the first hour even tried to resist their inclusion in the local party
organization. The very dynamic Dresden women’s committee, for example,
protested that the local DNVP section was too passive and that the women’s
committee would do better work if it remained independent.

Other party members, however, argued against separate structures altogether

and suggested that, given the dismal state of Germany overall, the emphasis
should be on gender cooperation rather than on separate organization, which to
them suggested rivalry. Women in the Berlin-Steglitz section of the DNVP
refused to form a women’s committee because they had worked so well together
with the men that they saw no need for dividing duties and for meeting sepa-
rately.

When the DNVP section of the Potsdam district held its yearly confer-

ence in 1922, the LFA Potsdam declined to hold the customary women’s meeting
before the conference. Although the LFA admitted that there were important
issues to be discussed by women, it declared its preference for concentrating on
the essential questions of the German people and for making a statement on the
unity of men and women in the party.

Although these women felt that their

concerns would be taken seriously in the party even without women’s commit-
tees, anti-feminism was also a motivation for rejecting a separate women’s struc-
ture. Major Olberg, one of the people involved in the drafting of the party

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statutes, suggested that women’s committees should be called recruiting commit-
tees (Werbeausschüsse) and that they should do no more than devise propaganda
strategies for women and train female speakers. The women’s committees thus
would belong to the party’s general propaganda division and not be tempted to
act as a vehicle for women’s interests.

Although Olberg’s ideas were not

adopted by the party board, the circumstances of the elections to the National
Assembly reveal that the RFA of the DNVP came into being primarily as a prop-
aganda office charged with mobilizing as many conservative women as quickly
as possible. Early party documents typically align the RFA with the DNVP’s
Press Committee and thus reveal that the party leaders considered propaganda
toward women as the main purpose of the RFA.

That the women’s committee structure prevailed had to do with the fact that it

already existed in many places and had done good work during the election
campaigns in January 1919. Behm, who continued to cooperate closely with the
male party leaders, considered the women’s committees a good solution for the
time being. Given that women had not voted before and were new party members,
committees devising propaganda specifically for women and coordinating activi-
ties with those of sympathetic women’s organizations made sense. A memo-
randum on party structures from early 1919 recognized the success of the
women’s committees in spite of resistance (supposedly from men), but stressed
that regional and local women’s committees that still worked independently
should be tied to the regular party organization.

The leading women, for their

part, tried to invalidate the objections of the men. Margot von Bonin, the vice-
chair of the RFA, suggested at a party meeting in early February 1919 that women
should not, in principle, be organized in separate groups, but that the formation of
women’s committees was necessary primarily for propaganda reasons. The RFA
even encouraged the women’s committees to invite men to their meetings.

After the elections of January 1919, the RFA focused on the buildup of

women’s committees at all levels. The party newsletters steadily reported the
foundation of new women’s committees, a process that was interrupted by the
inflation in 1923 but resumed in 1924, albeit at a slower pace. A clear picture is
difficult to convey because women’s committees in many places faltered with the
death or moving away of the chair and had to be founded again later on. Many
women’s committees may only have existed on paper, and sometimes men
headed the local or regional women’s committee. Wolfgang Kapp, for example,
was listed as chair of the East Prussian women’s committee in early 1919 before
becoming a putschist a year later – a unique career for the chair of a women’s
committee!

Specific information exists on the Prussian province Pomerania,

one of the regions where the DNVP was strongest. In Pomerania, 233 women’s
committees existed in September 1920, and in August 1921 the number had
almost doubled (430). This extraordinary success was ascribed to Hannah

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Brandt, the chair of the Pomeranian LFA. Brandt later put her organizational
talent at the disposal of the RFA in Berlin.

In Bavaria, where the DNVP (called

the Bayerische Mittelpartei, BMP) was weak, the buildup of women’s commit-
tees proceeded much more slowly, so that Lenore Kühn, the editor of the DNVP
women’s newsletter and member of the RFA, decided to visit the state in late
1919 to identify the problems and to encourage progress. The situation was
depressing. Some women’s committees had been formed, but many had become
dormant and were presided over by men after the leading women had withdrawn.
In some places, the wives of male party leaders tried to build up a women’s
committee, but the problem was that most women in the Bavarian DNVP were
either not interested in becoming active or considered themselves unfit for polit-
ical work. They called for speakers and organizers from Berlin.

The RFA never-

theless drew an optimistic picture in August 1922 after having gathered data on
the women’s organization in all parts of Germany. Thirty-eight Provincial
Women’s Committees (LFAs) had been constituted, covering the entire country.
A total of 1,900 women’s committees existed at all levels, but, as the examples
of Pomerania and Bavaria show, the distribution was very uneven. In addition,
the DNVP had 2,748 Vertrauensfrauen (women of confidence) carrying out
some of the tasks of a local women’s committee where none existed. There was
a tendency for the women’s committee structure to be best developed in those
areas where the party itself was strongest. Annagrete Lehmann (1877–1954),
Behm’s successor as chair of the RFA since February 1923, used this correlation
later to claim that women’s work benefited the party, since the DNVP was
strongest where women were most active. But she could not prove that she did
not invert causality.

The RFA of the DNVP took its propaganda and education mission very seri-

ously. It built up a file containing the addresses of sympathetic women’s organi-
zations and women, distributed blueprint speeches to members of provincial and
local women’s committees, lent out folders with materials on specific political
topics, and organized conferences and meetings for women in the party.

The

RFA further organized political education courses, which enlisted the elite of the
party (men and women) as speakers and focused on political organization skills
as well as nationalist ideology.

Until August 1922, eleven provincial women’s

committees had offered training workshops with practical exercises on speech
and the running of political assemblies.

In September 1919 the RFA began

publishing the Frauenkorrespondenz, while continuing to print most of its
contents in the official party newsletter. The Frauenkorrespondenz was sent to
women’s committees, individual subscribers, and to newspapers, which were
encouraged to print its articles. As editor of the Frauenkorrespondenz, the RFA
enlisted the highly able Lenore Kühn. Born in 1878 in Riga to a Baltic German
family, Kühn had a PhD in philosophy from the University of Freiburg (1907)

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and was a freelance author and journalist. She was an excellent pianist and
acquired some expertise in archeology and physics.

Kühn was the key figure

in the DNVP women’s publications in the early Weimar years. In 1921 she began
publishing an intellectually more demanding DNVP women’s periodical until the
inflation forced her to give it up in 1923.

Her scandalous private life, however,

reduced her standing in the DNVP and may have influenced her decision to step
down as editor of the Frauenkorrespondenz in December 1923, making room for
Elisabeth Spohr. A highly attractive woman even in her mature years, Kühn had
many male admirers and a colorful private life: divorced from her first husband
in 1919, she married the painter Hermann Frobenius in 1922 but soon started a
passionate and painful liaison with an Italian nobleman, which led to her second
divorce in 1926.

The inflation in 1923 hampered the activities of the women’s committees by

exacerbating the already bad financial situation of the party. The Frauen-
korrespondenz had to make frequent pleas for rapid payment of the subscription
fees because currency depreciation made delayed payments worthless. Trains
became so expensive that many women could not afford to travel to meetings in
other towns, and the Frauenkorrespondenz had to substitute the cheap blueprint
technique for the black-and-white newspaper print in early 1923. Whereas the
Frauenkorrespondenz had appeared biweekly in 1921 and 1922 (twenty-six
times per year), the RFA had difficulties delivering it more than once a month in
1923. Only in the spring of 1924 did regular publication resume, and in 1925 the
Frauenkorrespondenz intensified the frequency of publication to twice a week
(ninety-eight issues per year).

The DVP adopted the DNVP model for the organization of women with only

minor modifications. The National Women’s Committee (RFA) of the DVP
constituted itself in the first weeks after the foundation of the party under the
leadership of Clara Mende. Mende was the key woman in the early Weimar years
that Behm was in the DNVP. Born in Erfurt (Thuringia) in 1869, she became a
teacher and was promoted to the rank of Oberlehrerin before she got married and
consequently had to leave her teaching job. While working as a housewife,
Mende fostered contacts to the National Liberal Party and the women’s move-
ment. Before the war, she was a co-founder of the German League for Women’s
Suffrage (Verein für Frauenstimmrecht) and became the chair of the women’s
committee formed by the National Liberal Party after the liberalization of the
Law of Associations in 1908. This role and her frequent contributions to the party
press established her as an important presence in the party during the First World
War. When the National Liberal Party reconstituted itself as the DVP, Mende
signed the new party’s first proclamation and became its second vice-chair in
April 1919.

She was the only female DVP representative in the National

Assembly (1919–1920) and sat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1928. Mende, who

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travelled through the entire country during election campaigns, had a reputation
as an excellent speaker and debater.

She was the mastermind behind the estab-

lishment of the DVP’s committee structure for women and acted as chair of the
RFA until 1924.

The women’s propaganda of the DVP for the elections of January 1919

stressed the same themes the DNVP addressed but presented them in a more
rational and less polemical tone.

The RFA of the DVP received room for its

communications in the party’s newsletter DVP-Nachrichtenblatt and in the daily
newspaper Nationalliberale Correspondenz, but it never published its news
independently, as the DNVP women did. Such a step was discussed in 1920 but
rejected because of financial constraints.

The chair of the RFA in the DVP was

elected by the party’s Executive Committee (Geschäftsführender Ausschuss). In
the fall of 1920 the RFA gave itself statutes that broadened membership in the
RFA approximately along the lines of the Erweiterter RFA in the DNVP: all
female DVP parliamentarians and all female DVP members on the National
Economic Council became members. Every electoral district was entitled to
name a woman as deputy to the RFA, which could offer membership to leaders
of influential women’s organizations willing to cooperate with the DVP. The RFA
also decided to invite a well-known male party member to join it. It chose the
chairman of the DVP’s Hessian section, Dr. Eduard Dingeldey, because of his
openness to women’s issues; Dingeldey, however, was overwhelmed by his other
duties and often asked to let himself be replaced by Dr. Paul Moldenhauer,
member of the DVP group in the National Assembly. Since the RFA after its
enlargement became too unwieldy, it elected a smaller Executive Committee
from its own ranks – as did the RFA of the DNVP.

The provincial sections of

the DVP were organized according to electoral districts, not provinces or federal
states as in the DNVP, and their women’s committees thus were called
Wahlkreisfrauenausschüsse (Electoral District Women’s Committees, WkFA).
This did not always make a difference, since some states and provinces were
identical with electoral districts. The statutes of the DVP women’s committees
put more emphasis on the political training of women than the DNVP’s, but the
context suggests that political training was meant primarily to enhance women’s
propaganda skills.

This was not true, however, for the political training courses of Katharina von

Oheimb, one of the DVP’s representatives in the Reichstag (1920–1924). Von
Oheimb was an unusual figure among the DVP women. She was independently
wealthy, married four times, the mother of six children, a passionate hunter, and
acquainted with leading military and political figures of the Weimar period.
Divorced from her first and third husbands, she had inherited a fortune from her
deceased second husband. In 1927 she married Siegfried von Kardorff, a DVP
Reichstag representative who had left the DNVP in protest against its anti-

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Semitic tendencies.

From the start of the Weimar Republic, Kardorff-von

Oheimb saw it as her mission to educate women for their role in politics by
offering and financing educational workshops for women politicians at her home
in Goslar (south of Braunschweig). She invited nationally known speakers from
various bourgeois parties, men and women, to lectures for her workshops. To
combat partisan spirit, the course participants were forbidden to use the names
of the German parties throughout the workshop.

Kardorff-von Oheimb thus

helped train a crowd of women politicians from the DVP and other predomi-
nantly bourgeois parties.

After the Reichstag elections of June 1920, in which the DVP tripled its share

of the vote, DVP women intensified their efforts to build up a nationwide
women’s structure. Mende and other well-known DVP women undertook many
trips across Germany to encourage the foundation of local women’s committees
– with some success.

In Silesia, where Mende had frequently spoken, the

number of women’s committees tripled between the summer of 1920 and
February 1921. Even if one should be suspicious of the RFA’s tendency to report
too optimistically (it failed to give absolute numbers for Silesia), the evidence
suggests that the women’s structure began to become denser.

Yet, the DVP

always lagged behind the DNVP: In October 1920 the RFA of the DVP was still
encouraging the formation of women’s committees in many electoral districts,
which shows that this had not yet happened consistently at a time when the
DNVP was already done with it.

At the end of 1922 the RFA sent out ques-

tionnaires to gauge the status of women’s work in the provinces. The result
showed that the DVP had 500 women’s committees altogether (compared to the
DNVP’s 1,900 in August 1922); a women’s committee (WkFA) now existed in
all but three of Germany’s thirty-five electoral districts.

As in the DNVP,

however, the women’s structure was very uneven. Whereas the women’s
committee of Schleswig-Holstein boasted 400 women’s committees at the end of
1921 (a number that seems exaggerated in the light of the RFA’s total of 500), the
province of East Prussia had reported only fifteen about a year earlier.

Problems similar to those experienced by the DNVP were common. Few women
outside the big cities agreed to do political work, and fewer yet had the qualifi-
cation to do so. In April 1922 Martha Schwarz, the secretary of the DVP’s RFA,
wrote that politically untrained women had done much damage by sending out
confusing messages on the DVP’s stands. There were not enough experienced
women politicians to train women at the local level, and a shortage of funds
stifled much local initiative (the DVP was haunted by the same financial prob-
lems as the DNVP). In 1923, the inflation further obstructed women’s work in
the DVP.

Even the most successful women’s committee of the DVP, the one in

Schleswig-Holstein, had to overcome strong resistance from women themselves
to getting involved. Otherwise its recruitment appeals to women would not have

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repeated many times over that the women’s committees were not separate polit-
ical organizations but worked for the benefit of the party as a whole. The women
leaders of Schleswig-Holstein even encouraged women to invite men to their
committees, since that would ease cooperation within the party. Given that many
women were novices to political life, the leading women asked women to follow
the lead of men in shared committees while learning to speak and think inde-
pendently in their own committees.

In spite of these problems, women joined

the DVP in great numbers from the start; at the second party meeting in October
1919 it transpired that one third of party members were women, and in the spring
of 1920 the RFA claimed that women formed the majority of DVP members
(later, however, party sources again spoke of one-third).

A picture of the structures of women’s work within the parties would be

incomplete without consideration of organizations that cooperated with the
women’s committees of the DNVP or DVP, and often both. All German bour-
geois parties had more or less formal alliances with political or economic interest
organizations, and many people from these organizations were also party
members, while their leaders received seats in the party’s parliamentary groups
and committees. A variety of organizations had such ties to the women’s commit-
tees of the DVP and DNVP. From the start, the German Evangelical Women’s
League (DEF) was one such organization, although its ties to the DNVP were
stronger than those to the DVP. When the chair of the Evangelical League, Paula
Mueller-Otfried, joined the DNVP, she created some controversy in her organi-
zation, which had pledged neutrality in party politics. But the secularization poli-
cies of the Prussian government in 1918–19 allowed the conservative DNVP to
appear as the stronger bulwark of the Evangelical Church than the liberal DVP.
Cecilie Brickenstein, a member of the Evangelical League’s national board, was
also a DNVP activist in Bremen, and Asta Rötger, Mueller-Otfried’s deputy in
Berlin, was a DNVP expert on urban women and DNVP representative in the
Berlin city parliament.

The Evangelical League’s most important contribution

to the DNVP was likely its chairperson. A grim and serious figure, Mueller-
Otfried became the longest-serving and most active Reichstag member among
the DNVP women (1920–32). Born in 1865 to the family of a high-ranking civil
servant, Mueller-Otfried became a teacher. She lived in Hanover for most of her
life and remained unmarried. As chair of the DEF since 1901, she had – like
Behm – a national reputation before joining the DNVP. She was also active in the
Conservative Party, the most important predecessor of the DNVP, and played a
leading role in the women’s committee founded by this party in 1913. To build a
conservative counterweight to the BDF, the umbrella organization of German
bourgeois women’s leagues, Mueller-Otfried helped to found a new umbrella
organization of Evangelical women’s leagues, the Vereinigung Evangelischer
Frauenverbände Deutschlands (VEFD, Union of Evangelical Women’s Leagues

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of Germany). With twenty-seven associated leagues numbering nearly two
million members, the VEFD was the largest women’s organization of the Weimar
Republic.

Its chair, Magdalene von Tiling (1877–1974), represented the DNVP

in the Prussian Landtag (1921–30) and the Reichstag (1930–33). She was a
teacher who became well known through her pedagogical and theological writ-
ings and received an honorary degree in theology.

Although the DVP did not attract the leaders of the Evangelical women’s

movement, it counted among its ranks an important woman politician who occu-
pied various posts in the hierarchy of the Evangelical Church: Elsa Matz
(1881–1959). Matz became Mende’s successor as chair of the RFA in 1924 and
sat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933, with a short interruption in 1924. Born
in the Pomeranian capital Stettin (today: Szczecin, Poland), she studied German
philology, philosophy, and history at the universities of Kiel and Berlin and grad-
uated with a PhD. Matz started her career as a teacher in Stettin, where she
achieved the prestigious rank of Oberstudiendirektorin. She became active in the
professional organization of women teachers of Pomerania, and in 1929 she was
appointed director of a high school for girls in Berlin-Charlottenburg, a wealthy
section of town.

Matz, who was involved in the DVP from the very beginning

and had a seat on the DVP’s Party Board (Parteivorstand) for most of the Weimar
years, was the most energetic and active Reichstag representative among the
DVP women. She addressed almost every topic from Church and education
issues to sports and the international traffic of women.

Other organizations with ties to both parties were nationalist leagues such as

the Navy League of German Women, the Women’s League of the German
Colonial Society, the German Women’s League (Deutscher Frauenbund), and the
women’s branch of the League for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum
im Ausland). Women from both parties were represented in the leadership of
these organizations and attended their conferences. Some nationalist leagues
were even founded by women from the two parties during the Weimar Republic,
such as the German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie (Deutscher
Frauenausschuss zur Bekämpfung der Schuldlüge, DFBS). Clara Mende was
involved, and the DNVP, which reported almost every meeting of this organiza-
tion, was represented by Annagrete Lehmann, deputy in the Prussian Landtag
1921–28 and Behm’s successor as chair of the RFA. Some women from the
Center Party and the Democratic Party participated half-heartedly; the BDF
initially became a member but soon left the organization, which it considered
hyper-nationalistic.

Another league supported by the National Women’s

Committees of both parties was the German Young Women’s Service (Deutscher
Jungmädchendienst), a nationalist and conservative group that set up work
camps for young women in which it emphasized service, obedience, and self-
sacrificing nationalism. Both parties also had ties to the BDF, but those of the

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DVP were stronger, as indicated by the role of Emma Ender, who represented the
DVP in the diet of Hamburg (1919–24) and was chair of the BDF from 1924 to
1931.

Although the DNVP sent representatives to the BDF, it was initially very

critical of it and considered it a puppet of the Democratic Party.

This criticism

softened as the BDF moved to the right and gave the DVP and conservative
organizations more say, but it never disappeared. Both parties, moreover, had
strong ties to the housewives’ leagues, a conservative force in the BDF until they
left it in 1932.

Altogether, the women’s committee structure, as it was adopted by the DNVP

and DVP, represented a compromise. Women were organized separately but with
strong ties to their corresponding party organization, to which they were prima-
rily responsible and upon which they depended financially. The parties’ interests
were well served by offering women special committees charged with attracting a
new voter group and with communicating its interests to the party at large. Any
attempt to create parallel women’s and men’s committees on all levels, however,
would have encountered resistance from most men and many women in both
parties, not to speak of the difficulties arising from the lack of politically trained
women and the state of party finances. The women’s committee structure eased
communication between the national women’s leaders and grass-roots women,
and it gave women a separate space in which they were able to discuss their ideas
independently. By the same token, it also helped to limit women’s influence and
to consign their political activities to specific sectors. In 1928, the women’s
activist and BDF member Agnes Zahn-von Harnack observed that women had
difficulties making a career in the parties because they were too closely tied to the
women’s committee structure, whose influence was narrowly circumscribed. To
men, in contrast, a broad range of committees was open.

It certainly was an

injustice to treat the majority of voters for both parties as one single interest group
on a par with specific male or mixed groups, such as farmers and artisans, indus-
trialists, and blue-collar workers. Yet, the women themselves rarely objected to
their consignment to specific sectors and were afraid that in mixed committees
they would soon leave initiative and leadership to men, whereas their own
committees might better prepare them for a political role. Even when they tried to
build up a power position within the parties, they usually claimed rights only in
the realms they considered as women’s spheres and did not demand that women
should have a say in all matters. A motion DVP women submitted to the first
national party conference, for example, demanded that the party leadership
support women’s rights and women’s committees and request a memorandum
from the RFA on all issues of concern to women. But the DVP women did not
object when no vote on the motion took place and when Stresemann, as party
chairman, suggested that the motion be made into a mere recommendation for the
party board. This decision then received unanimous approval.

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The women’s committee structure in the DNVP and DVP was more elabo-

rate than in the other non-socialist parties. The Center Party developed some-
thing similar to the RFA only in 1922 (Reichsfrauenbeirat). Earlier, the
Catholic Women’s League of Germany (Katholischer deutscher Frauenbund,
KDF) had taken over important aspects of women’s work on all levels of the
party; Hedwig Dransfeld, its chair, had a seat in the Reichstag and on the party
board.

In the Democratic Party, women created their own RFA as early as the

DNVP and DVP but built up a much weaker structure of provincial and local
women’s committees and relied more on Vertrauensfrauen and random grass-
roots activity. It is unclear whether this was by choice or necessity, but it is
plausible that the Democratic Party’s dramatic losses after the elections to the
National Assembly dried up the resources for a more ambitious women’s struc-
ture before it had really gotten under way.

Many women’s committees in the

Democratic Party, unlike those in the DVP and DNVP, financed themselves. A
report on the south German women’s activities of the Democratic Party from
November 1919 stresses that only the Bavarian women’s groups of that party
received funding from the local party organization.

Their relative independ-

ence may have given the women’s committees of the Democratic Party more
latitude in pressing for women’s demands. In general, the women from the
Democratic Party put more emphasis on women’s rights than their sisters on
the right did. DDP member Regine Deutsch, for example, demanded that the
Democratic Party’s program allow women to be admitted to all party commit-
tees in proportion to their share of membership and wanted to commit her party
to fighting the vagueness of the passage on equal rights of men and women in
the Weimar Constitution, which granted equality only “in principle.”

Other

women from the Democratic Party stressed that the suffrage was neither a gift
nor an imposed obligation but simply a natural right, an argument rarely heard
in DVP and DNVP circles.

Notes

1. Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National

Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2001); Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”,
chapter 2; Süchting-Hänger, “ ‘Gleichgroße mut’ge Helferinnen’ in der
weiblichen Gegenwelt: Der Vaterländische Frauenverein und die
Politisierung konservativer Frauen 1890–1914.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation,
Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der
Moderne. (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000).

2. Roger Chickering, “ ‘Casting Their Gaze More Broadly’: Women’s Patriotic

Activism in Imperial Germany.” Past and Present 118 (1988): 156–85; Lora

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Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1844–1945. (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 2001). Ilka Riemann, “ ‘Er mit der Waffe,
sie mit Herz und Hand’: Die Rolle der Frauenvereine in der Sozialpolitik,
insbesondere der Vaterländischen Frauenvereine.” In Jutta Dalhoff, Uschi
Frey, and Ingrid Schöll, eds., Frauenmacht in der Geschichte (Düsseldorf:
Schwann, 1986).

3. Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party

System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988), pp. 17–22; Werner Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei
1918–1924 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1956), pp. 7–50; Dennis Paul Walker, “The
German Nationalist People’s Party: The Conservative Dilemma in the
Weimar Republic.” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979): 627–47;
Lewis Hertzman, “The Founding of the German National People’s Party
(DVNP), November 1918–January 1919.” Journal of Modern History 30
(1958): 24–36, and Hertzman, DNVP: Right-Wing Opposition in the Weimar
Republic, 1918–1924 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963),
chapter 3.

4. Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy,

1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 142–6 and
184–5; Renate Pore, A Conflict of Interest: Women in German Social
Democracy, 1919–1933, Contributions in Women’s Studies (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 20; Werner Thönnessen, The Emancipation of
Women: The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German Social
Democracy 1863–1933. Trans. Joris de Bres (London: Pluto, 1973).

5. For the Catholic women’s movement, see Gisela Breuer, Frauenbewegung

im Katholizismus: Der Katholische Frauenbund 1903–1918 (Frankfurt and
New York: Campus, 1998), and Birgit Sack, Zwischen religiöser Bindung
und moderner Gesellschaft: Katholische Frauenbewegung und politische
Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (1918/19–1933) (Münster: Waxmann,
1998); and Sack, “Katholizismus und Nation: Der katholische Frauenbund.”
In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und
Nationalismus in der Moderne. Frankfurt (Main): Campus, 2000.

6. “Aufruf der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Liebe, Deutschnationale

Volkspartei, pp. 107–8.

7. Margarethe Behm, “Wie kam es doch!” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 49, 6

December 1928. For a detailed description of the RFA’s constitution and
first activities, see Süchting-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”, pp.
134–49.

8. Emma von Westarp, “Margarethe Behms Lebensgang,” and Paula Mueller-

Otfried, “Margarethe Behm im Parlament,” both in: Frauenkorrespondenz
11, no. 32, 8 August 1929. On Behm’s rejection of anti-Semitism, see Jan

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Striesow, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Völkisch-Radikalen
1918–1922. 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 114, 121,
and 128.

9. “Parteitag 1919,” special issue of Die Post, July 1919, p. 2.

10. Margarethe Behm, “Wie kam es doch!”; Scheck, “German Conservatism

and Female Political Activitism in the Early Weimar Republic,” pp. 41–4;
Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, p. 36. For a summary and critique of
the DNVP’s propaganda in the early Weimar Republic, see Sneeringer,
Winning Women’s Votes, pp. 42–51.

11. See, for example “Die deutsche Frau in der neuen Staatsordnung,” Deutsche

Tageszeitung 26, no. 3, 2 January 1919, and the November and December
1918 issues of the Neue Preußische Zeitung (Kreuz-Zeitung), particularly
nos. 582, 607–8, 610, 637.

12. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” pp. 43–4, and, for propaganda materials,

BA Koblenz, ZSG 1–44 (DNVP), particularly vols. 8 and 11, as well as
GStA Berlin, XII, IV, vols 176–78.

13. “Aufruf des Vorstandes der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Liebe,

Deutschnationale Volkspartei, pp. 109–12.

14. Scheck, “German Conservatism,” p. 44. Joachim Hofmann-Göttig,

Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel: 70 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht in
Deutschland (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986), pp. 28–9. See also
Annagrete Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der deutschnationalen
Frauenarbeit.” In Max Weiß, ed., Der nationale Wille. (Essen: Wilhelm
Kamp, 1928), p. 321; Max Weiß, “Organisation.” In idem, ed., Der
Nationale Wille, p. 371.

15. Hofmann-Göttig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel, pp. 28–9.
16. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 81–5.

See also Gabriele Bremme, Die politische Rolle der Frau in Deutschland
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 25–30, 70–1, 243, and
248, and Hofmann-Göttig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel, pp. 28–35.

17. “Die gehörnten Linksparteien,” Deutsche Tageszeitung, 16 April 1924, in

BA Berlin, Reichslandbund Pressearchiv, 7988, p. 3.

18. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 215–28; Marie Baum,
Anna von Gierke: Ein Lebensbild (Weinheim and Berlin: Julius Betz, 1954).

19. Hildegard Goetting, Deutschnationale Vertretung der Fraueninteressen in

der Deutschen Verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung. Deutsch-
nationale Flugschrift, 91. Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle,
1921, pp. 4–9 and 11; GStA Berlin, XII, IV, vol. 173. Von Gierke later made
a futile attempt to start a women’s party in Berlin; in 1930 she ran for the
Reichstag on the ballot of the Conservative People’s Party (Konservative

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Volkspartei), a group of former DNVP members alienated by Hugenberg,
but she was not elected.

20. Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher, pp. 26 and 79; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women:

The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997), p. 96. See also Johanna Gehmacher, “Der andere
Ort der Welt. Käthe Schirmachers Auto/Biographie der Nation.” In Sophia
Kemlein, ed., Geschlecht und Nationalismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa
1848–1918. (Osnabrück: fibre, 2000), pp. 99–112.

21. Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher, pp. 66–8.
22. Käthe Schirmacher, Frauendienstpflicht. Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1918,

p. 6.

23. See below, Chapter 7.
24. See Raffael Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi Right,” in Paola Bacchetta

and Margaret Power, eds., Right-Wing Women Across the Globe (London and
New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 146–8.

25. Spohr, by the way, also lost her electoral district of 1919 (Posen), but the

party leadership offered her a good alternative. She was not burdened by a
feminist past. See “Deutschnationale Frauenversammlung,” Der Partei-
freund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Landesverband
Ostpreußen 3, no. 35, 28 September 1922.

26. The statutes do not say how the chair of the RFA was determined, but when

Behm stepped down in early 1923, her successor, Annagrete Lehmann, was
appointed by the party’s executive board. See Lehmann, “Ziel und
Entwicklung der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” p. 329.

27. “Haushaltsplan für das Jahr 1925,” in Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv

Osnabrück, Erw. C. 1, DNVP, no. 17, vol. 2, pp. 17–18.

28. Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung deutschnationaler Frauenarbeit,” pp.

320–3; Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, p. 36.

29. “Ihr deutschen Frauen in Stadt und Land!” in Wahl-Zeitung des Deutsch-

nationalen Volksvereins Greifswald 1, 8 January 1919 [printed 1918].

30. In the SPD, the male party leadership had forbidden the women to meet

before the general party conference because they feared that women would
thus have an opportunity to formulate demands that they could present to the
general party conference. See Pore, A Conflict of Interest, pp. xvi and 59.

31. “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,

DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 31–6; “Frauenfragen,” in Max Weiß, ed. Politisches
Handwörterbuch (Führer-ABC). Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-
vertriebsstelle, 1928, p. 209. Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, (p. 36)
uses slightly different names for the committees that were maybe used by
the DNVP activists whom he interviewed in the 1950s. My information
follows the contemporary documents.

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32. “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,

DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 31–6; Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, pp. 124–5. For
the structure of the DNVP, see Liebe, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, pp. 34–9.

33. “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Liebe, Deutschnationale

Volkspartei, pp. 124–5.

34. “Haushaltsplan für das Jahr 1925,” in Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv

Osnabrück, Erw. C. 1, DNVP, no. 17, vol. 2, pp. 17–18.

35. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Frauenlisten oder Mitarbeit in der Partei,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 22, 10 July 1920.

36. This may be explained by the argument, widespread among DNVP women

in this period, that housewives and mothers should ideally stay at home. For
Hergt’s chairmanship in the subcommittee, see Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no.
6, 4 December 1920. See also “Satzung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”
in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, p. 32.

37. Frau C. Rentsch, “Entwurf zur Organisation einer Partei,” in BA Berlin-

Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 160–1.

38. BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 485, p. 93.
39. Meißner to Behm, 14 March 1919, BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 486,

pp. 25–6.

40. Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 12, 4 March 1922.
41. Major Olberg, “Zur Frage der Organisation der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 144–5.

42. See the documents quoted in Weiß, “Organisation,” p. 367.
43. “Die Aufgaben der Partei,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp.

183–93.

44. “Bericht über den Verbandsvertretertag in Berlin, 7./8. Februar 1919,” in BA

Berlin-Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 1, pp. 199–200; “Tagung des erweiterten
R.F.A. der Dn. Vp.,” Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 4,
no. 284, 3 December 1921.

45. See list of the Landesverband Ostpreußen, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,

DNVP, vol. 1, p. 104. Kapp had built up the Fatherland Party in 1917–18,
and this party helped mobilize many nationalist women. See Heinz
Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei: Die nationale Rechte am Ende des
Kaiserreiches (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1997), pp. 184–5.

46. Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 1, 18 September 1920; Frauenkorrespondenz 2,

no. 23, 20 August 1921.

47. “Bericht über den Stand der Frauenausschüsse der deutschnationalen

Volksvereine (Ortsgruppen der bayr. Mittelpartei),” in BA Berlin-
Lichterfelde, DNVP, vol. 26, pp. 163–71.

48. Annagrete Lehmann, “Aus der Arbeit unserer Landesfrauenausschüsse,”

Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 8, 15 July 1931.

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49. Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der Deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” pp.

322–3.

50. See, for example, the report on one such course in Frauenkorrespondenz 2,

no. 2, 2 October 1920.

51. “Deutschnat. Frauenarbeit im Lande,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 23, 23

August 1922.

52. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 72 (Autobiographische Lebensläufe und

Werke) and vol. 77 (Lebenslauf in Jahrzehnten). See also the extensive biog-
raphical information in Christiane Streubel and Gregor Pickro, eds.,
Nachlass Lenore Kühn (1878–1955). Findbuch des Bundesarchivs Koblenz.
Koblenz, 2002, pp. XI-LXII.

53. Elisabeth Spohr, “An unsere Leserinnen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 13, no. 13,

26 March 1931. The newsletter founded by Lenore Kühn in 1921 was called
Die Deutschnationale Frau and should not be confused with the official
DNVP women’s periodical published under the same name from 1931 to
1933.

54. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 8 (diary 1921–22), entries of 10 June

1921 and 22 June 1921. See also vol. 72 (Autobiographische Lebensläufe
und Werke) and vol. 77 (Lebenslauf in Jahrzehnten).

55. For the difficulties during the inflation of 1923, see for example Lehmann,

“Ziel und Entwicklung der Deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” pp. 328–9.

56. Eberhard Kolb and Ludwig Richter, Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer

Republik: Die Führungsgremien der Deutschen Volkspartei, 1918–1933
(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1999, vol. 1), p. 36.

57. See the notes on her trips in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 20, 20 May 1920.
58. M.S. [Martha Schwarz], “Tagung des Reichsfrauenausschusses,” NLC 51,

no. 113, 10 July 1924.

59. “Was will die Deutsche Volkspartei?” in GStA Berlin-Dahlem, XII, IV, vol.

157 (DVP, 1919 Erstaufrufe u. a.). See also vol. 158 (DVP, 1919, Wahl zur
Nationalversammlung am 19. January 1919). For a more detailed discussion
of DVP women’s propaganda, see Sneeringer, pp. 30–4.

60. “Sitzung des RFA,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 16, 22 April 1920.
61. Clara Mende, “Zusammensetzung der Aufgaben des Reichsfrauen-

ausschusses,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 44, 4 November 1920. See also
the lists of RFA members in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt vol. 2, no. 1, 2 January
1920 and no. 18, 6 May 1920. At this time the RFA had twenty members.

62. For examples see Elisabeth Cimbal, “Die Frauenorganisation der Deutschen

Volkspartei in Schleswig-Holstein,” Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei
Schleswig-Holstein 1, no. 12, 15 August 1920; “Aus der praktischen
Vereinsarbeit. Frauenausschüsse,” Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei
Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 12, 7 July 1920; and “Aus der praktischen

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Vereinsarbeit: Tätigkeit der Frauenausschüsse,” Mitteilungen Deutsche
Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 13, 21 July 1920. See also Kolb and
Richter, eds., Nationalliberale Politik in der Weimarer Republik, p. 388
(meeting of the DVP Executive Board of 19 October 1920); Emma Ender,
“Anregungen für die Arbeit der Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
1, no. 9, 27 November 1919; “Arbeitsprogramm für die Frauenausschüsse,”
DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 42, 21 October 1920.

63. Kardorff-von Oheimb, Politik und Lebensbeichte (Tübingen: Hopfer, 1965),

pp. 74–80 and 94–5.

64. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb (N 1039), vols. 25

and 37.

65. See, for example, DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 45, 11 November 1920.
66. DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 5, 3 February 1921.
67. “Aus den Frauenausschüssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 3, 15 January

1920.

68. “Volksparteiliche Frauenarbeit 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 5, 2

March 1923.

69. “Aus dem Geschäftsbericht der Gesamtpartei,” Mitteilungen Deutsche

Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 24, 23 December 1921; “Gründung
des Wahlkreisfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußens,”
Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 9, 15 December
1920.

70. Martha Schwarz, “Organisationsarbeit der Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

3, no. 14, 7 April 1922; “Finanzfragen der Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-
Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 2, 19 January 1923.

71. “Aus der praktischen Vereinsarbeit: Frauenausschüsse,” Mitteilungen

Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 12, 7 July 1920; “Aus der
praktischen Parteiarbeit. Tätigkeit der Frauenausschüsse,” Mitteilungen
Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 13, 21 July 1920; and “Die
Frauenorganisation der Deutschen Volkspartei in Schleswig-Holstein,”
Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 1, no. 12, 15 August
1920.

72. Clara Mende, “Frauenarbeit in der Partei,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 2, 8

January 1920; “Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen
Volkspartei am 18., 19. u. 20. Oktober 1919,” p. 59; “Das Wort der Frau
während der Wahlvorbereitung” [by Emma Stropp], DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
2, no. 9, May 1920.

73. On Brickenstein, see Hannelore Cyrus et al., eds., Bremer Frauen von A bis

Z – Ein biographisches Lexikon (Bremen: Verlag in der Sonnenstrasse,
1991); on Rötger, see “Eine deutsche und evangelische Frau,” Die Deutsch-
nationale Frau 14, no. 22, 15 November 1932.

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74. On the DEF and VEFD, see foremost Ursula Baumann, “Religion und

Emanzipation: Konfessionelle Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1900–
1933.” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 21 (1992): 171–206;
Baumann, Protestantismus und Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland
(Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 1992); and Doris Kaufmann, “Die Begründ-
ung und Politik einer evangelischen Frauenbewegung in der Weimarer
Republik.” In Jutta Dalhoff, Uschi Frey, and Ingrid Schöll, eds., Frauen-
macht in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1986. See also Schneider-
Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling, p. 39.

75. For a short biography, see Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling, pp.

25–45.

76. “Zum 50. Geburtstag von Dr. Else [sic] Matz,” NLC 57, no. 90, 5 May 1931.

For Elsa Matz’s church connections, see Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Die
Frauenbewegung. Geschichte, Probleme, Ziele (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-
Gemeinschaft, 1928), p. 351.

77. See Archiv des KDF, folder “Auslandskommission 1920–1928, 1–122–2;”

Klaus Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in der Weimarer Republik
1919–1933 (Egelsbach, Frankfurt, Washington: Hänsel-Hohenhausen,
1995), pp. 132–3.

78. Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, pp. 33–4 and 38.
79. See L.R.K. [Lenore Ripke-Kühn], “Die Tagung des Bundes Deutscher

Frauenvereine in Hamburg,” Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 3, 4 October 1919.

80. On the relationship between the housewives’ leagues and the BDF, see

Hiltraud Schmidt-Waldherr, Emanzipation durch Professionalisierung?
Politische Strategien und Konflikte innerhalb der bürgerlichen Frauen-
bewegung während der Weimarer Republik und die Reaktion des bürger-
lichen Antifeminismus und des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Materialis
Verlag, 1987), pp. 104–6, and Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in
der Weimarer Republik, pp. 131–42.

81. Zahn-Harnack, Die Frauenbewegung, p. 322; Scheck, “German

Conservatism,” p. 45.

82. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 13. April

1919. Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1919, pp. 47–8, 66–7, and 103–4.

83. Rudolf Morsey, Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei, 1917–1923 (Düsseldorf:

Droste, 1966), pp. 140 and 292; Birgit Sack, “Katholizismus und Nation,”
p. 294: Helen Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics.” European History
Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1990): 369–99, particularly p. 383, where 1921 is given
as the date when the Center Party’s RFA was formed (I took 1922 from
sources closer to the events); Emmy Wingerath, “Die Tagung des
Reichsfrauenbeirats der Deutschen Zentrumspartei,” and “Satzungen des
Frauenbeirats der Deutschen Zentrumspartei,” both in Mitteilungen des

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 46

Reichsfrauenbeirats der Deutschen Zentrumspartei, 1927, no. 8, Mai-
August 1927, pp. 14–16.

84. For the context, see Jones, German Liberalism, pp. 59–60.
85. Catharina von Meyer, “Süddeutsche Frauentagungen,” Das Demokratische

Deutschland, 1918/1919, no. 50, 23 November 1919, pp. 1155–9, in GstA
Berlin-Dahlem, XII, III, vol. 10.

86. Regine Deutsch, “Die Frau als Staatsbürgerin,” Das Demokratische

Deutschland, 1918/1919, no. 17, 5 April 1919, pp. 399–402, in GStA Berlin,
XII, III, vol. 9. The formulation in the constitutional paragraph was criti-
cized for leaving room for discrimination. See Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die
bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933, Kritische Studien
zur Geschichtswissenschaft 46 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981),
pp. 168–9.

87. W. Krobiell, “Frauen und deutsche Demokraten,” Das Demokratische

Deutschland, 1918/19, no. 36, 17 August 1919, pp. 839–40, in GstA Berlin-
Dahlem, XII, III, vol. 10.

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 48

–3–

Hostility to Women in Politics

Ladies and gentlemen, women understand that it is not easy for man to
accept that we now stand next to him in political life (aha!). It is difficult. I
believe the sympathetic men to be in a minority. (Laughter and applause.)
… Men have not yet had an opportunity to learn that our influence in public
life is necessary.

Else Lange in a speech at the DVP’s first party conference, April 1919

It comes as no surprise that politically active women encountered hostility and
discrimination from men in the DNVP and DVP. The welcome messages of the
parties toward women in 1918 could not obscure the anti-feminism or defensive
attitude of most men from both parties. Rejection of women’s political engage-
ment sometimes also came from women who did not approve of the suffrage and
questioned the legitimacy of women’s representation in parliaments. But wherever
they came from, open attacks on the women’s political role were one thing; the
often daily observation of political women that men were uncomfortable working
with them and doubted their competence was another. These doubts were often
shared by the women politicians themselves: they were newcomers to parliamen-
tary life, and only a few of them had been involved in party work before 1918.
Their involvement in women’s organizations had prepared many of them for nego-
tiating with men, speaking in public, and working connections to their benefit. Yet
party life, particularly in parliaments, was different. Most of the leading male
parliamentarians were experienced and claimed to know how parliamentary work
should be done; they often made it difficult for women to articulate and introduce
their own ideas.

Women, however, sought ways to strengthen their self-confi-

dence and to get better acquainted with political matters, hence the emphasis of
women in both parties on the political education of women in speech and debate
workshops and their sometimes exaggerated clinging to topics where their quali-
fications were least doubted by men. But women in the two parties also protested
against discrimination on several occasions. The more explicitly feminist women
from the Democratic Party or the Left had no monopoly on this.

One example of a woman being thrown into political life without much

preparation was Anni Kalähne, who was DNVP representative to the Volkstag

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(diet) of the Free City of Danzig for most of the Weimar period. (Although
Danzig was under League of Nations sovereignty, its mostly German popula-
tion had formed local branches of all major German parties.) All the political
experience Kalähne had was her political discussions with her father, the Pan-
German historian Dietrich Schäfer. Yet the revolution and defeat, particularly
the threat of a Polish invasion or annexation of her home town, turned Kalähne
into a dedicated DNVP activist. She did not bother to ask her husband, who
was still in the army, for permission, when Käthe Schirmacher drafted her to
give a patriotic speech in late 1918. Kalähne became a highly active politician
well known in her home town as well as among the Germans in the contested
border areas with Poland. Her husband, who also joined the DNVP, tolerated
but did not appreciate her political engagement; despite her frequent invita-
tions, he never came to one of her speeches. Kalähne got a reputation as a
nationalist speaker not afraid of Polish or Socialist hecklers and rapidly built
up an impressive women’s organization for the DNVP in Danzig, but she felt
poorly prepared for parliamentary work and always had difficulties getting her
ideas heard within the DNVP. She quickly learned, however, that the most
promising way to get her plans realized was to discuss them first with two
influential male members of parliament who were her friends, and then let
them present her ideas to the DNVP group as their own. Her two friends
opposed equal rights for women but took her ideas seriously, which most other
men did not. Kalähne, who was herself no feminist, complained that it was
impossible for most of her male colleagues to admit that sometimes a woman
had a better idea than a man.

The experiences she describes were probably

shared by many political women, particularly at the local and regional level.
But few of them became as successful as Kalähne; many may simply have
withdrawn from politics.

Not only in daily work did women encounter prejudice and hostility, their very

presence in the parties and, particularly, in parliaments was contested.

This

angered the women in the DVP so much that they articulated their concerns as
early as the first party convention in April 1919. Ilse Szagunn, the chair of the
Greater Berlin women’s committees, and a deputy from Bielefeld, Else Lange
(not to be confused with Helene Lange, member of the Democratic Party and
veteran of the women’s movement), claimed that there was still too much resist-
ance against women’s political work in the party from men but also from women,
who did not yet accept their new rights and duties. Szagunn asked the men in the
party to support the women better, and Lange attacked the injustices of demobi-
lization to the many women who were dependent on their income. She criticized
in particular the fact that many well-educated men were ignorant of the women’s
movement but still dared to make judgments on women’s issues.

Party chairman

Stresemann noticed that the discontent of the DVP women was expressed even

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more strongly in the hallways than in the speeches and thus decided to address it
in his final speech. Women, he said, should not be concerned with the numerical
aspect of their representation but should instead “send us the most able women,
the ones who can work creatively. A single personality here can have a greater
effect than formal equality of numbers.”

Stresemann admitted that men had the

advantage of longer political training but claimed that this would change. He
admonished women not to be concerned exclusively with women’s issues but to
get involved in other matters as well. That would ease their acceptance by the
men in the party. He further stressed that increased cooperation would overcome
the ignorance of the men, and that at some point men and women would work
together so smoothly that no separate women’s committees would be necessary.

Stresemann’s emphasis on personality over numbers jibed well with the DVP’s

stress on individual values over numerical strength, but it did little to mitigate the
frustration of many DVP women. At the second party convention in October
1919, the Prussian Landtag deputy Margarethe Poehlmann again expressed anger
over the lack of understanding on the part of men, particularly the younger ones,
and demanded that women receive a high position on every DVP ballot.

In the

women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt the critique continued: Emma
Stropp, member of the RFA, claimed that men reacted “with clearly manifest
discomfort – to put it mildly” whenever women referred to the passage of the
Weimar Constitution on equal rights, and she complained that newspapers sympa-
thetic to the DVP still considered women’s issues unimportant.

And Luise

Marelle, the DVP’s expert on women in the professions, commented that the
widespread anti-feminism of men had condemned women to passivity in parlia-
ment. “Most female deputies chose the best option by not saying anything. (One
hears then that ‘they work well in the committees’).”

The anger of the DVP

women even intensified in the months preceding the Reichstag elections of June
1920. Although the DVP anticipated a vast increase in seats, women received only
poor consideration on the ballots. Stropp, who emerged as the DVP women’s most
vocal critic, mentioned that some women had threatened to withdraw their support
for the party’s electoral campaign and that all women in the party were angry:
“They experience the poor consideration accorded to female candidates on the
ballots as an offense to all women activists and as a sign of low esteem for their
political activity and its importance for Germany’s recovery. Often a female candi-
date has only been placed as a token candidate on a hopeless spot of the ballot.”

The structure of Stropp’s critique was always the same: first came sharp attacks
on anti-feminism, combined with references to the fact that women formed a
majority of potential voters and, in 1920, also a majority of DVP members; then
Stropp admonished the DVP women to continue their precious work for the DVP
– usually with strong nationalist undertones. Implicit was the threat that they
would stop if they were not better rewarded in the future.

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When the DVP’s share of Reichstag seats tripled in June 1920, women’s repre-

sentation kept pace with the party’s overall increase (three instead of one – and
four following a special election to fill the seat of a deceased male deputy in
February 1923). But frustration over limited acceptance by the men in the party
produced more protests. In July 1920, Stropp wrote that women from all parties
shared the feeling that men ignored their concerns. It was at this time that she
made her powerful plea for women’s rights, so that women could help salvage a
nation that resembled a damaged ship in a storm.

Stresemann took these

concerns seriously enough to visit the women’s meeting preceding the third
national party conference in December 1920. In a speech to the assembled
women, he admitted that the opinion of women had to be heard first on many
matters but rejected the charge that not enough women were represented in the
new DVP Reichstag group. Again he asked women to put the emphasis on ability
rather than numerical representation according to gender. In her response, Julie
Bassermann, the widow of Stresemann’s predecessor Ernst Bassermann, agreed
but demanded that this principle be applied to men as well; fewer men should get
seats simply because they represented certain social strata or professions.
Stresemann stayed for an open discussion of these matters and promised to make
the women’s concerns heard in the party leadership.

Although Stresemann hardly made substantial concessions to the women in

the party, the fact that he listened to them, took their concerns seriously, and
visited their meeting did win him respect from the DVP women and may have
helped to mitigate their discomfort. Preceding the Prussian elections of February
1921, the Prussian members of the RFA protested again that female candidates
were not receiving enough consideration, but they also admitted that too few
women were willing to compete for seats in parliaments because they considered
themselves unqualified and preferred to let men represent their interests.

Despite these claims, however, DVP women fared very well in the Prussian
Landtag elections. There were six women in the DVP’s 58-member Landtag
group (a seventh woman joined them in December 1922, replacing a man).
Women thus made up 10.3 percent of the DVP’s Landtag group (12 percent after
1922), much more than in any other bourgeois party in the Prussian Landtag –
and the Reichstag. With its 12 percent from December 1922 on, the DVP had the
highest share of women in the Landtag, surpassing even the SPD (11.4
percent)!

It seems that the DVP leaders, and later their colleagues from the

DNVP, agreed to give women better consideration for Prussian Landtag elections
than for the Reichstag, claiming that “female” concerns such as social policy
played a larger role there than in the Reichstag, where “male” concerns such as
foreign policy and military matters were important.

The DVP women’s criticism of anti-feminism softened after the Prussian elec-

tions of 1921, although there is little evidence that conditions in the party

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improved. In March 1924, with new Reichstag elections scheduled for May, the
RFA secretary Martha Schwarz mentioned that many women had become disillu-
sioned but continued to work for the party nonetheless, since it was woman’s nature
to make sacrifices and to work.

The RFA got the two “secure” places for women

on the national ballot that it had demanded, and both women on these places were
elected (Mende and Dr. Frances Magnus-von Hausen). Thus women lost one seat
in the DVP Reichstag group, but it was also true that the party overall suffered
losses. Unfortunately, women’s representation got no better when the DVP recov-
ered some seats in the Reichstag elections of 7 December 1924. (Mende remained
and was joined by Elsa Matz.). At the Prussian Landtag elections of the same date
only five women, instead of seven, got elected to the DVP group. Shortly there-
after, Mende argued that politically active women had to remain alert, “so as to
make it clear to the men that there are essential differences between the sexes but
that there is no monopoly of men on certain portions of wisdom, logic, discretion,
and political ability.” (Mende was referring to a DNVP proposal to exclude women
from sensitive foreign policy jobs because of their “inborn inability to keep
secrets.”)

The elections to the parliaments of the Prussian provinces on 29

November 1925 again triggered massive criticism from the DVP women because
the regional party sections had largely ignored women candidates. In a letter to
Stresemann, Mende complained that “women, who from the start have done the
most loyal and self-sacrificing work … are systematically being excluded from the
party’s work and even from their own spheres of activity.” The DVP’s Executive
Board decided at its next meeting to write to the regional sections and to stress the
importance of women as candidates and members of parliaments.

Criticism remained muted for several years. The female DVP activists knew

that, however difficult it was to overcome the prejudice of men, the disinterest
and passivity of women did not help either. Stropp, for example, claimed that
many women put too much trust in big-interest organizations and understood
neither why they should get politically active themselves nor why their rights
needed to be expanded. The Prussian Landtag member Marie Siegert, moreover,
explained that women’s political activism was lacking even in communal poli-
tics, often described as the ideal stage for women’s political engagement because
women could work close to home; rarely could the DVP find enough women
willing to run for election to city parliaments. Others pointed out that women
often blindly trusted male candidates and were too divided and too critical of
each other’s abilities.

Some women in the DVP also denied that there was anti-

feminism in the party; Käthe Rahmlow, a DVP activist from Dortmund, claimed
that women and men in her province (Westphalia) cooperated in a spirit of
complete camaraderie.

In the DNVP, the women remained mostly quiet during the first years although

they were hardly treated better than their counterparts in the DVP. Initially some

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DNVP men suggested that women’s suffrage should be revoked, but most of
them accepted it once they saw how much it benefited their party. The former
chair of the Conservative Party, Count Kuno von Westarp, for example, admitted
that he continued to oppose women’s suffrage but found it inopportune to express
this opinion when he realized that women’s suffrage “did not have as radical
effects as I had expected” and was impossible to revoke in the short run. He
debated the issue with Behm, who told him frankly that politically active women
did not cherish his old-fashioned “chivalry” toward them but wanted equal rights
in the party, in politics, and in the professions. Westarp remained unconvinced of
this goal but expressed respect for women’s work in the DNVP. In a telling rela-
tivization of the equality claim, Westarp declared that he granted women all
equal rights and practical possibilities necessary for their work.

The women, in

turn, did not challenge their place in the party nearly as much as the DVP women
had done from the start. Clotilde von der Groeben, a member of the East Prussian
LFA, claimed that men in general handled women’s interests well and that only
women representing major female professional groups had a right to sit in parlia-
ments.

Women reporting about their activities in local assemblies stressed that

the men in the DNVP respected their work – often more so than men in the
Democratic Party and DVP seemed to do (although this may also have been due
to the fact that DNVP women challenged the men in their party less).

The first open challenges to women’s work in the DNVP came from women,

not men. In early 1919 some right-wing women outside the DNVP gathered
signatures for a petition against women’s suffrage. The DNVP leadership
condemned this action, however, and declared that people who supported it could
not belong to the party.

In 1920 Lenore Kühn had to counter the charge leveled

by a woman in the extreme right-wing newspaper Deutsche Zeitung that the
DNVP women had secret sympathies for the “democratic” BDF and for femi-
nism and that the DNVP’s parliamentarians were not representative of German
women because none of them was a mother. In her reply, Kühn denied feminist
sympathies and pointed out that mothers did their most valuable work at home,
not in parliament, and that the example of Margarethe Behm showed that women
could be motherly even without being biological mothers.

In 1922 an article in

the conservative Kreuzzeitung written by a woman associated with the social
organizations of the Evangelical Church and the German League against the
Emancipation of Women stirred up a conflict. The author attacked the DNVP
women for putting feminist concerns over nationalist ones. While morality in
Germany was sinking to unprecedented depths, the author claimed, Behm and
Mueller-Otfried were watching by the sidelines and trying to advance women’s
rights together with women from the Left. Instead, truly conservative women
should stress that it behooves women to be self-sacrificing, obedient, and
submissive to the authority of men.

Kühn’s defense on behalf of the RFA was

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severely cut by the editors of the Kreuzzeitung, so she published the full article
in the Frauenkorrespondenz.

Politically active DNVP women were angry at the

way the Kreuzzeitung handled the affair, but party chairman Hergt and Westarp,
as editor of the Kreuzzeitung, tried to make amends at a leadership meeting of
the regional DNVP sections a few days later. Hergt praised the women’s work for
the party and stressed that they had always avoided a one-sided emphasis on
women’s rights. Women had represented their interests within the party with tact
and restraint and never tried to form a “state within the state.” Westarp explained
the behavior of the Kreuzzeitung in ways that restored the honor of the RFA, and
Hergt appealed to all regional chairmen to further the work of women within the
party.

The male party leaders thus defended women activists against the attacks

by anti-emancipatory women by attesting to them that they had not worked for
women’s rights. The irony of this may seem glaring to a present-day observer, but
it is doubtful that most DNVP women saw it that way.

In the months before the Reichstag elections of May 1924, however, DNVP

women expressed frustration over the poor consideration their candidates
received on the ballots – at a time when the DNVP expected gains at the polls.
In the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the RFA published a call to women not to abstain
from voting, but behind this plea lurked a critique of anti-feminism in the DNVP.
Everywhere, the RFA claimed, the work of women was being pushed back and
restricted. It was understandable, though still to be condemned, if women reacted
with abstention.

After the elections, the Reichstag group of the DNVP, which

had become the strongest in union with the allied National Rural League
(Reichslandbund, RLB), included four women, who had all been elected by
narrow margins. This was one woman more than before the elections but still a
weak representation in comparison to other parties (just over 4 percent). After the
elections, the DNVP journalist Beda Prilipp claimed that the party owed its
impressive gains at the polls primarily to women. In a sideswipe at the economic
interest groups in the party, she added: “This has to be valued all the more,
because the women of our party did not receive promises regarding any privi-
leges.” Prilipp complained that the share of female parliamentarians had not kept
pace with the growth of the party at the polls, and she was also alarmed about
the failure of Klara Klotz, the DNVP’s leading woman in Württemberg, to get
reelected to the Landtag of Württemberg, where state elections were held on the
same day as the Reichstag elections. Altogether, she warned that the anti-femi-
nism of the men in the DNVP would strengthen the Democratic Party and help
revive the ailing women’s movement.

Like the DVP in 1921, the DNVP reacted

to this criticism by making efforts to increase the women’s representation in the
next Prussian Landtag elections. The DNVP Landtag group elected in 1921 had
included five women in a group of seventy-five; after the elections of December
1924 it had nine women in a group of 109, which raised the women’s share from

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6.67 to 8.25 percent. At the Reichstag elections, held on the same day, five
women instead of four were elected to a DNVP group that had hardly changed
in size. Despite these modest improvements the conditions of women’s work in
the party remained difficult. In 1925, for example, the RFA complained to the
party leadership that many regional party sections refused to make enough funds
available to their women’s committees. This complaint induced the party secre-
tary to send out an admonition to the chairmen of the regional branches to better
support women’s work within the party.

When the electoral fortunes of the DNVP began to decline in the later 1920s

due to competition from special-interest parties, the pressure on female candi-
dates increased again. At the Reichstag elections of 20 May 1928, the DNVP lost
over one quarter of its seats, but women’s representation went down even more
dramatically from five to two (Mueller-Otfried and Lehmann). In the Prussian
Landtag, elected on the same day, the DNVP as a whole lost as heavily, but
women’s representation went down only from nine to eight (their share thus
increased from 8.25 to 9.7 percent). The situation improved later in the year
when two women were elected to replace deceased male deputies, which gave
women a record 12.2 percent of the DNVP’s seats. The decline of women’s repre-
sentation in the Reichstag, however, came as a shock to many DNVP women.

RFA chair Annagrete Lehmann showed that the reduced number of female
parliamentarians meant a severe loss of expertise in all questions of concern to
women. The few remaining women would be overloaded with work. Considering
that in electoral districts with gender-separated counting the DNVP had received
between fifty-five and fifty-nine percent of its votes from women, the RFA
calculated that a strictly proportional representation would give women forty-two
of the seventy-two DNVP Reichstag seats. Instead they had only two (2.7
percent) – the lowest share of any major party.

But, as earlier, Lehmann admon-

ished the DNVP women to redouble their efforts for the party, so that it would
do better in future elections and offer women more seats.

The crisis years after 1929 brought new challenges to women that will be

discussed later. What is important here is that they managed to defend their
participation in the parliamentary groups even though the decline of the two
parties’ share of the vote made it even harder for them to compete with men for
the few remaining seats. With more and more electoral districts electing only one
or two candidates – if any at all – for the DVP and DNVP, women had little hope
of winning a seat through the districts because they were almost never listed
above the third place on the district ballot. Thus, women were more dependent
than ever on their party’s list of candidates to be elected from the surplus votes
of the local districts (Reichsliste or Landesliste). But it has to be said that the
male leaders of the DVP and DNVP, by placing one or two women high on that
list, made sure that women were always represented in their Reichstag groups.

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The proportion of women in the reduced party groups therefore did not decline.
Ironically, it reached its highest point after the elections of July 1932, when the
DVP had one woman (Matz) among only seven deputies (14.29 percent) and the
DNVP still had three women out of thirty-seven (8.1 percent).

What weapons did women have against anti-feminism? One was direct

confrontation, which was chosen for example by Käthe Schirmacher in a written
exchange with her male party colleague Gottfried Traub, who sat with
Schirmacher in the National Assembly. When Traub addressed her in a letter with
the diminutive “Fräulein” (Misses) used for an unmarried woman (and a neuter
noun), Schirmacher sent back the envelope to Traub after having corrected
“Fräulein” to “Frau” and written above: “The member of parliament is no neuter
being. The woman representative carries the title ‘Frau’.”

But Schirmacher’s

outspoken defense of women’s rights angered and alienated many men and
women in the party. When the district that had elected her to the National
Assembly was separated from Germany, the DNVP leaders did not offer her a
promising place elsewhere, thus ending her parliamentary career (though not her
engagement in the party).

A less dangerous and perhaps more common weapon

against anti-feminism was irony, which the DVP women employed with mastery.
Lange’s speech at the first party conference was full of it, and Reichstag deputy
Margarethe Poehlmann used it at the second party conference when she
suggested that prejudice against women was proportional to the youth and inex-
perience of men. The DVP’s household expert Hilde Margis added to this by
claiming that anti-feminism was often less visible in “men with distinctly mascu-
line qualities” than in “other” men.

Women from both parties often bolstered

their claims for better representation by pointing out that their parties received
more votes from women than from men. But this argument did not hold much
water once the men realized that the placement of women candidates had little
influence over how women cast their votes.

It also smacked of democracy,

which both parties rejected; as Stresemann had argued, members of parliaments
should be chosen for their abilities, not for the numbers of voters they repre-
sented. Probably more effective was the argument that women worked for the
good of the nation and that Germany needed their full participation and input to
recover. Women of the DVP and DNVP never got tired of saying that they did not
primarily represent specific women’s interests but worked to make women’s
innate abilities more beneficial to the whole nation.

Another weapon was the threat to form a women’s party or to create separate

women’s ballots associated with the existing parties. The discussions about a
women’s party have been represented in much of the literature as a reaction to
the poor consideration for women’s interests demonstrated by the bourgeois
parties.

Yet, the idea of a women’s party was more. Take the words of Helene

Lange, the veteran and leading theorist of the bourgeois women’s movement,

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who in 1920 contemplated the mission of a women’s party on the following
terms: “The formation of a women’s party means to create an institution that will
basically serve the construction of the whole, the unification of interests, the
reconciliation of conflicts – but not by horse trading on a case to case basis but
rather by searching for ways in which truly national politics can be realized.”

The women’s party thus was not meant to be just another economic “pressure
group” but rather a reform party whose central mission, according to Lange, was
nothing other than the Volksgemeinschaft. Lange, and almost all others who
discussed the women’s party, readily admitted that it was not feasible for prac-
tical reasons, and separate women’s lists were rejected on similar grounds.

Women from the DNVP and DVP echoed this judgment. Lenore Kühn, for the
DNVP, admitted that not enough women were represented in the parties, but –
like Stresemann – she considered personalities more important than numbers and
believed a women’s party would become a powerless splinter party because
women were already too closely tied to the existing parties.

Stropp, for the

DVP, argued that a women’s party would increase political fragmentation in
circumstances that called for national unity. Despite her bitter critique of anti-
feminism, she claimed: “Politics can and should no longer … be divided
according to gender difference; this would be a grave sin against Germany’s
recovery.” Rather than forming a separate party, women should work hard within
the existing parties to overcome male prejudice, an argument Clara Mende
supported as well.

But Stropp got so exasperated over anti-feminism in May

1920 that she warned that a women’s party would soon become a reality if men
did not help enforce the equal rights clause of the Weimar Constitution.

Anna

von Gierke, the DNVP deputy in the National Assembly who left the party
because of its anti-Semitism, did indeed create a local women’s list for the
Greater Berlin town elections in July 1920. The DVP women observed this
experiment with interest and presented it to their party leaders as a manifestation
of women’s dissatisfaction with the existing parties.

This was ill considered,

however, because von Gierke’s list received only 936 votes, not even enough for
one seat in Berlin’s city parliament. Paula Mueller-Otfried saw this result as a
confirmation of the DNVP women’s rejection of a women’s party. She argued
that women’s interests were too heterogeneous to fit into one party, but she also
warned that women would not support indefinitely a mixed party that claimed to
take care of women’s interests by tolerating a few women in parliaments as repre-
sentatives of all women.

A second experiment with a women’s list in Münster

in 1928 did not fare much better than von Gierke’s.

The discussion of a

women’s party was powerfully revived in the early 1930s, when the growth of the
anti-feminist NSDAP threatened to undercut women’s demands in the other
parties.

But the consensus remained that a women’s party would stand no

chance at elections and would only serve to further the alarming fragmentation

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of bourgeois party politics and thus exacerbate the very ills of German political
life that women were so eager to cure.

Whereas men in the rightist parties hardly took the discussion of a women’s

party seriously, they felt threatened by the cooperation of women across party
lines. The women in the DVP were usually more open-minded about such coop-
eration than women from the DNVP. In the Greater Berlin area, the DVP
women’s committees took an active role in the founding of a local umbrella
organization for women’s groups, the Political Cooperative of the Women of
Greater Berlin (Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen von Groß-Berlin).
This organization evolved out of the old Berlin League for Women’s Suffrage
(Berliner Verein für Frauenstimmrecht) and included women from the Left and
a broad spectrum of bourgeois organizations. Its goals were to deepen women’s
political education and to work for equal rights for men and women. It insisted
on the broadening of women’s access to all professions and on equal pay for
equal work, and it claimed to be a forum for the issues that united women from
all parties. The chairwoman was Adele Schreiber, a Social Democrat. Although
even some DNVP members (notably Margarethe Behm) belonged to the board
of this organization, the DVP was much more engaged than the DNVP.

Emma

Stropp wished that the Political Cooperative of the Women of Greater Berlin
would help overcome the disinterest and ignorance that many female DVP
members displayed toward the women’s movement, and the DVP’s Anna Mayer
appealed at the organization’s constitutive meeting to revive women’s solidarity
across party lines.

The DNVP, however, soon denounced the Political

Cooperative as too feminist and too hostile to the parties. The DNVP’s
Frauenkorrespondenz largely ignored it.

After less than a year, even DVP

women got worried that the organization would take a too pacifist stand, but
with demonstrations against the “Black Horror on the Rhine” and an exhibition
about production with the use of German rather than foreign materials the
Political Cooperative reemphasized its nationalist credentials.

This was

enough to ease the concerns of DVP women for the time being, but they appear
to have lost interest after 1923. The DNVP women, in turn, tended to downplay
common women’s concerns and became thoroughly antagonistic to women’s
cross-party cooperation in the later years of the Weimar Republic, when
Hugenberg led the DNVP into sharp opposition to the Weimar system and all
moderate parties. As the DNVP’s Erika Altgelt argued in 1929, DNVP women
recognized no common basis of women’s politics, claiming that such a thing did
not and should not exist. In a similar vein, Annagrete Lehmann wrote in 1931
that women’s solidarity was worthless, even destructive, if it did not imply a
common stand based on a shared world-view.

Although women from all

parties chose to focus on similar political fields, powerful ideological divides –
particularly between socialist women and the religious women associated with

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the Center Party and the DNVP – undercut the chances for a consensus among
women in the parliaments.

On balance, women successfully defended their position in the two parties

throughout the Weimar Republic, but they did so by consistently stressing their
commitment to the nation and the party and by limiting or downplaying their
struggle for specific women’s interests. One time when women in the DVP got
particularly frustrated over the men’s lack of support for their work, for example,
Mende called on the women not to fall prey to “female egoism” but rather to
comprehend and fulfill the civic and political duties of women toward the party
even more deeply and seriously.

In the DNVP, women always put so much

more stress on women’s duties than on their rights that they hardly needed to
publish such disclaimers against “female egoism.” This went so far that in early
1924 Reichstag member Hedwig Hoffmann from Bochum, who had succeeded
a deceased male DNVP deputy in December 1921, exchanged her spot on the
ballot for a less promising one so as to make room for a male worker likely to
attract more votes than she was expected to receive.

The male party leaders

occasionally lent an open ear to women’s concerns, as shown by Stresemann’s
discussions with DVP women, the DNVP secretary’s answer to the RFA’s request
for more funding, or both parties’ efforts to strengthen women’s representation in
the Prussian Landtag. But the confinement of women to fields stereotypically
defined as “female,” though emphatically encouraged by most right-wing
women, left them little prospect of expanding their influence and advancing
women’s rights, as many may have hoped after the introduction of women’s
suffrage. It did, however, help to increase their representation in the influential
Prussian Landtag, where there was a stronger emphasis on “women’s fields” than
in the Reichstag.

Notes

1. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei, pp. 70–1.
2. Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik:

Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im
Reichstag (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), pp. 104–8, and Heide-Marie
Lauterer, Parlamentarierinnen in Deutschland 1918/19–1949 (Königstein
(Taunus): Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2002), pp. 70–85. In a survey of parlia-
mentarians in the National Assembly and the Reichstag, Claudia Koonz has
shown that there was a significant minority of men who were also new. The
majority, however, had been in the Reichstag before 1919, and this was
certainly true for the leadership of the parties. Koonz, “Conflicting
Allegiances,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1
(1976): 666–70.

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3. Anni Kalähne, “Lebenserinnerungen,” in Staatsarchiv Bremen, Nachlass

Dietrich Schäfer, folder 7.21.

4. See the case study on DDP women in Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche

Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, pp. 162–6.

5. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei, pp. 47–8,

66–7, and 70–1.

6. Ibid., pp. 94–5.
7. Ibid. Stresemann had expressed similar ideas at meetings of the DVP’s

Executive Board: Kolb and Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in der
Weimarer Republik, pp. 13 and 30 (meetings of 29 January and 13–14 April
1919).

8. Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18., 19. u.

20. Oktober 1919, pp. 130–2.

9. Emma Stropp, “In Arbeit getreu,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 1, 2 January

1920, and E. St. [Stropp], “Die Reichsfrauentagung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
2, no. 16, 22 April 1920.

10. Luise Marelle, “Antifeminismus und Berufswertung,” DVP-Nachrichten-

blatt 2, no. 19, 13 May 1920.

11. Emma Stropp, “Wahlmüdigkeit?” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 20, 20 May

1920.

12. [Emma Stropp], “Das Wort der Frau während der Wahlvorbereitung,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 9, 13 May 1920.

13. As quoted above in the “Introduction” (from Emma Stropp, “Der neue

Reichstag,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 26, 1 July 1920).

14. “Die Reichsfrauentagung in Nürnberg,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, 2, nos.

48/49, 9 December 1920.

15. “Sitzung des Reichsfrauenausschusses (preußische Mitglieder),” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 3, 20 January 1921.

16. For the results, see DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 8, 24 February 1921.
17. Martha Schwarz, “Frauenwürde und Wahlkampf,” NLC 51, no. 45, 26

March 1924. See also Clara Mende, “Die Frau als Vertreterin ihres Volkes,”
NLC 51, no. 60, 23 April 1924; Ender’s statements in “Fünfter Parteitag der
Deutschen Volkspartei in Hannover am 29. und 30. März,” special edition of
NLC; and Martha Schwarz, “Tagung des Reichsfrauenausschusses,” NLC
51, no. 46, 1 April 1924.

18. C.M. [Clara Mende], “Kampf gegen Frauen,” NLC 52, no. 38, 25 February

1925.

19. Kolb and Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik,

p. 649 (meeting of 27 January 1926).

20. Emma Stropp, “Verantwortlichkeit,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4,

no. 15, 7 August 1922; Marie Siegert, “Frauenarbeit im Stadtparlament,”

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NLC 51, no. 157, 25 September 1924. See also “Frauenkandidaturen,”
Berliner Stimmen 1, no. 21, 24 December 1924.

21. Käthe Rahmlow, “Wege und Ziele weiblicher Politik,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 33, 19 August 1920.

22. Kuno von Westarp, Konservative Politik im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur

Republik. Teil I: Von der Deutschkonservativen Partei zur Deutsch-
nationalen Volkspartei. Manuscript, Nachlaß Westarp, Gärtringen, chap. 4.

23. Clotilde von der Groeben, “Frauenvertretung in den Parlamenten,” Der

Parteifreund 2, no. 11, 17 March 1921.

24. Margarethe Pohle, “Aus der Erfurter Gemeindevertretung,” Frauen-

korrespondenz 3, no. 17, 20 May 1922, and “Parlamentarische Kleinarbeit
deutschnationaler Frauen in Provinz- und Gemeindevertretungen,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 21, 29 July 1922.

25. Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the Early

Weimar Republic,” p. 45; Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei
2, no. 35, 11 February 1919. See also “Zurückweisung einer demokratischen
Verdächtigung,” Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 2, no.
200, 1 September 1919.

26. LRK [Lenore Ripke-Kühn], “Frau und Volksvertretung,” Frauen-

korrespondenz 1, no. 18, 15 May 1920. The opinion that women did their
best for the state as mothers and housewives was typical for anti-emancipa-
tory arguments. Compare the statements of Hans Philipp, member of the
German League Against the Emancipation of Women, in a newsletter of the
National Liberal Party: “Die Anteilnahme der Frau am Staatsleben,” Die
Frau in der Politik. Monatsbeilage der “Deutschen Stimmen” 1, no. 2, 24
February 1918, p. 13, in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–42 (DVP), vol. 16.

27. “Wir und die Anderen,” Neue Preußische Kreuzzeitung, no. 88, 21 February

1922 (evening).

28. Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 12, 4 March 1922, and no. 13, 18 March 1922.

See also “Die Frauen in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Neue Preuß-
ische Kreuzzeitung, no. 107, 4 March 1922.

29. Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 14, 1 April 1922.
30. “Wahlaufruf zum 4. Mai 1924,” Deutsche Tageszeitung, no. 187, 20 April

1924; copy in Reichslandbund-Pressearchiv, BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, vol.
7988, p. 3.

31. Beda Prilipp, “Und die Frauen – ?” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 21, 28 May

1924.

32. Rundschreiben 103 (9 May 1925), in Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv

Osnabrück, Erw. C 1 (DNVP), vol. 17, part 2, p. 109.

33. The RFA also mentioned poor results for women in other state elections on

20 May. There were elections in Anhalt, Bavaria, Oldenburg, and

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Württemberg, but I did not find evidence that the DNVP had any women in
those parliaments immediately preceding the 1928 elections. The RFA
claimed that after 20 May 1928 Johanna Richter (in Baden) was the only
DNVP woman in any state parliament except Prussia, but that is not accu-
rate. There was still a DNVP woman in the diets of Hamburg, Lübeck,
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Saxony. In the early 1930s, DNVP women
returned to the diet of Bremen and Württemberg.

34. Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum Wahlausfall,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 22,

31 May 1928, and “Die Wahlbeteiligung der Frauen,” Frauenkorrespondenz
10, no. 23, 7 June 1928.

35. “Deutschnationale Frauen in den neuen Parlamenten,” Frauenkorres-

pondenz 10, no. 21, 24 May 1928; Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum Wahlausfall,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 22, 31 May 1928.

36. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlass Traub (N 1059), volume 67 (correspon-

dence).

37. Walzer, Käthe Schirmacher, p. 89.
38. Hilde Margis, “Wir Frauen und die Wahl,” NLC 51, no. 67, 2 May 1924.
39. Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics,” p. 385.
40. Focusing on the Democratic Party, Barbara Greven-Aschoff has shown that

women became frustrated when time and again they got pushed to lower
places on the ballot by representatives of powerful economic interest
groups: Greven-Aschoff, Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland,
pp. 162–66.

41. Helene Lange, “Politische Zerstörungsmethoden,” Die Frau 27, no. 7 (April

1920): 193–5.

42. Greven-Aschoff, Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung, p. 158; Boak, “Women in

Weimar Politics,” pp. 386–8; and Evans, The Feminist Movement in
Germany, p. 247. See also the discussion on the women’s party at a BDF
board meeting in October 1930, in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauen-
vereine in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 257–65.

43. LRK [Lenore Ripke-Kühn], “Frauenlisten und Frauenparteien,” in

Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 4, 18 October 1919; see also Lenore Ripke-
Kühn, “Frauenfragen und Parteiarbeit,” Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 9, 27
December 1919.

44. Emma Stropp, “In Arbeit getreu,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 1, 2 January

1920; Clara Mende, “Frauenarbeit in der Partei,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2,
no. 2, 8 January 1920.

45. Emma Stropp, “Clara Mende und andere,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 21,

27 May 1920.

46. Emma Stropp, “Die Groß-Berliner Stadtwahlen von allgemeinen Gesichts-

punkten betrachtet,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 23/24, 17 June 1920.

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47. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Frauenlisten oder Mitarbeit in der Partei,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 22, 10 July 1920.

48. Lotte Garnich, “Frauenlisten,” Berliner Stimmen 5, no. 17, 10 November

1928.

49. In 1931, Martha Schwarz (DVP) again reminded her readers that the discus-

sion of a women’s party was not about special interests: Martha Schwarz,
“Frauenpartei?!” NLC 58, no. 166, 27 August 1931. See also Kardorff-von
Oheimb, Brauchen wir eine Frauenpartei? (Berlin-Frohnau: Verlag für
Kultur und Wissenschaft, 1931).

50. “Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen von Groß-Berlin,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 1, no. 12, 18 December 1919.

51. Emma Stropp, “Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 2, 8 January 1920; “Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft
der Frauen von Groß-Berlin,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 8, 19 February
1920.

52. E. St. [Emma Stropp], “Verrat an der eigenen Partei,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

2, no. 10, 4 March 1920.

53. M. Regenbogen, “Die politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

2, no. 47, 25 November 1920.

54. Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 41, 10 October 1929; Annagrete Lehmann,

“Vormarsch der nationalen Opposition,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 14,
15 October 1931.

55. Clara Mende, “Frauenarbeit in der Partei.” For similar statements with

regard to the priority of national interest, see Emma Stropp, “Der neue
Reichstag,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 26, 1 July 1920, and Stropp, “In
Arbeit getreu,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 1, 2 January 1920.

56. Die Frauen im neuen Reichstag,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 19, 10 May

1924.

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–4–

Women’s Rights and Housewives’ Power

The state has to consider higher interests than the loss of a woman civil
servant. If this civil servant gets married, has children, and raises them in
the enclosed sphere of the family, a higher interest is served.

Magdalene von Tiling, DNVP (1928)

The broad hostility toward women in politics as well as the ideology of right-
wing women limited their ability and willingness to advance women’s rights.
Their engagement for women’s rights was slanted toward the concerns of some
select professional groups, and it was regarded with suspicion by the representa-
tives of urban and rural housewives, who had different priorities than profes-
sional women. Even when DVP and DNVP women took up the cause of women’s
rights, they often weakened their momentum because they insisted that women
should work primarily in “female” spheres and that the role of housewife and
mother was woman’s ideal profession. This has to be understood in the context
of the widespread perception that the suffrage had been a terminal achievement
for women and automatically gave them full equality. Even women from the
Democratic Party, which prided itself on its openness for women’s concerns,
complained that many men and women from their party believed that women’s
issues did not matter any more after the suffrage had been won.

Right-wing

women, of course, had always tended to regard even women’s suffrage with
ambivalence or downright hostility. They stressed after 1918 that the only way to
use the suffrage was to make women’s influence felt for the benefit of the whole
nation and not for specific women’s issues, as becomes clear in a speech by the
DNVP’s Magdalene von Tiling: “… only the thought of the Volksgemeinschaft
and the damage that has to be repaired urges woman to leave her narrow private
sphere. This is not at all a question of women’s rights …”

Although all leading

right-wing women believed that women now had to permeate society with their
cultural influence, they continued to stress that they had not entered Weimar poli-
tics to advance women’s rights. Frequently they denied in public that they were
interested in women’s rights per se and, in keeping with their Volksgemeinschaft
ideology, emphasized that they pushed for women’s rights only whenever their
neglect threatened to harm the nation.

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Yet, important women’s rights issues had to be addressed. Although the

Constitution adopted in August 1919 granted women equal rights “in principle”
and stressed equal rights for men and women in the professions and in marriage,
the German civil law code and the criminal code remained discriminatory toward
women and needed to be changed.

Women still received lower pay for equal

work, faced restricted opportunities for advancement, and were excluded from
some careers. In civil law, women were disadvantaged particularly in marriage;
married women had almost no legal power over their income and property or
over the education of their children. The DNVP women formulated a program in
1920–21 that addressed most of these injustices and promised to redress them.
Their program stressed equal rights as a principle and demanded support for
working women including equal pay for equal work.

The DVP women insisted

on similar concerns and convinced their party in 1919 to include the demand for
equal standing for women and men in politics, law, and economic life in the party
program.

Although women from the DVP and DNVP initially considered the revision of

the civil law code important, they paid little attention to basic women’s rights later
on. Given their widespread notion of women fulfilling different tasks than men,
right-wing women did not even fight to cut the addendum “in principle” from the
constitutional clause that stated that women and men had equal rights. This
formulation established a gray zone for laws that discriminated against women,
but when a motion came before the National Assembly to cut the words “in prin-
ciple,” the DNVP women helped to defeat it. Mende, the only female DVP deputy
in the National Assembly, was absent during the vote.

Some women from both

parties sought to impart a greater understanding of the injustices contained in the
civil law code and to commit their parties to fighting them. Dr. Anna Mayer, the
DVP’s expert on women and the law, campaigned for redress of the clauses that
made family law discriminatory toward women, although she refused, in accor-
dance with the idea of essential differences between men and women, to demand
symmetrical rights for husband and wife.

Erna von Birkhahn, as member of the

DNVP’s RFA, argued along similar lines, while Else von Sperber in the Reichstag
and Elisabeth Spohr in the Prussian Landtag tried to strengthen the legal power of
the divorced mother over the upbringing of the children.

Yet, efforts for a revi-

sion of women’s rights in marriage and family frequently got lost in parliamentary
discussions, and no vocal economic-interest group stepped in to pressure the
lawmakers. Not even a comparatively minor issue came to a solution: the right of
a woman who married a foreign national to choose between her citizenship and
the citizenship of her husband. In Germany, as in many other countries, a woman
automatically lost her citizenship when she married a foreign national.
International women’s organizations pressed for a harmonization of national law
codes and for the right of women to choose, although they disagreed on the desir-

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ability of mixed-nationality marriages.

For German women politicians, the

question had some importance because after Versailles many German citizens
lived in foreign countries where women might lose all contact with Germany after
marrying a foreign national and thus forfeiting their German citizenship. The
DVP Reichstag group, led by Matz, Doris Hertwig-Bünger, and Wilhelm Kahl,
requested a revision of the German law in 1928, and the DVP women’s press
continued to push for the woman’s right to choose.

The DNVP women agreed

in principle that the woman should choose her nationality but worried about
mixed-nationality couples in wartime. The Reichstag twice recommended a revi-
sion of the law, but the government did nothing.

One area where women from the DVP and DNVP became more active was the

defense of women’s right to work. Right-wing women recognized that, given the
large “women surplus” after the war and the hard economic times, women were
dependent on access to the professions and needed to be protected there as much
as possible. Already during the first national party conferences, the DVP women
pushed their colleagues hard to recognize that women needed to work. While
attempting to direct women mostly to “female” jobs, the women of the DVP
insisted that the party address the rights and needs of working women.

In a

speech published as a pamphlet, the DVP’s Bavarian Landtag representative
Gertraud Wolf in 1921 pushed for an extension of women’s rights in the profes-
sions. She criticized the mass dismissal of women in the course of demobiliza-
tion in 1919–20 (which Mende, however, had supported in late 1918

demanded equal salaries for equal work for men and women, and encouraged
women to strengthen their professional-interest organizations.

Throughout the

1920s, DVP women promoted specific rights for professional women, but the
Great Depression again put the legitimacy of women’s presence in the profes-
sions under attack. DVP women once more had to stress that most women
needed to work in order to support their families and relatives and that the
summary dismissal of women would not solve the problem of mass unemploy-
ment. These arguments also belonged to the arsenal with which DVP women
tried to fight the Nazi challenge after 1930.

The DNVP women pledged to

support the expansion of professional women’s rights in their programs, but they
stressed even more strongly than the DVP that women, with only a few excep-
tions, should choose “women’s” professions. The DNVP’s Elisabeth Spohr, for
example, often fought for equal rights for professional women in the Prussian
Landtag, but she also emphasized that a woman should not be “degraded” to
being a man’s competitor on the job market.

Beate Bartels, a contributor to the

Frauenkorrespondenz, went so far as to praise domestic service as the ideal
women’s profession and an excellent character-building school for women; she
argued that by encouraging obedience and humility, domestic service was the
best path to the realization of the “German ideal of womanhood.”

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A primary battlefield for women’s professional rights was the status of

married female civil servants. Although they constituted only a very small
percentage of all employed women, their status attracted much attention because
the employment practices of the state could serve as a precedent for the treatment
of the much larger group of married women working in the private sector.

Until

1919, German law forced women in the civil service to quit their jobs and to give
up their pension claims when they got married. The Weimar Constitution abol-
ished this rule, but various government decrees designed to reduce the number
of civil service personnel in 1923 reintroduced some of the old restrictions. This
concerned some well-organized professional women, above all the postal and
telegraph workers (in the service of the Reich) and the school teachers (in the
service of the states). Both of these groups had representatives in the DVP and
DNVP. Yet, their interests differed slightly. The Union of the Female Postal and
Telegraph Workers (Verband der deutschen Reichspost- und Telegraphen-
beamtinnen, VRPT) refrained from pushing hard against the state’s right to
dismiss married civil servants because most of the union’s members were young
and did not expect to keep their jobs as telephone operators or telegraph trans-
mitters after marriage. Their interest was, above all, to get a compensation
payment for lost pensions. Female teachers, however, had longer training and
often felt a life-long, personal commitment to their jobs; they therefore more
forcefully resisted dismissal because of marriage – regardless of compensation.

The status of the married civil servant was entangled with other contentious

issues, such as the programs to cut civil-service jobs (Beamtenabbau) and the
debate over the privileged status of civil servants. Given the strained finances,
the Reich and state governments often looked to married women in the civil
service as a tempting target for job cuts, claiming that these women were
“double-earners” and could, if dismissed, rely on the income of their husbands.
The bourgeois parties often feared, however, that the dismissal of tenured female
civil servants might poke a hole into the system of life-long job security in the
civil service, a privilege already under attack by the working-class parties. For a
long time this conflict obstructed a permanent settlement of the issue. From 1923
on, the Reichstag and various state governments adopted temporary rulings that
allowed the dismissal of married women from the civil service in exchange for a
token compensation. In 1929 the Reichstag reinstituted the original clause from
the Constitution, which satisfied women who cherished job security but angered
those women who wanted to quit when they got married and needed the indem-
nification payment to start a family. Yet at a time of renewed pressure on the
employment of married women (and of women in general), the Reichstag in May
1932 passed a law that allowed the Reich to dismiss women after marriage in
exchange for a small compensation payment. Most German states had similar
bills in the pipeline, which quickly became laws in the Third Reich.

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In their argumentation over this highly publicized issue, women from the DVP

and DNVP generally stressed the woman’s freedom to choose whether she
wanted to quit or to combine work and family. Beginning with the debates on the
Constitution in the National Assembly, women in both parties argued – against
initial opposition from men in the DNVP – that a woman who felt able to recon-
cile work and family should be allowed to stay in her job. If she chose to quit,
however, she should receive compensation for the pension payments that she
would forfeit. Both parties, together with the VRPT, for many years followed this
line of argument.

Under the pressure of the economic crisis after 1929,

however, the DNVP women became more conservative, justifying the right of the
state to dismiss female civil servants – except in economic emergencies – while
still stressing that the dismissed woman deserved a compensation payment. They
therefore welcomed the law of 1932.

The DVP women, represented by Elsa

Matz in the Reichstag, Anny von Kulesza in the Prussian Landtag, and Doris
Hertwig-Bünger in the Saxon Landtag and the Reichstag, defended the women’s
right to stay in their jobs more energetically and stressed that only a few “double-
earner” couples were wealthy enough to survive on the husband’s income
alone.

The DVP women thus were critical of the law of 1932. Elsa Matz, the

only woman in the DVP Reichstag group at that time, abstained during the vote
while the men of her party joined the DNVP, NSDAP, Center Party, and SPD in
passing it.

Yet, while defending women’s right to keep working after marriage,

women from both parties agreed that women ideally should leave employment
when they got married, so as to devote their energies to their “most important”
tasks as mothers and housewives. Paula Mueller-Otfried of the DNVP expressed
this in a Reichstag debate in 1923 when she said: “… in all parties, I assume, the
wish prevails to lead as many women as possible to their most satisfying and
normal occupation – being a wife and mother.”

Women from both parties

feared that having to decide between dismissal without compensation and
marriage would tempt a woman to enter into illicit love relationships and thus
accelerate the widely proclaimed decline of morality.

The state should there-

fore facilitate the transition of the female civil servant from work to motherhood
through a compensation payment.

A more specific question was whether a woman in the civil service who had

an illegitimate child should be dismissed without any compensation. The interest
organizations of professional women disagreed on this. Pointing out that public
servants should serve as role models, the VRPT demanded that the woman civil
servant with an illegitimate child should be subject to disciplinary measures
including dismissal, whereas the Union of Female Civil Servants in the Social
Sector opposed any disciplinary action.

This was a thorny topic because there

was no agreement on whether the law should treat fathers and mothers of illegit-
imate children the same way (some disciplinary procedures that were less

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dramatic than dismissal were already in place against the fathers of illegitimate
children). In the spring of 1922 the issue was debated in the Reichstag, with the
DNVP and the Center Party insisting on the immediate dismissal of a female
civil servant with an illegitimate child. Mueller-Otfried argued, however, that
male civil servants with illegitimate children should continue to face punitive
consequences, too. The DVP, represented by Mende, refused to follow the
DNVP’s hard line and demanded that each case be examined on its own.

During the final vote, however, the Center Party switched sides to vote down
punitive measures for the mother of an illegitimate child in the civil service,
whereas the DVP joined the ranks of the DNVP in the minority that insisted on
automatic disciplinary measures. The DNVP women, together with the VRPT,
argued that the existing law disadvantaged men by leaving in place some disci-
plinary procedures against the fathers of illegitimate children while granting
women freedom from prosecution. The DNVP’s Hedwig Hoffmann-Bochum
claimed in the Reichstag that the law, by giving women this freedom, would
further undermine the sanctity of marriage, but her comments provoked the
laughter of many deputies from other parties, as the DNVP women’s press noted
with outrage.

In their continuing struggle against this provision, DNVP women

were supported by men in their party.

Apart from civil servants, some other professions also attracted the attention

of women from the two parties. They agreed, for example, that the exclusion of
women from the legal professions was a major injustice. The DNVP women’s
program of 1921 demanded that women be allowed to work as lawyers and be
consulted in all trials involving young people. Women from both parties
supported bills designed to broaden women’s rights in the legal professions in the
Reichstag and various state parliaments.

Yet, they had to proceed cautiously

because many men in their parties rejected the opening of this prestigious male
preserve to women and because many women of the rank and file and in the local
party organizations shared this reaction. In March 1921, Mueller-Otfried and
Behm caused a stir when they broke party discipline and voted for a Communist
Reichstag bill providing for women’s right to serve on juries.

Men in the DNVP

Reichstag group were outraged, and local party women insinuated that the
party’s female Reichstag representatives here were advancing the selfish
women’s rights agenda that they had promised to shun.

The Communist-spon-

sored bill, however, failed to get the approval of Germany’s Federal Council. The
question therefore returned to the Reichstag, which discussed another bill
proposing to give women access to jury duty in April 1922.

During the new debate, two men took the stage for the DVP and DNVP, with

women making some informal comments during their speeches. For the DVP,
Wilhelm Kahl, one of the most respected deputies, argued that service in juries
did not accord with the nature of women and that men simply did not like being

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judged by women. Kahl claimed that a majority of German women would reject
the bill if they were asked. When a socialist woman denied this claim, women
from the bourgeois parties interrupted her and said that Kahl was right. The
DNVP’s speaker, Adelbert Düringer, supported the bill but pointed out that many
in his party did not. Düringer admitted that “a healthy and natural feeling for
justice” was as likely to be found in women as in men and that women would be
stricter than men when judging crimes involving brutality or sexual violence. He
and the women of his party had tried to build exemption clauses into the law that
would have allowed women to reject jury duty during menstruation, but this
amendment had failed. The bill passed on 6 April 1922 with the votes of most
DNVP and DVP representatives.

When a bill allowing women to become

judges came before the Reichstag not much later, the majority of the DVP
deputies including its women supported it, whereas the DNVP voted against it.
Leading DNVP women had supported the idea of women as judges, but it
appears that resistance against it in the party – among men and women – was
particularly strong. Already during the debates on women’s jury service the
DNVP women had been forced to deny that the admission of women to jury duty
was a precedent for women’s right to serve as judges.

The buildup of a female police force was another initiative that opened oppor-

tunities for women in traditionally male areas while respecting accepted gender
differences and hierarchies. The DVP’s Anna Mayer, who occupied a high posi-
tion in the Prussian Ministry of People’s Welfare, helped direct a pilot project to
train and deploy women in the police for specific jobs – mostly the surveillance
of prostitutes, the interviewing of children in “problem families,” and other tasks
at the intersection of law enforcement and social work. Mayer argued that the
female police force showed how women’s enlarged influence could work for the
welfare of state and society without undermining the women’s maternal abilities.
The DNVP watched these efforts with interest. When Elisabeth Spohr addressed
the issue in the Prussian Landtag in 1928 she did not object to women in the
police per se but argued that, given the strained state finances, the female police
should rely primarily on unpaid volunteers. She probably hoped that the female
police would thus broaden the activities and the influence of religious social-
work organizations allied with the DNVP.

When Saxony adopted a project

similar to Prussia’s, the DVP’s Saxon Landtag representative Doris Hertwig-
Bünger found it necessary to stress that the female police was no competition to
men in the police forces because the women would receive a different training
and take over different tasks. She had to justify, in particular, the fact that the
women in Saxony received some training in the use of a weapon, which she
considered necessary for self-defense.

Of special interest to the women of the DVP and DNVP were domestic

employees and midwives. Both became important because of socialist initiatives.

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The SPD and the Communist Party wanted to extend basic workers’ rights to
domestic employees, who had until 1918 stood under a restrictive special law, the
Gesindeordnung. Domestic employees, virtually 99 percent women, should
receive the right to a limited work day and a vacation, maternity protection, and
a more specific definition of the tasks they had to perform. Separate bills were
debated in 1921–22, 1925, and 1927–30, but the legal situation of domestic
employees, who still made up one ninth of all employed women in 1925,
remained unresolved; a bill was passed by the Reichstag in 1930 that was never
fully implemented.

With respect to midwives, the Prussian Landtag passed an

SPD-sponsored reform law in 1922 that established professional standards for
midwives and gave them some social security. But this law had to be revoked
because its provisions for a state-controlled network of midwives were found to
contradict the law of free movement.

In both cases, the bourgeois parties opposed what they saw as the socialization

of professions that allegedly relied on women’s idealism and defied standard
labor regulations. The female politicians of the DVP and DNVP, who took center
stage in the discussion of these issues, agreed that the relationship between
servant and employer was too personal to allow for a rigid contract in accordance
with the labor laws applicable in other professions. They pointed out that the
demands of housewives, who usually supervised domestic servants, required an
unusual flexibility on the part of the domestic personnel particularly during
family reunions and during the housewife’s pregnancy and childbearing times.
Clearly, bourgeois women wanted to protect the rights of employers at a time
when the economic decline of the German middle classes made domestic
servants hard to afford. Many specific issues were debated: the right of the
servant to vacations, the maximum period of work without a break, the right of
the servant to go to church on Sundays, the registration of domestic employees
(including a photo-identification card), protection for the servant before and
after the birth of her own child, and many others. Whereas the DVP women, with
their close links to the urban housewives’ league (RDH), generally took the side
of the employers, the DNVP could not disregard the interests of the female
domestic servants, who often voted for it. The DNVP women, feeling pressure
from the interest organizations of both sides, thus tried to mediate between the
two and to avoid a clear stand. This was made possible because the domestic
employee organizations allied with the DNVP were very moderate in their
demands and agreed with the housewives on many arguments against greater
social security.

On midwives, the DVP and DNVP women sought a compro-

mise between mothers and midwives, with whose professional organizations
both parties kept in contact. While recognizing the need to give more job secu-
rity to midwives and to establish standards for their training and work, DVP and
DNVP women tried to minimize state control and maximize the choice of

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mothers. In the Prussian Landtag, Margarethe Poehlmann of the DVP attacked
the SPD bill on midwives as an attempt to socialize this profession and to deprive
Christian women of their right to choose a Christian midwife. Her speech
received broad applause from the Center Party and the right wing of the Landtag,
and Elisabeth Spohr later articulated similar points for the DNVP.

But the DVP

and DNVP women supported the bill after it was revised so as to give mothers
the free choice of a midwife.

Another labor group consisting primarily of women had powerful defenders

mostly in the DNVP: the workers employed in domestic industry. This group, a
descendant of the proto-industrial cottage system, did manual piecework at home
for a distant merchant, usually combining this work with farm and household
tasks. This type of work was widespread in some regions of Saxony, Thuringia,
and Silesia, particularly in the production of refined textiles and toys. People
employed in the home industry lacked most of the social provisions that covered
workers in factories.

DNVP women often argued that work in the domestic

industry should be promoted because it allowed women to reconcile work and
family and helped small family farms that would not be financially viable
without the extra income from the domestic industry.

Margarethe Behm, as

founder and leader of the Union of Female Home Workers, was the most
outspoken advocate of this labor group. She used her Reichstag seat to push
through social-security legislation for the workers of the home industry, culmi-
nating in the passage of a bill granting them extensive insurance coverage in
1922.

Recognizing her role in this success, the press dubbed the law the “Lex

Behm.”

Her engagement for poor women won her the reputation of being a just

and caring mother (or grandmother), and she came to be called “Muttel” Behm
(a tender version of “Mother Behm”). On her sixty-fifth birthday in 1925, the
Medical Faculty of the University of Greifswald awarded her an honorary
doctorate.

The interest of one women’s group, however, dominated the agenda of right-

wing women on women’s issues: the housewives. The economic pressures of the
First World War had made most Germans painfully aware of the importance of
homemaking. Nobody doubted any more that the role of the housewife as a
consumer, as a daily preparer of food, and – in the countryside – as a producer
had national importance. Schirmacher had expressed this most powerfully in
1918: “The world war has taught us that cooking and homemaking are service to
the country, defense of the country, and a form of citizenship. Not only the sword
is a weapon – in the ‘hunger war’, the cooking spoon is equally important.”

The

war had indeed triggered a movement to professionalize homemaking so as to
maximize the use of scarce food resources. An avalanche of scientific informa-
tion and practical advice became available to housewives, who were also recog-
nized as extremely important consumers – given that two-thirds of the national

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wealth went through their hands every year. Mindful of many women’s triple load
of household, family, and work, home economics experts encouraged women to
adopt effective time management, rationalize the household, and adopt certain
guidelines for shopping. During the war, urban and rural housewives had formed
their national interest organizations, the RDH and the RLHV. The economic
crises of the Weimar years lent renewed urgency to the efforts begun during the
war, and the housewives’ movement gained mass support. In 1922 the league of
urban housewives (RDH) had 250,000 members, and the membership of the
league of rural housewives (RLHV) peaked around 100,000 in 1929.

Housewives’ representatives campaigned to get homemaking recognized as a
profession. Many of them saw homemaking and motherhood as woman’s true
calling and were suspicious of the claims of women in other professions. They
wanted to upgrade the public image of homemaking and to make it economically
viable for more (middle-class) women to devote their full energy to the house-
hold and family.

Most DVP and DNVP women agreed with the housewives’ leaders on

women’s ideal calling. In defense against the charge that few politically active
women were married and had children, Lenore Kühn had explained that mothers
and housewives should not be burdened with political work.

From this notion

followed the claim, however, that single women active in politics had to work for
the interests of housewives and mothers. The concerns of housewives indeed
stood at the center of the DVP’s and DNVP’s political agenda on women. Kühn
herself was very much aware of this when she worked for the RFA in the early
1920s. In daily contact with the DNVP’s women deputies in the Reichstag and
the Prussian Landtag, she often felt alienated by their excessive stress on house-
wife issues and their apparent disinterest in educated professional women. After
getting particularly exasperated about her work, she confided to her diary in June
1921: “Oh, I wish I was rid of it all, particularly because we academics are really
not wanted. The best thing would be to give up my academic title.”

But Kühn,

with her high-flying intellectual interests, probably expressed the point of view
of a small minority.

References to the household as the model for male-female

cooperation appeared frequently in the statements of right-wing women. They
often suggested that the common sense of the housewife should be inserted into
politics and occasionally represented themselves as the housewives in the party
household, charged with making new members feel welcome and at home.

Mende, in particular, stressed the contribution the common sense of housewives
would make to political life. She argued that Germany’s economy in the First
World War would have worked much better had the authorities drafted more
women with housekeeping skills into the administration, and, in a critique of men
in the National Assembly in 1919, she claimed that women tended to be more
energetic and practical because of their household experience.

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The personal connections between the parties and housewives’ groups are

striking.

The rural housewives were strongly involved in the DNVP. The leader

of the RLHV, Elisabet Boehm, belonged to the RFA of the DNVP. The urban
housewives of the RDH had their closest ties to the DVP. Maria Jecker, chair of
the RDH from 1927 on, belonged to the National Women’s Committee of the
DVP. Housewives’ activists were also represented in the parliamentary groups of
both parties. Among the most notable in the DNVP were Therese Deutsch from
East Prussia, who sat in the Prussian Landtag 1921–1932 (with a short interrup-
tion in 1928), Else von Sperber, also an East Prussian who sat in the Reichstag
from May 1924 to May 1928, and Elsa Hielscher-Panthen from Silesia, who
served in the Prussian Landtag from 1924 to 1932. All three were respected rural
housewives’ representatives. Another expert on rural homemaking was the
home-economics teacher Maria Schott (born 1878), who sat in the Landtag of
Sachsen-Weimar and later the Reichstag (March 1923 to May 1928). Two
outstanding representatives of urban housewives in the DNVP were Hedwig
Hoffmann-Bochum, an urban home-economics expert from Bochum sitting in
the Reichstag from 1921 to 1924, and the Silesian noblewoman Freda Freifrau
von Rechenberg, who served in the Prussian Landtag from 1924 to 1928 and was
the vice-chair of the RFA from 1927 to 1932.

In the Landtag of Mecklenburg-

Schwerin, the DNVP’s Hanny Voß represented housewives’ interests, and the
DNVP also included some well-known housewives without parliamentary seats,
such as Martha Voß-Zietz, who chaired the RDH in the early 1920s, and Bertha
Hindenberg-Delbrück, a nationally known activist for the same organization in
Hanover.

Besides Jecker and Clara Mende, who had built up her own home-

economics school in Berlin-Tempelhof, the DVP boasted Charlotte Mühsam-
Werther, the housewives’ representative on the National Economic Council, in its
ranks. The DVP’s most important representatives of housewives in parliaments
were Milka Fritsch, Reichstag member 1923–24, and Lotte Garnich, Prussian
Landtag member 1919–1924. Hedwig Heyl, the prestigious founder of the urban
housewives’ movement, was active for the DVP in the city parliament of
Berlin.

Finally, Hilde Margis, a well-known home-economics expert, was chair

of the DVP housewives’ committee.

Given the intense connections between the housewives’ leagues and the two

parties, it comes as no surprise that the DVP and DNVP women supported ener-
getically the policies of these leagues. The “buy German” campaigns of the two
housewives’ leagues, in particular, received outspoken support in the women’s
press of the DVP and DNVP. Women from both parties criticized the preference
of German consumers for white flour over the “German” rye and for tropical
fruit over apples grown in Germany. They also encouraged the purchase of
German consumer goods by stressing the superior quality of German-made
crafts over mass-produced foreign goods – a misleading argument because many

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German goods were also mass-produced. Sometimes the “buy German” argu-
ments became rather absurd, as when Else von Sperber mixed health arguments
with racial notions in 1930: “In the nordic countries, in particular, the once
almost exclusive consumption of rye has led to a beautiful, tall, and strong
human type.” (Sperber failed to explain, however, why this had presumably not
happened in Poland, where the diet was equally dominated by rye.

) Mende

always wrote “meat” in quotation marks when she meant imported meat, and the
DNVP’s Martha Voß-Zietz admired Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s measures
to restrict the import of foreign food: “How can a responsible citizen today not
wish for a man like Mussolini, who ends with a strike of the pen the import of
bananas and teaches Germans to eat German apples …?”

Mussolini’s declara-

tion of a weekly “rice day” to further the appreciation of Italian rice also received
the praise of a DNVP commentator, who wished that the German government
would introduce a “rye bread day”.

In the charged nationalist atmosphere of the

post-Versailles period, buying German produce and consumer goods appeared as
a national duty. The leading women in the two parties often backed up their “buy
German” campaigns with calls for higher tariffs on foreign food and consumer
goods. This policy, of course, appealed to the economic interests of important
voter groups – the East Elbian landowners in the DNVP and small producers and
retailers in the DVP.

In close contact with the housewives’ leagues, women from the two parties

also supported efforts to teach German housewives more efficient ways of
cooking and housekeeping. They displayed interest in new developments in
household machinery, architecture, and city planning, and they reported exten-
sively about exhibitions on these topics. DNVP women in the Prussian Landtag
secured state funds for agricultural schools and research institutions, and the
DVP’s Hilde Margis was instrumental in building up a network of courses for
urban housewives.

The stress on household rationalization, however, was not

always intended to ease the household work of employed women or to free the
housewife so that she could get paid employment outside the house. DNVP
women, in particular, hoped that efficient housework would give the (bour-
geois) housewife more time for the education of her children and more oppor-
tunities for increasing the size of the family – an important task in view of
DNVP women’s worries about the low birthrate, particularly that of the middle
class.

The leading women in the DVP and DNVP knew that the availability of cheap

labor was of concern to both housewives’ leagues. Right-wing women therefore
supported various schemes for a compulsory service year for girls in an urban or
rural household. This measure would have ensured a steady supply of essentially
free labor to housewives (in fact, some proposals even stipulated that the girls
would pay for their “training”!). Also, women in the DVP and DNVP took into

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account the housewives’ opposition to labor legislation upgrading the rights of
domestic employees and rural workers – with the DNVP being more constrained
here by virtue of its ties to domestic employee organizations.

Since the

proposals for a compulsory service year never came to fruition in the Weimar
Republic, right-wing women supported the buildup of voluntary service arrange-
ments instead.

The housewives’ leagues helped to facilitate such arrangements,

while one organization made women’s service and preparation for housework its
primary aim: the German Young Women’s Service (Deutscher Jungmädchen-
dienst). Founded in 1923, it enjoyed support from the women of the DVP and
DNVP. In its camps, young women learned basic housekeeping, nursing, and
infant-care skills and enjoyed the hiking, marching, and fireside singing typical
for so many German youth leagues of the period.

Several right-wing women

suggested that the Jungmädchendienst become a model for the compulsory
service year. Should this happen, DNVP Reichstag deputy Maria Schott
predicted that “a physically and morally healthy Volkstum would blossom
again.”

In conclusion, the women from the DVP and DNVP pushed for women’s

rights in some areas but their initiatives often lost their bite due to the women’s
own argument that women’s rights should not always be equal to men’s rights
because women were not equal to men. If one considered motherhood and
housekeeping as women’s first and “natural” duties, then fighting against the
dismissal of married female civil servants did not make much sense – particu-
larly if the state agreed to ease the dismissed woman’s transition to house-
keeping and motherhood by paying her a compensation sum. Making house-
keeping more viable and more effective appeared as a worthy cause, and no
interest organization of women had as much power and representation in the
DVP and DNVP as the housewives’ leagues. Their concerns therefore domi-
nated the women’s agenda of the two parties, and the discrimination of women
in the civil law code received far less attention. Here, the BDF, as the umbrella
organization of German bourgeois women, was widely considered the group
charged with doing the political legwork, but it was hampered by its strongest
members, the two housewives’ leagues.

Whereas the weight of the house-

wives’ organizations often acted as a brake on women’s rights demands in the
DVP and DNVP, it worked as a push for most of their initiatives with regard to
families, youth, education, and morality.

Notes

1. Magdalene von Tiling, “Die verheiratete Beamtin und Artikel 14 der Reichs-

Personalabbau-Verordnung,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 51, 20
December 1928 (supplement).

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2. W. Krobiell, “Frauen und deutsche Demokraten,” in Das Demokratische

Deutschland 1918/19, no. 36 (17 August 1919): pp. 839–40, in GStA Berlin,
XII, III, vol. 10.

3. See the summary of Tiling’s speech: “Tagung des erweiterten RFA der Dn.

Vp.”, Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 4, no. 284, 3
December 1921.

4. See for example Elisabeth Cimbal, “Frauenausschüsse und ihre

Arbeitsgebiete,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 2, 29 January
1922.

5. Frevert, Women in German History, p. 170; Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi

Society (London: Croom Helm, 1975), p. 6; for a good summary of the
issues, see Britta Lohschelder, “Die Knäbin mit dem Doktortitel”.
Akademikerinnen in der Weimarer Republik, Forum Frauengeschichte 14
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1994), pp. 8–15.

6. “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik: Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” p. 31; “Grundsätze der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei vom Jahre 1920,” in Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei,
pp. 112–19 (points 10 and 29).

7. “Der Parteitag in Leipzig,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1, no. 5, 30 October 1919.

On the genesis of the party program, see Wolfgang Hartenstein, Die Anfänge
der Deutschen Volkspartei 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962), pp.
106–20. See also Clara Mende, Die Deutsche Volkspartei zur Frauenfrage
(Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1919), p. 7.

8. Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland

1894–1933, pp. 168–9.

9. Anna Mayer, Die Rechtsstellung der Ehefrau und der ehelichen Mutter,

Flugschriften der Deutschen Volkspartei III-9 (Berlin 1921).

10. Erna von Birkhahn, “Eherechts- oder Ehescheidungsreform?” Frauen-

korrespondenz 11, no. 19, 9 May 1929; Elisabeth Spohr, “Die elterliche
Gewalt der Mutter,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 17, 28 April 1927.

11. Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),

pp. 146–8.

12. Elsa Matz, “Die Staatsangehörigkeit der Ehefrau,” NLC 57, no. 231, 27

November 1930. See also VdR 1930–1932, vol. 445, pp. 1419–20.

13. “Staatszugehörigkeit der Ehefrau,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 2, 14

January 1925; Eli Nathans, “Political Rights and Ethnic Duties: Citizenship
Regimes and the Nationality of Married Women in Germany, France, and
the United States, 1900–1930,” unpublished manuscript (2001). See also Eli
Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and
Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, forthcoming July 2004).

14. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 13. April

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1919, pp. 70–1, and Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen
Volkspartei am 18., 19. u. 20. Oktober 1919, pp. 180 and 205.

15. See Clara Mende, “Neue Aufgaben für die deutschen Frauen,” Die Frau in

der Politik. Monatsbeilage der “Deutschen Stimmen” 1, no. 11, 24
November 1918, p. 83, in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–42 (DVP), vol. 16: “… no
woman may leave a returning soldier insecure about his job, not even for a
minute.”

16. Gertraud Wolf, Frauenberufsfragen und Politik, Flugschriften der DVP 53,

Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1921 (in GStA Berlin, XII, III, vol. 16).

17. See, for example, Martha Schwarz, “Frauen in der Preußischen

Unterrichtsverwaltung” and “Leistungsprinzip oder soziale Gehälter,” both
in NLC 59, no. 28, 11 February 1932, and J. Lange, “Das junge Mädchen,”
NLC 59, no. 34, 18 February 1932. On the reaction to the Nazi challenge,
see below, Chapter 9.

18. Elisabeth Spohr, Deutschnationale Vertretung der Fraueninteressen in der

Preußischen Landesversammlung (Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-
vertriebsstelle, n.d. [1920?]), pp. 3 and 14–17.

19. Beate Bartels, “Die Frau gehört ins Haus,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 22,

2 June 1927. See also Elisabeth Spohr, “Berufswahl der Mädchen,” Frauen-
korrespondenz 9, no. 7, 17 February 1927.

20. According to the census figures of 1925, there were only about seven thou-

sand married women in the civil service, as compared to 3.7 million married
women working outside the civil service (2.5 million of them were working
together with the husband in the family business or the family farm) and a
total of 11.5 million working women. These numbers were probably even
lower during the Depression. See Lotte Garnich, “Krise und
Frauenberufsarbeit,” NLC 59, no. 23, 4 February 1932, and Rosa Kempf,
Die deutsche Frau nach der Volks-, Berufs- und Betriebszählung von 1925
(Mannheim: Bensheimer, 1931).

21. Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, pp.

172–80; Frevert, Women in German History, pp. 197–8; Ursula Nienhaus,
“ ‘Neue Frauen’ im öffentlichen Dienst: Der Frauenverband der deutschen
Post- und Telegraphenbeamtinnen (1905–1933).” Internationale Wissen-
schaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung
34, no. 3–4 (1998): 426–40.

22. “Gesetz über die Rechtstellung [sic] der verheirateten Beamtin,” Deutsch-

nationale Frau 14, no. 10, 15 May 1932; Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche
Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, p. 173.

23. See “Frauenfrage,” in Deutschnationaler Rednerführer 1920, pp. 264–5;

Hildegard Goetting, Deutschnationale Vertretung der Fraueninteressen in
der Deutschen Verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung (Berlin, 1921),

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p. 7; and Annagrete Lehmann, “Abfindungssumme für verheiratete Beamtin
abgeschafft,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 13, 28 March 1929.

24. Annagrete Lehmann, “Rechtliche Stellung der verheirateten Beamtin und

Lehrerin,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 3, 1 May 1931. Ilse Neumann
advanced the same argument in the Prussian Landtag: “Aus dem
Preußischen Landtag,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 17, 1 December 1931.

25. Anny von Kulesza, Frauenfragen der Gegenwart, Flugschriften der

Deutschen Volkspartei 79 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1931), pp. 9–11.
See also Doris Hertwig-Bünger’s Reichstag speech in VdR, 1928–1930, vol.
424, pp. 1547–8; “Die Unkündbarkeit der verheirateten Beamtin,” NLC 56,
no. 67, 28 March 1929; and Anny von Kulesza, “Frauenarbeit –
Doppelverdiener,” NLC 58, no. 37, 19 February 1931.

26. “Gesetz über die Rechtstellung [sic] der verheirateten Beamtin,”

Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 10, 15 May 1932, and “Reichstags-
entscheidung zur Frage der verheirateten Beamtin,” NLC 59, no. 105, 2 June
1932.

27. As quoted in Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no. 6, 23 May 1923.
28. For the DNVP, see Magdalene von Tiling, “Die verheiratete Beamtin.” For

the DVP: DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, pp. 508–9, and DVP-Wahlhandbuch
1928, pp. 437–8.

29. See the resolution of the VRPT in Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 18, 11 June

1921, and Nora Hartwich, “Die uneheliche Mutterschaft der Sozial-
beamtin,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 10, 4 February 1922.

30. For a summary of the Reichstag debate, see Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 15,

22 April 1922.

31. “Aus Rt. und Lt.,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 20, 15 July 1922. See also

VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 354, p. 6932.

32. See Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 21, 29 July 1922, and “Aus Rt. und Lt.,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 20, 15 July 1922. For the support of Reinhard
Mumm, also a DNVP Reichstag deputy, see Reinhard Mumm, “Der Kampf
um die Ehe,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 37, 17 September 1924.

33. “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik,” p. 31; DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, pp.

506–7.

34. Die Deutschnationale Fraktion des Reichstags und die Reichsregierungen

Fehrenbach u. Dr. Wirth (Juni 1920–August 1921), Deutschnationales
Handbuch 8, Berlin 1921, pp. 108 and 233.

35. Ilse Prehn, “Über weibliche Laien- und Berufsrichter,” in Der Parteifreund

2, no. 23, 9 June 1921; for a resolution of the women’s group of Königsberg
against women in juries, see Der Parteifreund 2, nrs. 27/28, 7 July 1921,
and on the reaction of DNVP men: Nachlass Westarp, Gärtringen (in
private possession), Briefwechsel 1920–22, A–Z. See also Ute Planert,

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Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,
1998), p. 247.

36. VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 354, pp. 6913–18. For the text of the law, see Reichs-

gesetzblatt Teil 1, Jahrgang 1922. Berlin: Verlag des Gesetzessammlungs-
amts, 1922, p. 465.

37. “Nochmals: Die Frau als Schöffin und Geschworene,” Frauenkorres-

pondenz 2, no. 18, 11 June 1921; Die Frau in Familie und Staat,
Deutschnationales Rüstzeug 7, Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-
vertriebsstelle, 1924, p. 20 (in: GstA Berlin, XII, III, vol. 2); LRK [=Lenore
Ripke-Kühn], “Weibliche Schöffen und Geschworene,” Frauenkorres-
pondenz 2, no. 14, 9 April 1921.

38. Anna Mayer, “Weibliche Polizei in Preußen,” NLC 54, no. 38, 23 February

1927; “Weibliche Polizei,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 13, 25 March 1926;
“Aus dem preußischen Landtage,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 7, 16
February 1928. See also DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928, pp. 435–6.

39. Doris Hertwig-Bünger, “Weibliche Polizei,” NLC 54, no. 82, 3 May 1927.

For background, see Ursula Nienhaus, Nicht für eine Führungsposition
geeignet: Josefine Erkens und die Anfänge weiblicher Polizei in
Deutschland, 1923–1933 (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999).

40. Ingrid Wittmann, “ ‘Echte Weiblichkeit ist ein Dienen’ – Die Hausgehilfin in

der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus.” In Frauengruppe
Faschismusforschung, eds., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte
der Frauen in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus.
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1981), pp. 15–16; Frevert,
Women in German History, p. 195; Ute Gerhard, Unerhört: Die Geschichte
der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990), p. 364; Renate
Bridenthal, “Class Struggle Around the Hearth: Women and Domestic
Service in the Weimar Republic.” In Michael Dobrowski and Isidor
Wallimann, eds., Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic
Collapse of the Weimar Republic. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp.
247–51.

41. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 52–3.

42. Freda von Rechenberg, “Zum Hausgehilfengesetz,” Frauenkorrespondenz

12, no. 1, 2 January 1930; F.W., “Hauswirtschaft und soziale Lasten,” NLC
55, no. 53, 22 March 1928; Maria Jecker, “Zum Entwurf eines Gesetzes
über die Beschäftigung in der Hauswirtschaft,” NLC 56, no. 168, 20
August 1929; Theone Polaczek, “Ein Wort zur staatsbürgerlichen
Erziehung der Hausangestellten,” NLC 57, no. 165, 27 August 1930. The
DNVP usually invited representatives of both sides to meetings on this
issue: See the speech by domestic employee Auguste Rhode at the big

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DNVP women’s meeting in 1921: “Frauenversammlung der Deutsch-
nationalen Volkspartei,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 11, 26 February
1921. For evidence of the conservatism of a domestic employee union
linked with the Catholic Church, see Wittmann, “ ‘Echte Weiblichkeit ist
ein Dienen,’ ” p. 23.

43. VdL, 1919–1921, vol. XII, pp. 15557–65 and 15599–15601. See also

Margarethe Poehlmann, “Das Hebammengesetz,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3,
no. 5, 3 February 1921.

44. Margarethe Poehlmann, “Das neue preußische Hebammengesetz,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 37, 15 September 1922, and Elisabeth Spohr, “Der
neue Regierungsentwurf des Hebammengesetzes,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2,
no. 21, 23 July 1921. See also VdL, 1921–1924, vol. VIII, pp. 10596–7.

45. Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy,

1885–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 35–6 and
165–74; Barbara Franzoi Bari, “ ‘… with the wolf always at the door …’:
Women’s Work in Domestic Industry in Britain and Germany.” In Marilyn J.
Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Connecting Spheres: European Women in
a Globalizing World, 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).

46. Erika Altgelt, “Erhaltung der Heimarbeit,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 36,

20 May 1925.

47. Reinhard Mumm, “Der Ehrentag Margarethe Behms,” Der Parteifreund 3,

no. 14, 15 April 1922.

48. Ibid.
49. Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 1, 7 January 1925.
50. Käthe Schirmacher, Frauendienstpflicht. Bonn: Marcus und Weber Verlag,

1918, p. 6.

51. Bridenthal, “Class Struggle around the Hearth,” p. 246, and Bridenthal,

“Organized Rural Women and the Conservative Mobilization of the German
Countryside in the Weimar Republic.” In Larry E. Jones and James
Retallack, eds., Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the
History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence and
Oxford: Berg, 1993), p. 390.

52. Lenore Kühn, “Frau und Volksvertretung,” Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 18,

15 May 1920.

53. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 8 (diary 1921–22), entry of 22 June 1921.
54. Besides, she downplayed the high respect other DNVP women still showed

for her at this time: “I am highly respected and miserably paid.” BA
Koblenz, Nachlass Kühn, vol. 8 (diary 1921–22), entry of 11 July 1921.

55. See the appeal of the DNVP’s National Women’s Committee in

Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 13, 26 March 1921, and Luise Marelle,

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“Antifeminismus und Berufswertung,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 19, 13
May 1920.

56. See Mende’s speech, in 10 Vorträge gehalten auf der Schulungswoche in

Darmstadt vom “Deutschen Frauenausschuß zur Bekämpfung der
Schuldlüge.” (1925), in BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–121, p. 41, and Clara Mende,
“Die praktische politische Arbeit und die Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1,
no. 3, 17 October 1919. Mende did not imply that women should take over
the tasks of men. She merely signaled that if women acted in their fields as
energetically as an efficient housewife did, men would do their part, too.

57. On housewives’ issues, see Renate Bridenthal, “ ‘Professional’ Housewives:

Stepsisters of the Women’s Movement.” In Renate Bridenthal, Atina
Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny:
Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1984), and Bridenthal, “Organized Rural Women;” Schmidt-Waldherr,
Emanzipation durch Professionalisierung?; Nancy Reagin, “Comparing
Apples and Oranges: Housewives and the Politics of Consumption in
Interwar Germany.” In Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias
Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer
Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); and Nancy Reagin, “The Foreign Housewife and
the German Linen Cabinet: Household Management and National Identity
in Imperial Germany.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht:
Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2000). See also the extensive literature cited in Karen Hagemann,
“Of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Housewives: Everyday Housework and the Limits of
Household Rationalization in the Urban Working-Class Milieu of the
Weimar Republic.” International Review of Social History 41 (1996):
305–30 (here pp. 306–7).

58. Annagrete Lehmann, “Zum Wahlausfall,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 22,

31 May 1928.

59. On Hindenberg-Delbrück, see Nancy Reagin, A German Women’s

Movement (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
1995), pp. 226–32.

60. On Heyl, see Heidi Koschwitz-Newby, “Hedwig Heyl. Die beste Hausfrau

Berlins.” In Christiane Eifert and Susanne Rouette, eds., Unter allen
Umständen. Frauengeschichte(n) in Berlin (Berlin: Rotation Verlag, 1986).

61. Else von Sperber, “Unser täglich Brot –,” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 13,

27 March 1930.

62. Martha Voß-Zietz, “Kauft deutsche Waren!” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no.

3, 16 January 1930; Clara Mende, “Das Interesse der Hausfrau an der
Steuer- und Zollpolitik,” NLC 52, no. 160, 1 September 1925.

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63. Dr. Wanda Anger, “Warum Roggenbrot?” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 18,

1 May 1930.

64. Hilde Margis, “Der Aufgabenkreis für die Rationalisierungsbestrebungen

im Haushalt,” NLC 54, no. 151, 25 August 1927, and Margis, “Sachlichkeit
und Lebensführung,” NLC 57, no. 10, 16 January 1930; “Tagung des
Reichsfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 54, 27
November 1928 (special edition). See also Deutsch’s speech in VdL,
1924–1928, vol. XII, pp. 17686–9.

65. Elisabeth Spohr, “Volkserstarkung oder Untergang,” Frauenkorrespondenz

6, no. 28, 16 July 1924; Reagin, A German Women’s Movement, p. 231. The
information about effective cooking and housekeeping may well have been
appreciated broadly, but the economic constraints made a mechanization of
the German household a unique prerogative of the upper classes. See
Reagin, “Comparing Apples and Oranges,” pp. 243–5 and 254, and
Hagemann, “Of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Housewives,” p. 305.

66. Bridenthal, “Class Struggle around the Hearth,” pp. 251–3; Reagin, A

German Women’s Movement, p. 232; Bridenthal, “Organized Rural
Women,” pp. 396–8.

67. See, for example, Asta Rötger, “Vom freiwilligen Arbeitsdienst der Frauen,”

Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 18, 15 September 1932; Hannah Brandt,
“Dienst,” Frauenkorrespondenz, 22 December 1923; Elisabeth Spohr,
“Frauendienstpflicht,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 26, 2 July 1924; Ilse
Szagunn, “Idee der Arbeitsdienstpflicht,” NLC 52, no. 4, 5 February 1925.

68. “M.S. [Martha Schwarz], “Deutscher Jungmädchendienst,” NLC 51, no.

126, 1 August 1924; Hannah Brandt, “Völkische Erziehung der deutschen
Jungmädchen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 25, 25 June 1924.

69. Maria Schott, “Die weibliche Jugend und die Erwerbslosenfürsorge,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 29, 23 July 1924.

70. Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in der Weimarer Republik,

chapters 2 and 3.

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–5–

Family, Youth, and Morality

The German women see their main task as the preservation and strength-
ening of the German family. It is for us a positive moral value, the basic
form of an ethical community, and the basic unit of all cultural life.

Marie Bernays at the DVP’s national conference in October 1919.

Studies by Claudia Koonz and Helen Boak on the parliamentary activities of
women from all Weimar parties show that women spoke mostly on topics close
to their agreed “maternal” sphere: education, family, social policy, and morality.

Although foreign policy mattered more than these studies suggest, and enough
to justify an extra chapter below, this characterization fits most of the political
activities of DVP and DNVP women. The DVP, for example, had twenty women
representatives in the Reichstag and the state parliaments in early 1924, and all
but one were members of the social-policy committee of their parliament; four-
teen of them also belonged to the committee on cultural policy, which dealt with
education and matters of morality. The DNVP women showed a preference for
the same committees.

The men in the two parties never questioned that women

should take the lead in social and cultural affairs and generally supported their
work in these fields.

Women from both parties saw the family as the central unit and corner stone

of the Volksgemeinschaft. They tended to conceive of their party and the German
nation as an extended family in which they played the role of the mother and
housewife.

Just as they saw the Volksgemeinschaft, imagined as a national

family, threatened by dissolution, they also believed that the actual family in
Germany was in crisis. It did nothing to diminish the passion of their arguments
that the “happy” family life of before 1914, which they contrasted with the
postwar situation, resembled more a nostalgic vision than a memory of reality.
As the main dangers to the postwar family they identified the economic and exis-
tential distress caused by the strains of war and the upheavals of the postwar
period. Also, the buildup of the secular Weimar state, attempts by the Left to
“socialize” the family, and the widespread decline of religious feeling alarmed
right-wing defenders of the family. They feared that hedonistic individualism and
tolerance for public displays of immorality were eroding the ethical foundations

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of marriage and parenthood at the same time as the material conditions for
family life deteriorated. Overworked men and women no longer seemed to have
the time and will to foster a harmonious, nurturing, and religious family life for
which they often lacked a basic precondition: an adequate apartment. The result
of this trend appeared to be the decline of the birthrate, which all right-wing
Germans considered a threat to the military strength they hoped Germany would
regain in the future. This analysis of the situation induced women from the two
parties to support a variety of legislative measures to benefit families (particu-
larly large ones), to halt the secularization of education, and to rein in public
displays of immorality.

The DVP women were often torn between their religiously motivated conser-

vatism with regard to family and morality and their liberal preference for indi-
vidual autonomy. Whereas they worked out several compromises between these
positions, they never wavered on their goal to increase the birthrate in Germany,
a concern motivated by their nationalism. As early as at the second national party
conference of the DVP in October 1919, Marie Bernays, a DVP representative in
the Landtag of Baden and director of a social women’s school in Mannheim,
stressed that the preservation of the German family was the foremost task of
German women. She appealed for measures in favor of families with many chil-
dren and argued that the decline of the birthrate was not due to new professional
opportunities for women, as critics of women’s emancipation claimed, but rather
to the economic plight of the middle classes.

In the following years, women

from the DVP consistently advocated state support for kinderreiche (“child-rich”
or large) families. Through tax relief and rent subsidies, the state should
encourage Germans to have more children and improve the situation of those
who already had many children. In the rhetoric of DVP women, a “healthy”
family policy and support for large families were the same thing. The DVP
supported several Reichstag interpellations calling on the government to help
large families and to better protect mothers after childbirth.

When new census

figures released in 1925 showed a further decline of the birthrate, Elsa Matz
warned in a leader article for the Nationalliberale Correspondenz that the
Germans would soon become a dying people. Criticizing a bill that would have
worsened the situation of large families, she asked: “Who wonders in the face of
these facts that in Germany the ‘fear of having a child’ constantly increases?”

In a similar vein, she demanded that the government fund more research into the
causes of German emigration.

To bolster their argument for the national impor-

tance of an increased birthrate, DVP women occasionally alluded to France,
where the birthrate had declined that much earlier than in Germany. Else
Broekelschen-Kemper, a DVP deputy in the Prussian Landtag, drew a particu-
larly alarmist picture in 1929. Regarding the single child as power-hungry and
greedy, Broekelschen-Kemper argued that the preponderance of single-child

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families in France had replaced an older hospitable culture with a selfish, hedo-
nistic society and that the low birthrate had created a labor shortage leading to
the decline of agriculture and the rise of foreign immigration.

Concern about the birthrate also informed the policies of DVP women in other

issues regarding the family. With respect to the status of illegitimate children, for
example, the DVP women adopted a compromise formula between their reli-
giously motivated will to protect marriage and their aim to increase the birthrate.
They opted for improving support for the illegitimate child while insisting on the
inferiority of the child’s position compared to the position of legitimate chil-
dren.

The legalization of abortion, which was demanded by several bills

presented by the Communists and the SPD, drew opposition from the DVP not
only for religious reasons but also because of fears regarding the declining
birthrate. Dr. Ilse Szagunn, as the DVP’s medical expert, defended the illegality
of abortion but supported a reduction of the severe punishments for it.

A bill

drafted along those lines passed in 1926 with the votes of the DVP, the socialist
parties, and the Democratic Party, but it was opposed by the DNVP and Center
Party.

The reform of divorce law, debated in the Reichstag in 1926, had a less

compelling connection to the birthrate but forced the DVP and its women to steer
a middle course between religious respect for marriage and liberal criticism of
the cumbersome and prohibitive divorce regulations of German civil law. To
protect the family, DVP women wanted to ensure that divorce could not be
achieved easily, but they also recognized that in some cases marriages were
unsalvageable and should be ended.

DVP women did not ignore the social conditions that worked against large

families, such as low income and inadequate housing. When advocating relief of
these conditions, DVP women had to walk a thin line between proposing effec-
tive improvements and supporting policies advanced by the Left, which usually
offended the DVP’s liberal distaste for massive state intervention. This becomes
clear in the stands of the DVP’s expert on housing and urban development, Doris
Hertwig-Bünger, who sat in the Saxon Landtag and later in the Reichstag.
Hertwig-Bünger stressed repeatedly that state incentives for the building of
apartments were a basic form of support for families with many children. When
the Communists presented a Reichstag bill supportive of these goals, however,
Hertwig-Bünger opposed it because she found in it too much emphasis on state
control, excessively permissive provisions regarding abortion, and unrealistic
financial demands.

Minimizing state control over family life was a concern

also when the DVP women opposed a Communist bill for the establishment of
mandatory Kindergartens for all children at least three years of age.

Whereas eugenic arguments played an important role in the controversies over

reproduction during the Weimar Republic, particularly on the Left, DVP women
only marginally participated in that debate.

Bernays’ reference to the plight of

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the middle class in her speech on the decline of the birthrate makes it clear that
DVP women thought primarily of increasing the family size of the middle
classes, which tended to have a lower birthrate than the working class (although
the birthrate was declining across the board). But this class bias was rarely
spelled out; generally DVP women restricted themselves to pushing for a generic
increase of the population through fiscal and social measures. Szagunn agreed
on the need to include eugenic perspectives in the abortion debate but did not
push that argument.

That eugenics and abortion found little resonance among

DVP women may also have been because the Communists and SPD took the
initiative in these fields for much of the Weimar Republic. At the DVP women’s
national conference in May 1929, for example, Broekelschen-Kemper warned
that state-supported information agencies on family questions could be used to
disseminate left-wing ideas on reproduction and to hand out contraceptive
devices. This warning reflected the typical distrust all right-wing women felt
toward the SPD-led Prussian government, which was doing pioneering work in
its centers for eugenic advice.

The DNVP women took similar stands to DVP women on family and repro-

duction but tended to stress their conservative and religious views more and were
much more likely than DVP women to place their concerns into a racial context.
The DNVP guidelines for women’s work in the party articulate clearly the reli-
gious foundation of the DNVP women’s family policies: “The German
Nationalist woman sees in the Christian family the basis of a prospering people
and state and thus stands primarily for the safeguarding of Christian marriage
and for Christian childrearing … All measures beneficial to the foundation of
families and providing relief to families with many children are to be supported
energetically.”

In all parliaments, the DNVP acted accordingly. In the

Reichstag, it pushed successfully for an increase in the unemployment benefits
for workers with families in 1924.

In the Prussian Landtag, Elisabeth Spohr

and Ilse-Charlotte Noack demanded priority for large families in the distribution
of apartments and land by the state of Prussia, and their colleague Therese
Deutsch pushed for greater benefits for these families as well: “The state has to
show clearly that it regards these families as the sources of strength for the
future.”

Deutsch also demanded higher state funding for the National League

of Large Families (Reichsbund der Kinderreichen), with which the DNVP
fostered close contacts. (The leader of this organization, Martha Storost, ran on
the DNVP ticket in Prussia in 1924 – though unsuccessfully.)

Most DNVP

women probably agreed with the comments of the DVP’s Broekelschen-Kemper
on the low birthrate in France, although this argument would take a more explicit
racist tone in the DNVP. A woman writing for the official DNVP yearbook for
1920, for example, declared that the two-child family was a “Latin disease” indi-
cating racial decline.

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On abortion and divorce, the DNVP opposed liberalization together with the

Center Party. In a typical diatribe against abortion, Elisabeth Spohr argued that
the thought of a person’s right to his or her body was “poison” poured out by the
same circles that had undermined the Germans’ will to demonstrate obedience
and service and thus caused Germany’s breakdown in 1918. Spohr claimed that
the middle classes would sink into the proletariat all the faster if they limited
their fertility and that the unskilled worker would procreate so much that he
would soon represent the physical and mental “type” of the German. How a large
number of children would economically benefit middle-class families, however,
remained Spohr’s secret.

With respect to divorce law, the DNVP women

emphasized the sanctity of marriage and praised self-control and self-discipline
as the best remedy for unhappy marriages, although many of them also pointed
out the injustices to women contained in the existing law.

On illegitimate chil-

dren, DNVP women took the same position as DVP women, seeking to improve
the social situation of these children while denying them the same rights as
“legitimate” children.

The campaign of DNVP women for the family resorted much more readily to

simplified, paranoid, and racist images than did the rhetoric of DVP women.
Often the women from the DNVP invoked the vision of social chaos in the Soviet
Union and the fear that Poles and Russians, who had a much higher birthrate than
the Germans, might soon overrun Germany. DNVP women thus connected the
widespread concern about the “bleeding border” in the east – the notion that the
drawing of the German-Polish border after 1918 had disadvantaged Germany
and was causing great suffering for the Germans on both sides – to the vision of
Slavs and Bolsheviks overwhelming a declining German people.

At the

DNVP’s national conference in Königsberg (East Prussia) in September 1927,
Annagrete Lehmann argued that the dissolution of the family and the dechris-
tianization of culture in Germany would lead to a situation similar to the one that
existed in the Soviet Union: hundreds of thousands of abandoned children would
roam through the cities and the countryside, divorce would be easily available,
and the sexual license of young men would go unchecked.

Often DNVP

women implied that Communists, Social Democrats, and atheists all formed a
fifth column for the eastern menace in Germany. The RFA secretary Hannah
Brandt, for example, accused socialists of wanting to dissolve the family by
establishing communal Kindergartens and by upgrading the status of unmarried
couples. She called this policy a “Bolshevization of German notions of custom
and morality.”

When Lehmann spoke in the Reichstag against a Communist

proposal for the liberalization of abortion, she argued that the decline of the
birthrate could only be ascribed to the rise of atheism that was killing the
commitment to having a child.

In the Prussian Landtag, Dr. Helene von Watter

argued in February 1929 that social legislation had failed to reverse the decline

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of the birthrate and that only “a different moral, ethical, and Christian attitude”
could help. Watter alluded to the high birthrate in Russia and Poland when she
warned: “If our people fails to fundamentally change in this respect over the
coming years then we will soon be overgrown and overpopulated [überwuchert
und übervölkert] by the other countries and states – and this without war or other
external events.”

This mood reached fever pitch in the last years of the Weimar

Republic, when concern about a further decline of the birthrate due to the Great
Depression, and anxiety about the spread of atheistic movements from the Soviet
Union to Germany, gripped many on the German right. The renewed attacks of
the Stalin regime against the Churches in the Soviet Union and the growing
strength of the Communist Party in Germany further fueled these fears.

memorandum written by DNVP women in February 1932 stated that the
Germans would soon be a “dying people” because their governments had made
them bear too much economic hardship since 1918.

In a sharp attack on the

social policies of the German government, Reichstag deputy Magdalene von
Tiling argued a few months later that the government had strengthened the trend
toward families with only one or two children. In 1950 the population of
Germany would therefore sharply decline, and the Germans would no longer be
a “people without space” but would have to open themselves to the “inflow of
Slavic blood.”

In the election campaigns of 1932, Annagrete Lehmann often

conjured up the image of a final struggle between the national-Christian camp
and the international-atheistic “forces destructive of the family” associated with
the Slavs in Eastern Europe and the Communist Party in Germany.

The racist connotations of these horror scenarios fit well with the racial

hygienic ideas that came to dominate the thinking of some DNVP women on
reproductive issues.

The leading exponents of this trend among the DNVP

women were the völkisch women’s activists, above all Käthe Schirmacher, Ilse
Hamel, and Erna von Birkhahn, member of the RFA and chair of the DNVP’s
provincial women’s committee in Mecklenburg.

They combined a commitment

to women’s rights with a racialized vision of the Volksgemeinschaft similar to the
one promoted by leading Nazi theorists. In an article on “völkisch longing,” for
example, Erna von Birkhahn argued that a true Volksgemeinschaft could only
develop among people of the same race. Therefore, mixed-race marriages should
be discouraged and only “German-blooded people” (Deutschblütige) should be
allowed to shape German culture and law.

Whereas Birkhahn did not explicitly

refer to Jews, Ilse Hamel argued that “a natural, unbridgeable antagonism” exists
between Aryans and Jews. Believing that the Germanic woman would instinc-
tively choose a partner with the same racial background, she accused Jews of
interfering with that racial intuition through their corrupting cultural influence.
Hamel concluded with an urgent call to all German mothers to instill in their
children the “horror of mixed marriages and the dangers of hybrid blood.”

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Hamel repeatedly stressed that it was the task of the German woman to
strengthen the Nordic element of the population (Aufnordung), a point also made
by Schirmacher in speeches at the 1925 meeting of the DNVP’s Völkisch
Committee and the national party conference in 1926.

These ideas, propagated

by the völkisch women’s activists throughout the 1920s, became predominant in
the thinking of DNVP women after 1930 with the encouragement of RFA chair
Annagrete Lehmann.

Related to the concern about the family and the birthrate, issues regarding

education and youth also figured prominently on the agenda of DVP and DNVP
women. Given the strong representation of schoolteachers in the ranks of politi-
cally active women, the interest of these women in school legislation and all
aspects of youth comes as no surprise. In several regions, the women’s commit-
tees of both parties inspired the creation and helped in the development of youth
committees.

Women from both parties considered youth concerns and educa-

tion a central aspect of women’s activity, and they often hoped to create the
legislative framework for a new generation educated in a more patriotic and reli-
gious spirit.

Right-wing women agreed that German women should raise a new

generation of more patriotic, self-sacrificing, and determined Germans. As the
DNVP’s Klara Klotz, chair of the LFA Württemberg, put it before the DNVP
women’s conference of September 1926: “Through us mothers, the family should
become Germany’s psychological and mental arms factory.”

For the DVP,

Marie Bernays had already written in 1920 that instilling a nationalist attitude in
children must become a universal mission of German schools: “We, the women,
will always protest if critics argue that education toward a nationalist attitude is
tantamount to the political influencing of youth. We do not want the talk of toler-
ance and the reconciliation of peoples to allow our children to forget that their
fathers died for our freedom.”

The idea that women or mothers had the power

and duty to raise a new generation in a more nationalist spirit appeared
frequently in the deliberations of DVP women on foreign policy. The Reichstag
deputy Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb, for example, spoke of children as a
“sleeping army,” and Emma Stropp declared it a special duty of women to protest
national humiliation by considering the future of German children.

Here was a

vital connection between women’s activities in education and morality and their
nationalism. Believing that Germany’s defeat in 1918 had been in part an
outcome of moral weakness already manifest before 1914, right-wing women
wanted to strengthen the moral fiber of the nation by working for a more nation-
alist and authoritarian education. While emphasizing this connection, right-wing
women also made a point for the national importance of their primary fields of
interest, often belittled by men.

In their statements about youth, women from the DNVP and, to a lesser degree,

the DVP often revealed a patronizing and authoritarian pedagogy, as exemplified

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by the Martin Luther statement quoted in a DNVP pamphlet: “The apple has to
lie next to the whip.”

Women from both parties agreed that the lowering of the

voting age from twenty-five to twenty in 1919 was a mistake. In the National
Assembly, Margarethe Behm spoke against this reform in an amused atmosphere:
“The male youth, in particular, is real cider in this age group, (very good! On the
right) it can turn into beautiful wine, better than the one we get nowadays,
(laughter and approval) but it still is only cider, (very true! On the right) and we
have to wish that it turns only into the most noble wine.”

Occasionally DVP and

DNVP women admitted their fears that the lower voting age benefited mostly the
extremist parties, but they always justified a higher voting age on pedagogical
grounds.

Tiling often stressed that the young person, particularly the girl, should

not be confronted with too many adult matters. At an RFA meeting in 1928,
Lehmann gave this argument a racist twist by arguing that the Nordic girl had the
tendency to mature more slowly than others but that Jewish influence in pedagogy
was forcing her to confront sexual matters earlier than would be natural for her.

But the raising of the voting age, although demanded by the programs of both
parties, was hard to effect. The biggest debates on youth and education thus
focused on other matters, particularly the school system.

The Weimar Constitution stated that three types of school should exist:

common schools for children of all religious denominations, religious schools
where the teachers and the majority of students would belong to the same
denomination, and secular schools without any religious orientation. The first
type of school received a preferential position, but the Constitution left the
specifics to be defined by the Reichstag in a national school law. The Reichstag
debated the issue repeatedly in the early 1920s, but only in 1927 did the govern-
ment present a bill that seemed to have a chance to pass. The DNVP’s Interior
Minister Walter von Keudell had presided over the drafting of the bill; the school
experts Elsa Matz from the DVP and Ulrike Scheidel from the DNVP were
involved in the committee deliberations, and Prussian Landtag deputy
Magdalene von Tiling had been consulted as well.

The National School Bill,

supported by the Center Party, the BVP, and the DNVP, proposed to abolish the
preferential treatment of the common school and to provide for an easier trans-
formation of common schools into denominational schools according to the wish
of parents. The bill was debated from October 1927 to February 1928. The left-
wing parties and the Democratic Party opposed it because they claimed that it
gave an advantage to denominational schools. Decisive was the fact that the DVP,
which was at this time seeking to reaffirm its liberal principles, dragged its feet.
When the Center Party proved unwilling to compromise on some DVP demands
for revision that would have allowed the DVP to save its liberal face, the coali-
tion government of DVP, Center Party, and DNVP broke apart and negotiations
on the bill collapsed.

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The DVP women watched the fate of the National School Bill with ambiva-

lence. Given that Matz and other DVP women were well-connected to the
Evangelical Church, the improved position of religious schools cannot have
offended them. In fact, they had repeatedly demanded better protection for
denominational schools. Margarethe Detmering, a DVP representative in the
Landtag of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had even managed to push the Landtag to
increase the amount of religious instruction in public schools from two to three
hours a week.

When the National School Bill was published, Clara Mende

welcomed it and offered criticism only of some details.

Yet, the DVP women’s

press remained remarkably silent over the following months. Probably Matz and
her colleagues decided to follow the more critical party line. After the collapse
of the government, the DVP women again addressed the bill in public, but mostly
in order to deny the polemical charge from the Center and DNVP that the DVP
had caused the collapse because it wanted to ban religion from the schools.

The

DNVP was outraged after the failure of the bill, most of all Magdalene von
Tiling. As a prolific author of pedagogical works, Tiling had published a
pamphlet on the National School Bill, which she regarded to some extent as her
personal cause, even though she was not (yet) in the Reichstag.

Tiling and other

DNVP women had always defended the influence of religion in the schools and
the value of denominational schools. They resented the fact that the spirit of
Christianity did not have to permeate all classes in the privileged common
schools, although these schools did offer religion lessons.

That some common schools had been transformed into secular schools angered

the DNVP women particularly. They kept a watchful eye over developments at
these schools, mostly in Berlin, and brought to nationwide attention what they
considered their most glaring abuses. In early 1924, for example, the DNVP
claimed that some secular schools in Berlin had allowed students of both sexes to
perform naked dances. Gertrud Becker, a DNVP deputy in the Berlin city parlia-
ment, publicized the story and demanded legal measures to prevent a recurrence
of this event. The DNVP even brought the issue before the Landtag and used it in
its campaign for the May 1924 Reichstag elections.

In 1926, the DNVP women

protested against the appointment of an atheistic school councillor as head of the
schools of Dortmund. This appointment provoked angry reactions from Christian
parents, who even initiated a “school strike” by refusing to send their children to
school. A male Prussian Landtag deputy from the DNVP argued that it was a
scandal that religious schools should be put under the supervision of somebody
who “considers the truths of the Christian religion mistakes.”

In 1928, Hannah

Brandt, the secretary of the RFA, exposed one secular school in Berlin after it
distributed communist song books to its students, and another after its students
were required to sing the Communist International while marching.

In the same

year Lehmann attacked a new Prussian government decree stating that students in

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state schools had to sing republican songs and to receive instruction on the League
of Nations, which Germany had joined in 1926. This contradicted the DNVP’s
demand – advanced also by DVP women – that instruction on the Treaty of
Versailles and the “war-guilt lie” be made mandatory at all schools.

Frequently

the DNVP women played on anti-Semitic stereotypes by pointing out that some
of the school officials presiding over the Berlin schools were Jewish. Gertrud
Becker in 1924 depicted Jews as the seducers of German youth by insinuating that
Jews had inspired the naked dances. Berlin’s school councillor Dr. Kurt
Löwenstein became the target of special resentment from DNVP women because
of his Jewish background: as early as 1920, a speaker at a DNVP women’s confer-
ence in Königsberg exclaimed: “It is outrageous that the government dares to
offer us a Dr. Löwenstein as supreme school councillor.”

Memory of the

perceived outrages at secular schools loomed large when DNVP women enthusi-
astically welcomed the illegal overthrow of the SPD-led caretaker Prussian
government by Chancellor Franz von Papen on 20 July 1932.

Whereas the DVP women stayed aloof from the DNVP women’s struggle

against the secular schools, women from both parties agreed on the defense of
private education against the encroachments of the state, while also demanding
state support for these schools. Private girls’ schools, in particular, received
much attention from them. Many of these schools had been built up by charis-
matic women before 1914. The DVP women often stressed the pedagogical value
of the girls’ schools and argued that coeducational schools tended to make girls
feel more apprehensive and shy than single-sex institutions. The DVP school
expert Dr. Marie Bernays, herself the director of a girls’ school, argued that such
institutions were more flexible and innovative than the state schools and more
inspired by the spirit of morality. Bernays also pointed out that these schools
were crucial for girls because the teachers were mostly women. Elsa Matz, who
was the director of a girls’ school in Stettin (Pomerania), made the same argu-
ment several times in the first Reichstag (1920–24), and Dr. Gertraud Wolf
repeated it in the Bavarian Landtag. Margarethe Poehlmann, who had founded a
girls’ school in Tilsit (Russia – after 1918: Lithuania) before the war, represented
the interests of girls’ schools in the Prussian Landtag until her death in December
1923.

But with all the stress on the need for a different curriculum for girls, the

DVP women also demanded that the degree of the girls’ schools must be equiv-
alent to the degree from the mainstream Realschule.

They therefore combined

the argument for essential difference between the sexes with a claim for equal
opportunities.

The DNVP women saw the girls’ school primarily as a threatened space where

German girls still received a reliable national and Christian education – far from
the allegedly internationalist and hyper-intellectual training that girls received in
the state schools. Tiling argued that girls’ schools should continue to emphasize

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subjects that related to Germany’s cultural heritage and to religious ethics.
Together with other DNVP women, she often stressed that the girls’ school
should offer a different curriculum from that of coeducational or boys’ schools
because girls suffered from an overly intellectualized curriculum.

DNVP

women thereby put less emphasis on equal opportunities than their DVP
colleagues, but women from both parties were in complete agreement that the
faculty of girls’ schools should consist mostly of women and that women should,
as a rule, be their directors. They fought several changes of state regulations that
threatened to reduce the number of women teachers in the girls’ schools.

In connection with youth and education, women from the two parties

frequently raised public-health issues, particularly the dangers of alcohol abuse.
The physical damage alcohol inflicted on young people was seen as a threat to
the future viability of the Volk.

In the Reichstag, Mueller-Otfried attacked the

government in 1921 for doing too little to combat alcohol abuse: “How much
longer will the patience of those people be strained who do no longer want to see
our people’s potential and its force squandered by increasing alcohol abuse?”

Therese Deutsch, as DNVP deputy in the Prussian Landtag, suggested that train
stations should promote the sale of milk and reduce the sale of alcoholic bever-
ages, and Elisabeth Spohr, also in the Prussian Landtag, sharply criticized the
German government for permitting advertisements for alcoholic beverages on
the national railroad.

Spohr called for a broad information campaign on the

model of American temperance campaigns. Like many other political women,
she believed that the fight against alcohol abuse was a special cause of women:
“We, the women, are looking for positive tasks that contribute to the rebuilding
of the people (Volksaufbau). Here is a task where women have to participate with
special energy.” Spohr also hit a note frequently used by women from the DVP
and DNVP when she deplored the waste of sugar, fruit, and other nutrients in the
production of alcoholic beverages.

A special concern about alcohol abuse in

public was raised by Klara Klotz, the DNVP’s only female legislator in the
Landtag of Württemberg, during the Ruhr Occupation in 1923: “In this deadly
serious time of suffering – and out of respect for the heroic Ruhr population and
its horrible suffering – our public life has to become pure and German again.”

The women of the DVP also made temperance a central element of their poli-

cies regarding families and youth.

In the Prussian Landtag, Margarethe

Poehlmann demanded more protection for young people against the dangers of
alcohol and smoking, and Gertraud Wolf voiced similar concerns in the Bavarian
Landtag.

In 1928 Wolf published an article with the title “More Milk!”

describing Bavarian projects to propagate the health benefits of milk consump-
tion and to accustom young people to drinking milk regularly; the call mehr
Milch! may have reminded educated Germans of the motto mehr Licht! (more
light!) – Goethe’s often quoted last words.

Wolf and other women also pushed

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for a revision of laws that considered drunkenness an extenuating circum-
stance.

To rein in alcohol abuse, women from the two parties demanded or

supported a variety of measures. They asked the state to become more active in
alcohol-awareness education, to limit or ban the sale of alcoholic beverages to
young people, to raise taxes on alcohol consumption, and to restrict the adver-
tising of alcoholic beverages. The temperance struggle had a long tradition in the
German and international women’s movement, and women from the DVP and
DNVP here advanced nearly identical proposals that were frequently supported
by women from the Democratic Party and other parties as well, though with little
success, given the opposition of the beer and wine lobby connected to male legis-
lators on the right. Women from both parties watched with interest the enactment
of prohibition legislation in the United States, but they usually doubted that full-
scale prohibition would be possible in Germany and worried about its effects in
America. After Clara Mende had visited the Washington conference of the
International Council of Women in 1925, she argued that prohibition legislation
in the United States had led to a lowering of morals and an increase of alcohol
consumption among young people, particularly girls.

Whereas the alcohol issue concerned mostly the prevention of a physical and

moral danger to youth, women legislators were also active in promoting meas-
ures to enhance the health of the people, in particular the young. More than the
men in their parties, women of the DVP and DNVP encouraged sports. Although
gymnastics had a long and honored tradition in Germany beginning with the
exercises of “Vater” Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in the aftermath of the liberation
wars against Napoleon, most schools still lacked facilities and a commitment to
physical education in the 1920s.

Matz repeatedly assured the Reichstag that

supporting sports was meant more to benefit the people’s health and morality
than to encourage the pursuit of top-performance sports and the “Schmeling
hype” – the wave of national excitement created by the exploits of boxing star
Max Schmeling. Yet she did point out to the Reichstag that German successes at
the Olympic Games of 1928 had enhanced Germany’s reputation abroad – partic-
ularly “considering the friendliness toward sports in the Anglo-Saxon countries”
– and thus demanded more state support for the German Olympic team.

In a

paradigmatic statement, Matz explained to the Reichstag in 1928 that exercise
strengthened the will and self-control of young people while making them less
susceptible to “those pleasures that tend to destroy the body and the spirit.”
Obviously, her remarks provoked some smiling among men in the Reichstag, to
which she reacted with the following words: “I know very well that my talking
about these things does not cause general happiness in the Reichstag, but I want
to stress that a little more personal experience with gymnastics and sports would
do many of the members of this high house no harm.”

In the DNVP, several

women in the Prussian Landtag took up similar causes. Therese Deutsch asked

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the state to support youth hiking by funding the network of youth hostels that was
being built up on the initiative of General Rüdiger von der Goltz.

Freifrau

Helene von Watter, also a DNVP Landtag deputy, was on the board of the
German Gymnastics League (Deutsche Turnerschaft) and demanded in the
Prussian Landtag that sports be emphasized more because they helped Germans
“to preserve their last good, their genetic heritage.”

Beate Bartels argued in the

DNVP’s Frauenkorrespondenz that sports lessons in school had to stress char-
acter formation and not “American striving for records.” Otherwise, she argued,
the school would stir up ambition and arrogance, which Bartels considered twice
as obnoxious in girls as in boys.

Directly related to youth issues was the women’s concern over public morality.

This theme played a key role in the work of women legislators and activists from
both parties. The absence of many fathers and the increasing problems of policing
the home front had already created a widespread sense of alarm among educators
during the First World War. Later, the upheavals of the postwar period appeared
to prevent the restoration of the protective environment that youth deserved, as the
Weimar Republic seemed to have given free rein to public displays of vice. Images
of neglected, aggressive, and hedonistic youngsters abounded. A contributor to
the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, for example, claimed in 1920 that young people spent
all their money on beer and cigarettes and had to be taught respect for spiritual
work, a task that only women’s educational influence could achieve.

One of the

key points of the DNVP women’s program of 1921 was the fight against public
displays of immorality – against the proliferation of “trash and dirt” in literature,
film, and theater.

Women from almost all parties in the Reichstag agreed on the

need for restrictive legislation, although they differed on how much control and
censorship could pass before fundamental freedoms were violated. In August
1925, the DNVP’s Interior Minister Martin Schiele proposed a bill to the
Reichstag to tighten censorship rules and to establish a reviewing board charged
with identifying publications containing dangers for youth. Reichstag members
Elsa Matz from the DVP as well as Ulrike Scheidel and Paula Mueller-Otfried
from the DNVP helped to draft the bill and to promote it afterwards. The bill was
debated for over a year and became law on 18 December 1926 with the support
of the DVP, DNVP, and the Center Party, serving, in the words of historian
Cornelie Usborne, as “a reminder of the importance of conservative forces amidst
the social revolution of the ‘roaring twenties’.”

Typical for right-wing women, an author in the Frauenkorrespondenz in early

1926 justified the bill and demanded that women play a central role in its imple-
mentation. “It [the bill] calls for women who are ready to fight with their
maternal feeling for women’s dignity.” She claimed that women had a particular
role in fighting public immorality because they had a more refined sense of
shame and were more likely than men to be denigrated by immoral literary or

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artistic products.

After the passage of the bill, Elsa Matz was appointed to the

highest national control committee on film (Filmoberprüfstelle). How inclusive
her definition of immorality and danger to youth was became clear when she
justified the banning of the anti-war film “All Quiet on the Western Front” in late
1930, blaming the film for damaging German prestige abroad, offending
veterans, and provoking unrest.

Whereas DNVP women had no problem with

censorship, DVP women occasionally saw the need to justify their positions in
this field in front of the men in their party. Matz admitted that, against her
advice, the majority of the DVP Reichstag group had voted against the ban of
“All Quiet on the Western Front.” Therefore, Prussian Landtag deputy Anny von
Kulesza took pains to explain to the DVP’s national conference in 1930 that the
struggle against public displays of immorality did not contradict liberal princi-
ples, even though she advocated such illiberal positions as censorship and the
employment of religious persons as teachers.

In the context of public morality, prostitution was an important topic because

it revealed a double standard of morality for men and women and because most
bourgeois women considered it a great danger to the health of the Volk through
its role in the spread of venereal disease. Already before the First World War, the
German women’s movement had attacked the arbitrary control and regulation of
prostitutes by the police as an injustice that rested on double standards of
morality.

After the war, this claim was revived in the context of concern over

venereal diseases that were believed to have spread dramatically during the
war.

DVP and DNVP women argued that police regulation provided a false

sense of security against the spread of venereal disease because the vast majority
of prostitutes were “wild,” meaning unregistered, practitioners of their trade.
Women from both parties urged lawmakers to rein in prostitution in general and
thus to prevent the spread of venereal disease. They also criticized the inconsis-
tent state policy that declared prostitution illegal while helping to organize it. In
1927, the Reichstag finally abolished police regulation and decriminalized pros-
titution through the Law on the Struggle Against Venereal Disease. Women from
both parties welcomed the change, but the DNVP commentator, Reichstag
member Ulrike Scheidel, demanded that the new law be followed up by a law
allowing the police to take some prostitutes into custody. Scheidel argued that
three out of four prostitutes were mentally disturbed and should be sent to rural
work colonies.

Women from both parties also pressed hard for bans on the

employment of young women in bars that used the sexual appeal of these women
to lure male customers and to increase their alcohol consumption
(Animierkneipen). The National Assembly passed a law restricting this abuse in
December 1919, and when the Prussian Landtag in 1921 deliberated a law on the
employment of women in the hotel and restaurant sector, Margarethe Poehlmann
and Lotte Garnich of the DVP as well as Elisabeth Spohr and Ilse-Charlotte

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Noack of the DNVP demanded a complete ban of the Animierkneipen in Prussia
– but to no avail.

In general, women from the DVP and DNVP pursued similar policies with

respect to family, youth, and morality, with the former being occasionally a little
more liberal (divorce, abortion) and the latter more religious and racially
oriented. With respect to these issues, the DNVP and often the DVP thus
belonged to the “moral” or “religious” Right and cooperated with the Center
Party and the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP).

Women from both parties had

important connections to the Evangelical Church and to prestigious male
Reichstag members associated with it: Wilhelm Kahl in the DVP and Reinhard
Mumm in the DNVP.

The racist element in the DNVP women’s discourse on

the birthrate, health, and morality shows that some DNVP women already
thought of the Volksgemeinschaft in strictly racial terms, but this thinking had no
obvious equivalent in the DVP. Yet all the policies adopted by women from both
parties were consistent in their aim to strengthen morally and physically a nation
weakened by the effects of war and economic crisis. Their efforts to strengthen
the family, increase the birthrate, and fight amorality in education and public
displays aimed at making the German people united and strong. This meant to
stem a widely perceived decline but could also be seen as a preparation of the
Volkskörper for a new war in which a “healthy”, purged Germany would do
better than it had in 1914–1918. Klotz’s reference to mothers as Germany’s
“arms factory” points in that direction.

Notes

1. Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18., 19. u.

20. Oktober 1919, pp. 177–8. Emphasis in the original.

2. Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics”, p. 379 (calls social and cultural policies

a “not very prestigious area”); Koonz, “Conflicting Allegiances,” pp. 671–4
(stresses the division of political concerns of legislators along sex lines).
One should point out, however, that some of these spheres, such as welfare,
occupied center stage in Weimar politics.

3. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1924, p. 493.
4. For examples see “Grundsätze deutschnationaler Frauenarbeit,” as quoted in

Annagrete Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der deutschnationalen
Frauenarbeit.” In Max Weiß, ed., Der nationale Wille (Essen: Wilhelm
Kamp, 1928), pp. 326 and 328, and DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1924, p. 496.

5. Bericht über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18., 19. u.

20. Oktober 1919, pp. 177–8.

6. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928. Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1928, pp. 425

and 428. See also Helene Fock, “Bevölkerungsbewegung und Steuer-

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 99

politik,” NLC 52, no. 189, 14 October 1925 (FR 35), and M. S. [Martha
Schwarz], “Probleme der Bevölkerungspolitik,” NLC 56, no. 218, 30
October 1929 (FR 35).

7. Elsa Matz, “Familienschutz und Steuerpolitik,” NLC 52, no. 223, 30

November 1925. See also her Reichstag speech, in VdR, 1924–1928, vol.
388, pp. 4938–9. For background, see Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3, and Usborne, The Politics of the
Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992),
pp. 166–73.

8. VdR, 1924–1928, vol. 392, pp. 9697–8.
9. Broekelschen-Kemper, “Probleme des Geburtenrückgangs,” NLC 56, no.

104, 22 May 1929.

10. See the report of the DVP women’s meeting during the national party

conference in Nürnberg in December 1920: “Die Reichsfrauentagung in
Nürnberg,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 48/49, 9 December 1920. See also
Anna Mayer, “Der neue Gesetzentwurf über die Rechtstellung der unehe-
lichen Kinder und die Annahme an Kindesstatt,” NLC 56, no. 27, 6 February
1929.

11. Ilse Szagunn, “Paragraph 218,” NLC 51, no. 132, 12 August 1924.
12. Usborne, Politics of the Body; p. 172; Grossman, Reforming Sex, pp. 82–3.
13. Clara Mende, “Zur Reform der Ehescheidung,” NLC 53, no. 62, 8 April

1926. See also DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 15, 20 July 1923, and
“Fortbildungskurs für Frauen in Neuruppin,” Berliner Stimmen 4, no. 6,
June 1927. On religious opposition to the reform of family law, see Usborne,
Politics of the Body, p. 92.

14. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 424, pp. 1331 and 1788–9; vol. 426, pp. 3610–12; and

vol. 428, pp. 5994–6.

15. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928, pp. 428–9.
16. Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain,

1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review XXIII,
no. 3 (2000): 477–505 (here pp. 489–94).

17. Ilse Szagunn, “Paragraph 218,” NLC 51, no. 132, 12 August 1924. Szagunn,

however, supported the eugenic policies of the Nazi Regime in 1934. See
Grossman, Reforming Sex, p. 155.

18. Else Frobenius, “Mitarbeit der Frau an der Politik. Reichsfrauentagung der

Deutschen Volkspartei in Bremen,” Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 20, 18 May
1929. See also Usborne, The Politics of the Body, pp. 72 and 172.

19. “Grundsätze deutschnationaler Frauenarbeit,” as quoted in Lehmann, “Ziel

und Entwicklung der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” p. 326.

20. Maria Schott, “Die weibliche Jugend und die Erwerbslosenfürsorge,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no. 29, 23 July 1924.

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21. Frauenkorrespondenz 4, no. 3, 7 March 1923;VdL, 1928–32, vol. III, pp.

4091–2. See also RFA, “Fürsorge für kinderreiche Familien,” Frauen-
korrespondenz 5, no. 45, 12 November 1924.

22. For the DNVP’s contacts with the Bund der Kinderreichen, see for example

Lenore Kühn, “Der Bund der Kinderreichen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no.
26, 4 October 1922, and the list of DNVP candidates in Frauen-
korrespondenz 6, no. 46, 26 November 1924.

23. Emma Föllmer, “Die nationale Frau,” Jahrbuch 1920 der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei. Berlin: Schriftenvertrieb der Dn. Vp.: [1920], in BA Koblenz,
ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 4 (2).

24. Else von Sperber, “Zur Ehescheidungsreform,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no.

3, 20 January 1927; Elisabeth Spohr, “Volkserstarkung oder Untergang,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 28, 16 July 1924.

25. Freda von Rechenberg, “Gefährdung der Eheauffassung,” Frauen-

korrespondenz 10, no. 11, 22 March 1928; Else Meyer, “Jugendnot
und Ehereform,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 48, 29 November
1928.

26. “Die Stellung des unehelichen Kindes,” Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 9, 21

January 1922; see also “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik: Richtlinien der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” in Jahrbuch 1921 der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei. Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriften-
vertriebsstelle [1920], p. 30.

27. On women’s concern over Germany’s border with Poland, see Elizabeth

Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border’: Gender and Rituals of
Nationalist Protest in Germany, 1919–1939.” Women’s History Review 9, no.
2 (2000): 201–29, which does not, however, mention the fear of the high
birthrate in Poland and the Soviet Union, which was a crucial aspect of
DNVP women’s thinking about the border.

28. Summary of Lehmann’s speech: “Die Frauenversammlung auf dem

Deutschnationalen Reichsparteitag in Königsberg,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9,
no. 38, 22 September 1927.

29. “Der Kampf um die deutsche Familie,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 16, 19

April 1928. See also Asta Rötger, “Neugestaltung oder Vernichtung,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 52, 24 December 1930.

30. VdR, 1928–30, vol. 424, p. 1330.
31. VdL, 1928–32, vol. III, pp. 3956–7.
32. Lange, Protestantische Frauen auf dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus, p.

170; Kurt Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik
(1918–1932) (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981), p. 313.

33. Lindequist, “Warum sind wir deutschnational?” Die Deutschnationale Frau

14, no. 4, 16 February 1932.

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34. Magdalene von Tiling, “Kulturfragen,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no.

11, 1 June 1932.

35. See for example Annagrete Lehmann, “Deutsche Frauen, Volk und Staat

rufen Euch!” Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 13, 1 July 1932.

36. Whereas eugenics – the theory on how to raise the genetic quality of the

offspring – was generally pursued outside a racist framework (and
frequently by the Left), racial hygiene often tended to build eugenic princi-
ples into a ranking of races by genetic value. See Paul Weindling, Health,
Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism,
1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 135–8, and
Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), particularly chapter 1.

37. See Christiane Streubel, “ ‘Eine wahrhaft nationale Frauenbewegung’:

Völkisch-Nationale Feministinnen in der Weimarer Republik.” In Eva
Schoeck-Quinteros and Christiane Streubel, eds., Frauen der politischen
Rechten 1890–1933: Aktionen – Organisationen – Ideologien (Berlin:
Trafo-Verlag, in print). I prefer to call these women “völkisch women’s
activists” rather than “völkisch feminists,” “national feminists,” or “opposi-
tional fascists,” as they are called in other sources. They were not feminists
in the sense of being interested in advancing universal women’s rights, and
their idea of women’s rights implied not much individual freedom (see
below, p. 173). “National feminists” is also misleading insofar as most
women promoting women’s rights would have cringed at the thought of
being excluded from the label “national.” The term “oppositional fascists”
makes sense only in the light of these women’s opposition to right-wing
men’s mysogyny.

38. Erna von Birkhahn, “Völkisches Sehnen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 11,

2 February 1924.

39. Ilse Hamel, “Völkische Mütter – starkes Volk,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no.

12, 16 February 1924.

40. Ilse Hamel, “Völkisch als Rassebegriff,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 26, 2

July 1924; Käthe Schirmacher, “Frankreichs farbige Truppen,” Frauen-
korrespondenz 7, no. 51, 13 July 1925; and Schirmacher, “Die Schwarze
Schmach,” Bundesarchiv Koblenz, ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 3.

41. See the organizational news in the first two volumes of Der Parteifreund.

Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Landesverband Ost-
preußen; Elisabeth Lürßen, “Die weibliche Jugend in den Jugendgruppen
der D. Vp.,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 1, no. 4, 26 October 1919. For the
strength of the teaching profession among women legislators, see Koonz,
“Conflicting Allegiances,” p. 669.

42. Marie Bernays, “Eindrücke der Tagung des Vereins Frauenbildung-

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Frauenstudium in Heidelberg vom 15. bis 17. Juli,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
2, no. 30, 29 July 1920.

43. “Unsere Familie soll durch uns Mütter die seelische und geistige

Waffenschmiede Deutschlands werden!” in “Deutschnationale Frauentagung
in Köln,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 37, 9 September 1926.

44. Marie Bernays, “Eindrücke der Tagung des Vereins Frauenbildung-

Frauenstudium in Heidelberg vom 15. bis 17. Juli.”

45. Katharina von Oheimb, “Das schlafende Heer,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4,

no. 2, 19 January 1923; Emma Stropp, “Das Auslieferungsverlangen,” DVP-
Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 7, 12 February 1920.

46. Die Frau in Familie und Staat, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug 7, Berlin:

Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1924, p. 16.

47. Verhandlungen der Nationalversammlung, vol. 327, p. 1266. See also

Reinhard Mumm, “Weibliche Beredsamkeit,” in Frauenkorrespondenz 2,
no. 12, 12 March 1921.

48. On the DVP’s stand, see Marie Bernays, “Die weibliche Jugend und die

Reichstagswahlen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 22, 3 June 1920.

49. “Weimarer Brief,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 6, 9 February 1928; for

Tilings’s argument, see VdL, 1924–1928, vol. XII, p. 18093.

50. See Magdalene von Tiling, Die christliche Frau und das Reichsschulgesetz,

Aus Deutschlands Not und Ringen 2, Berlin: Deutschnationale
Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1928, and Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von
Tiling, pp. 86–8.

51. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System,

1918–1933, pp. 295–7; Dennis Walker, “The German Nationalist People’s
Party,” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979), pp. 629–30.

52. Die Frauen in der Politik der Deutschen Volkspartei, Flugschriften der

Deutschen Volkspartei 53, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1924, pp. 8–9.

53. Clara Mende, “Ein Berufsausbildungsgesetz,” NLC 54, no. 174, 4 October

1927.

54. DVP-Wahlhandbuch 1928, p. 419.
55. Tiling, Die christliche Frau und das Reichsschulgesetz; C.S., “Das

Reichsschulgesetz,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 35, 1 September 1927;
“Sitzung des Erweiterten Frauenausschusses,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no.
45, 10 November 1927 (with Tiling’s speech on the National School Bill).

56. Gertrud Becker, “Sittliche Gefährdung unserer Kinder,” Frauen-

korrespondenz 6, no. 12, 16 February 1924; Annagrete Lehmann, “Frauen-
welt und Wahlen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 11, 2 February 1924;
Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein Soldin 6, no. 1, 31 January 1924;
Frau Waschmeyer, “Rhytmisch-gymnastische Nacktübungen, Nationalpost

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6, no. 7, 17 February 1924; Die Frau in Familie und Staat, Deutsch-
nationales Rüstzeug 7, Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle,
1924, pp. 14–15. For the Landtag motion, see VdL, 1921–1924, vol. 13, p.
7938.

57. RFA, “Der Schulkonflikt in Westfalen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 52, 23

December 1926; RFA, “Der Kampf um die christliche Schule,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 50, 9 December 1926; Schneider-Ludorff,
Magdalene von Tiling, pp. 69–70.

58. “Zustände an weltlichen Schulen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 17, 26

April 1928.

59. Annagrete Lehmann, “Was steht am 20. Mai zur Entscheidung?”

Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 16, 19 April 1928. For the DVP position, see
Die Frauen in der Politik der Deutschen Volkspartei, Flugschriften der
Deutschen Volkspartei 53, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1924, pp. 6–7.

60. “Frauenversammlung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Der Partei-

freund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Landesverband
Ostpreußen 1, no. 25, 28 October 1920. See also Mitteilungen des
Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest” 16, no. 13, 1 October
1920.

61. See Ilse Hamel, “Rückkehr zu deutscher Sitte und Art,” Deutschnationale

Frau 14, no. 17, 1 September 1932; Annagrete Lehmann, “Überwindung der
Revolution?” Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 15, 31 July 1932.

62. Marie Bernays, “Das Schicksal der privaten Mädchenschulen,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 15, 15 April 1920. For Matz’s speeches, see VdR,
1920–1924, vol. 345, p. 1111, and vol. 354, p. 6948; Milka Fritsch,
“Margarethe Poehlmann† Was sie uns gewesen ist!” NLC 51, no. 13, 21
January 1924. On Wolf, see DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 8, 13 April 1923.
For a summary biography of Bernays, see Ira Hochreuther, Frauen im
Parlament: südwestdeutsche Abgeordnete seit 1919 (Stuttgart: Theiss
Verlag, 1992), pp. 54–5.

63. See for example Die Frauen in der Politik der Deutschen Volkspartei, p. 11.
64. Magdalene von Tiling, “Mädchenschulfragen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no.

20, 9 July 1921; Magdalene von Tiling, Wir Frauen und die christliche
Schule (Berlin: Vaterländische Verlags- und Kunstanstalt, 1928). See also
VdL, 1924–28, vol. XII, pp. 18091–6.

65. See for example “Die Deutschnationalen und das Mädchenschulwesen,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 1, no. 14, 6 March 1920 (discussing a proposal
regarding girls’ schools made by Spohr in the Prussian Landtag);
“Frauenfragen im Hauptausschuß des Preußischen Landtages,” NLC 51, no.
151, 12 September 1924; “Forderungen zur Mädchenschulbildung,” NLC
52, no. 154, 24 August 1925.

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66. VdL, Landesversammlung 1919–1921, vol. XI, pp. 14163–70 (Poehlmann).
67. VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 357, pp. 9211–12.
68. VdL, 1928–1932, vol. III, p. 4092; Elisabeth Spohr, “Die Alkoholfrage,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 37, 17 September 1924.

69. Elisabeth Spohr, “Die Alkoholfrage,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 37, 17

September 1924.

70. Klara Klotz, “Aus meiner Landtagsarbeit,” Frauenkorrespondenz 5,

no. 11, 19 September 1923. For a summary biography of Klotz, see
Hochreuther, Frauen im Parlament: südwestdeutsche Abgeordnete seit 1919,
pp. 80–1.

71. “Familie und Wahlen,” NLC 51, no. 67, 2 May 1924.
72. Margarethe Poehlmann, “Sozialpolitische Fragen im Preußischen Landtag,”

DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 21, 26 May 1921, and DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4,
no. 7, 30 March 1923 (on Wolf).

73. Gertraud Wolf, “Mehr Milch!” NLC 55, no. 49, 15 March 1928.
74. See, for example, Gertraud Wolf ’s initiative in the Bavarian Landtag in

March 1923: DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 7, 30 March 1923.

75. Clara Mende, “Amerikanisches über den Alkohol,” NLC 52, no. 123, 8 July

1925.

76. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Band 2: Von der

Reformära bis zur industriellen und politischen “Deutschen Doppel-
revolution”: 1815–1848/49. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1987, pp. 333–5.

77. VdR, 1928–30, vol. 428, p. 5591, and VdR, 1930–32, vol. 445, p. 1419.
78. VdR, 1928–30, vol. 425, pp. 2296–7.
79. VdL, 1928–1932, vol. III, p. 4092.
80. “Die Frau in der Deutschen Turnerschaft,” NLC 55, no. 168, 26 September

1928.

81. Beate Bartels, “Mädchensport,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 40, 6 October

1927.

82. Ella Mensch, “Die Erhalterin von Werten,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 31,

5 August 1920.

83. “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik. Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” p. 30.

84. Usborne, Politics of the Body, p. 77. For context, see ibid., pp. 76–81, and

Margret F. Stieg, “The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and
Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy.” Central European History 23
(1990): 22–56 (here pp. 33–48).

85. Hildegard Ellenbeck, “Die Frau im Kampf gegen Schmutz und Schund,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 1, 5 January 1926.

86. Elsa Matz, “Endlich,” NLC 57, no. 242, 12 December 1930. Matz only

regretted that her own committee had passed the film despite her objections.

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It was banned by the Reichstag later on – against the votes of most DVP
deputies.

87. 8. Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Mannheim vom 21.

bis 23. März 1930, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1930, p. 6.

88. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, pp. 43–4; Frevert, Women in

German History, p. 135. See also “Deutschnationale Frauenpolitik:
Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” p. 30.

89. Usborne, The Politics of the Body, p. 109.
90. “Die Gefährdetenfürsorge nach dem Reichsgesetz zur Bekämpfung der

Geschlechtskrankheiten und den preußischen Ausführungsbestimmungen,”
NLC 55, no. 16, 26 January 1928; Ulrike Scheidel, “Das Gesetz zur Bekämp-
fung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 4, 27
January 1927.

91. VdL, Landesversammlung 1919–1921, vol. XI, pp. 14163–70 (Poehlmann),

14850–2 (Spohr), 14855–6 (Garnich); “Rückblick,” Frauenkorrespondenz
3, no. 3, 22 October 1921 (on Noack).

92. Usborne, Politics of the Body, pp. 72 and 76.
93. Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik, pp. 24, 29, and 35–7.

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–6–

Small Rentiers

Aside from the loss of precious people and the terrible mutilations of
disabled war veterans, the fate of small rentiers is particularly touching
among the many worries and traumas that affected Germany as a conse-
quence of the war and the revolution … After a life of sacrificing themselves
for the public good, these old people are left with nothing and are defense-
less against harsh poverty.

Paula Mueller-Otfried, 1928

One issue of social policy received consistent attention from women of both
parties: the plight of small rentiers. The women chose this issue as a central
feature of their social policy because the small rentiers epitomized to them the
plight of the middle classes and allowed them to put their maternalist policies in
action. That over two-thirds of the small rentiers were women was rarely
mentioned because the DVP and DNVP women always sought to avoid giving
the impression that they were advancing particular women’s interests. By repre-
senting the interests of small rentiers, the women also did a service to their
parties: the rentiers initially voted strongly for the DVP and DNVP, and women
tried to keep them loyal to their parties at a time when the interests of big busi-
ness and agriculture tended to win out over the demands of the rentiers. In the
end, however, the women’s efforts merely delayed the small rentiers’ exodus to
splinter parties and the NSDAP.

Small rentiers were a poorly defined middle-class group – estimates vary

between 200,000 and a million people – that depended on savings to pay for their
living costs in old age or to supplement their pensions.

The male members of

this group had typically been officers, white-collar workers, or independently
employed small businessmen. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of this
group were women, however.

They included widows of members of the former

groups and the so-called Haustöchter, women who had never married but had
instead taken care of their parents or other family members on whose inheritance
they had hoped to survive in old age. The preponderance of women over men in
the small-rentier group resulted from women on average living longer than men
and also from the fact that women generally had a harder time than men finding

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employment to relieve their dependence on savings in old age. Moreover, many
women had invested their wartime income in government war bonds.

Devaluation and inflation, however, had by the end of 1923 destroyed the savings
of small rentiers and eroded their pension payments, if they ever had any. A
Reichstag law granting some relief to small rentiers was passed in February 1923
but failed to stabilize their situation, and the revaluation legislation of early 1924,
while promising some compensation payments, denied them the hoped-for resti-
tution of their savings. Many rentiers thus became dependent on poor relief,
which they found insufficient, degrading, and inconsistent. Poor relief was
administered at the municipal level, and complaints abounded about the arbitrary
way in which financially strained municipalities dealt with the claims of
rentiers.

The small rentiers, represented by the German Rentiers’ League (Deutscher

Rentnerbund) with between 90,000 and 170,000 members, blamed the Weimar
state for their plight because they believed that its tax policies and its abandon-
ment of the gold standard had ruined them. Therefore they demanded restitution
from the Reich – often exaggerating their prewar or pre-inflation wealth.
Pointing out that they had saved for a lifetime for their retirement and had made
many investments in government or war bonds, they depicted themselves as a
patriotic and civic-minded group distinct from those poor pensioners who had
not owned any savings (Sozialrentner). Small pensioners often implied that the
Sozialrentner had been impoverished due to their own moral failure and not due
to misguided or evil state policies.

In tandem with the German Rentiers’

League, women from the DVP and DNVP (and to some extent the Democratic
Party) became the primary spokespeople of the small pensioners. Their approach
was two-fold: at the grass-roots level, women from the two parties attempted to
organize direct help for the small rentiers, particularly during the worst period of
the inflation. On the legislative level, they pushed for fast relief measures and
demanded a law giving restitution to the rentiers for a substantial part of their lost
savings. They emphasized that it was degrading for members of the middle
classes to stand in line for social-welfare checks together with social dropouts
and the lowest strata of the working class. At the very least, they demanded that
the state separate support for the small rentiers from poor relief.

Already in the National Assembly, the DNVP’s Anna von Gierke had

demanded relief measures for the small rentiers. Pointing out that most rentiers
had invested their money in government papers and war bonds, she argued that
the state had the duty to support them now that these papers were rapidly losing
their value.

In 1922, Elisabeth Spohr of the DNVP repeatedly demanded relief

measures in the Prussian Landtag, pointing out that desperation had induced
many small rentiers to commit suicide.

In late 1923, Annagrete Lehmann called

on DNVP members to invite small rentiers to dinner and to make a heated room

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available to them for part of the day.

When the Reich government in February

1924 fell far short of paying restitution for the lost assets of the small rentiers,
Paula Mueller-Otfried took up the battle in the Reichstag. In accordance with the
claim of the German Rentier’s League, she demanded that a law be passed that
recognized the rentiers’ right to restitution and argued that the existing relief was
inadequate and poorly administered. When confronted with a proposal for an
across-the-board increase in poor relief, she echoed the claims of the small
rentiers by arguing that the Reichstag had to make a distinction between people
who had been impoverished through their own fault and those who had been
impoverished through the mistake of the state. She therefore demanded that state
support be increased only for those disabled by the war and for the small rentiers.
The proposal that passed did incorporate this suggestion.

In the campaign for the Reichstag elections of December 1924, the DNVP

made extensive restitution promises to the rentiers that soon came to haunt the
party. Although many DNVP supporters had been creditors hurt by the inflation,
influential party groups associated with big industry and agriculture belonged to
the debtors who had fared reasonably well. These circles rejected any effective
revaluation legislation that would have benefited the creditors including the
small rentiers. The opponents of revaluation had kept a low profile during the
election campaigns of 1924 because they knew that the DNVP’s pro-creditor
rhetoric attracted many voters in the two Reichstag elections of that year. But
they reasserted their influence in the spring of 1925, when the Reichstag began
discussing a revision of the previous year’s revaluation legislation. This was at a
time when the DNVP leaders, participating for the first time in the Reich govern-
ment, found it difficult to deny the financial impossibility of substantial revalu-
ation – which they had ignored during the election campaign. Things came to a
head in May 1925 after the DNVP signed on to a revaluation compromise that
belied its campaign promises. The rentiers were outraged and accused the DNVP
of voter fraud. Indeed, as one historian of revaluation concludes: “The DNVP
was not alone in making elastic promises, but its were the most elastic.”

became known that DNVP leaders, while making their campaign promises, had
all along doubted the financial feasibility of extensive restitution and known
about the strong, though initially passive, resistance against revaluation in their
party. The whole affair revealed the cavalier attitude of DNVP leaders toward the
electorate and dealt a severe blow to the party’s credibility.

Whether the leading women of the DNVP deserved the criticism that rentiers

now hurled at the DNVP leaders is unclear. They certainly tried hard to win back
the confidence of the small rentiers after the disaster. Paula Mueller-Otfried in
the Reichstag as well as Elisabeth Spohr and Therese Deutsch in the Prussian
Landtag pushed for relief measures, while stressing that only a law on restitution
could bring justice to the small rentiers. But DNVP women now at least warned

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their audiences that the financial situation made full restitution of lost assets
impossible.

Mueller-Otfried quickly became a nationally recognized expert on

the issue; she published several pamphlets on the small rentiers in which she
argued that the suffering of the small rentiers came directly from the loss of the
war (which she blamed on socialists and democrats) and the misguided govern-
ment policies up to 1925 – before the DNVP joined the Reich government.
Mueller-Otfried displayed an impressive knowledge of the issue in all its legal
and financial complexities, but she consistently ignored the resistance of pro-
debtor groups in her party. Although she did acknowledge in passing that the
DVP women were working in the same direction, her overriding claim was that
the DNVP was the rentiers’ only forceful representative and that all would be
well for the small rentiers if only the DNVP had twice as many Reichstag seats.

The small-rentier issue became important again at the time of the Reichstag

elections in May 1928. In late 1927, the Reich government and the Reichstag had
agreed to raise payments to rentiers slightly without making a distinction
between small rentiers and social-welfare recipients. Mueller-Otfried and the
DNVP, considering the raise unsatisfactory, had fought hard to channel the
scarce financial resources to the small rentiers alone, but this time they failed to
prevail against the opposition of the Left, the Center Party, and the Democratic
Party.

After the breakup of the center-to-right coalition over the National

School Bill in February 1928, DNVP women revived their campaign for the
rentiers in preparation for the elections. They increasingly shifted their claim
from the controversial revaluation of lost assets to the right to a secure income
for rentiers, urging the government and the Reichstag to help quickly and effec-
tively and not to wait until most small rentiers hurt by the inflation had died. But
the DNVP women had to defend their party’s record on small-rentier rights
against fierce attacks from new splinter parties that made revaluation their
primary cause. Mueller-Otfried and her colleagues pointed out that these splinter
parties would have no power in the Reichstag and argued that the much larger
DNVP was still loyal to the rentiers’ cause.

Although weakened by the elec-

tions of 1928, the DNVP resumed its struggle for a rentier’s compensation law in
the new Reichstag. In February 1929, Annagrete Lehmann, speaking in the place
of the ailing Paula Mueller-Otfried, demanded that the Reichstag draft a rentier
bill on short order. She again stressed that the small rentiers deserved compen-
sation because they had been hurt by the state, and that they should not be
grouped together with welfare recipients. Her initiative again floundered on the
resistance mainly of the SPD, the Communist Party, and the Center Party, who
proposed to draw the circle of aid recipients much larger, thus diluting the
expected benefits.

With the onset of the Great Depression, the suffering of small rentiers again

captured the attention of the leading DNVP women. In the summer and fall of

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1930, Mueller-Otfried made the most passionate pleas to date in the Reichstag,
attacking the government under Center Party chancellor Heinrich Brüning for
“cold-heartedly” ignoring the fate of weak and well-meaning people and calling
on the government to “finally heal this bleeding wound.”

The DNVP women

continued to demand a compensation law in principle, but the economic crisis
after 1929 made such thoughts unrealistic, so that most initiatives from DNVP
women now centered on more coincidental relief for the small rentiers. The
Reichstag and successive governments paid lip service to the small rentiers’
cause, but nothing happened. In late 1931, Mueller-Otfried wrote an open letter
to the Reich Labor Minister, imploring him to stop treating the rentiers like a
dying caste, but to no avail. The only notable success came in Danzig, where
DNVP Volkstag member Anni Kalähne drafted and promoted a restitution law
for small rentiers that was passed in June 1931.

The DVP women pursued almost parallel policies with respect to the small

rentiers, and they also faced difficulties from the pro-debtor groups in their party,
mainly big industry. The DVP, too, made campaign promises in 1924 that it was
unable to fulfill, but the fact that it participated in government almost perma-
nently from 1922 to 1931 made it more respectful than the DNVP of the Reich’s
financial realities. Among the DVP women, Prussian Landtag deputy Jane Voigt
played a pioneering role. In her home town Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, she
had already started a pilot program to support small rentiers in 1920. Voigt
convinced the town government to open a heated room for small rentiers during
the winter; she collected money from businesses and distributed it to nearly five
hundred rentiers; and she organized free lunches for rentiers in the homes of
wealthy citizens. To these services she later added a work registry for small
rentiers and a series of initiatives to grant small rentiers rebates on the cost of
electricity, gas, and coal, the predominant heating fuel.

Voigt’s success inspired

efforts by the DVP’s women’s committee in Schleswig-Holstein to introduce
similar services in all of the province. Work registries were particularly
successful; they allowed older women, who had a hard time finding employment,
to earn something by, for example, doing needlework for wealthy families.

the RFA, Voigt formed a special committee for the small rentiers that issued
guidelines on how DVP women could help rentiers through advising, practical
help, and social events. The initiatives of Flensburg thus became the model for a
nation-wide effort.

Elsa Matz soon took up the issue in the Reichstag. She was a candidate in

Pomerania, where many small rentiers lived. Matz was instrumental in the delib-
erations leading to the Reichstag law that was passed in February 1923. Like
Mueller-Otfried, she established herself as a national authority on small-rentier
questions. In reaction to Mueller-Otfried’s pamphlet, Matz wrote her own, which
was less polemical and propagandistic than Mueller-Otfried’s although Matz,

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too, said nothing about the pro-debtor interests in her party.

Matz tried consis-

tently to put the small rentiers on the same level as war veterans – claiming that
they had been patriotic citizens who had supported the state in its time of greatest
need. Thus, she sometimes called them the “veterans of work.”

Probably to

exclude working-class people with very small savings from restitution, Matz
insisted that compensation was feasible only if people with a minimum of 10,000
marks in lost savings were reimbursed – whereas the SPD demanded a minimum
of one thousand marks. To make that distinction clearer, Matz began using the
term “capital rentier” (Kapitalrentner) instead of “small rentier” (Kleinrentner)
in her speeches and articles.

After the disappointing government compromise of May 1925, for which the

DVP shared responsibility with the DNVP, Matz, Voigt, and other DVP women
sought to keep the issue alive. Frequently they demanded a Reich law and a
Prussian law together with the DNVP women. Matz published a stream of arti-
cles on the issue in the Nationalliberale Correspondenz. Almost all of these arti-
cles appeared in the main section of the newspaper and not in its biweekly
women’s supplement. Many of them even appeared as leader articles on the front
page of the newspaper. This shows that the issue was taken seriously by the party
as a whole and that Matz had established herself as the leading DVP expert on
the small rentiers.

Matz shared the disappointment of the DNVP women when

the Reich government missed what seemed to be a good opportunity for a new
rentiers’ law in late 1927 and early 1928; she further shared their frustration over
the attacks from the German Rentiers’ League on the DVP and DNVP.

At least

the DNVP had left the coalition government in time (February 1928) to formu-
late its own demands without concern for the actual implementation of policies,
an advantage it preserved when it stayed out of the Grand Coalition government
formed with DVP support after the May 1928 Reichstag elections.

Matz fought many Reichstag battles for the small rentiers. On one occasion,

she got into a rhetorical duel with Center Party deputy Hermann Esser and
announced: “whoever wants a fight should also get it from a woman.” This
comment was received with such disruptive laughter that Reichstag President
Paul Löbe (SPD) had to call the Reichstag to order.

But Matz also expressed

frustration over the limits that continuous government responsibility imposed on
the DVP’s ability to make promises: “The German People’s Party has over the
last couple of years done everything it could for the rentiers. We were, of course,
bound by the governments in which we participated and unable to make the far-
reaching demands that the Democratic Party and the DNVP were able to advance
after joining the opposition.”

Matz recognized that a satisfactory law securing

the income of small rentiers was unrealistic after the onset of the Great
Depression, but she kept pushing for relief measures without giving up the claim
for a restitution law.

Seeing the rentier’s issue being pushed to the background

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by the problems of mass unemployment, Matz tried to effect relief for the rentiers
in various government emergency decrees throughout the depression years. As
early as 1931 she pointed out that many disgruntled rentiers were turning to the
NSDAP for support.

That she and other DVP women repeatedly called on their

Reichstag group to continue pushing for a rentiers’ law suggests that they also
had to convince people in the DVP.

The rentier issue led DVP and DNVP women into the jungle of interest poli-

tics that was gnawing at the vital nerve of their parties. Lacking close ties to big
industry, they were able to side with the interests of a group of middle-class
people who had stylized themselves as the “quintessential victims of the infla-
tion.”

The small rentiers appeared to embody bourgeois virtues close to the

heart of right-wing women such as patriotism and thriftiness. Providing a polit-
ical voice to this group appealed to the maternalist mission of right-wing women
and to their concern for the harmony of the Volksgemeinschaft. Yet the small-
rentier issue, to which women from both parties devoted so much energy, did
nothing to bolster their claim to healing and strengthening the Volks-
gemeinschaft. First, they failed to reconcile the interests of diverse economic
groups in their parties and to prevent most of the disgruntled rentiers from
choosing other parties. Second, they reflected a widespread bourgeois prejudice
and revealed a narrowly class-based view of the Volksgemeinschaft when they
insisted on separating a socially declining middle-class group as “deserving
poor” from the lower-class “undeserving poor.”

Notes

1. Paula Mueller-Otfried, Kleinrentnernot, Aus Deutschlands Not und Ringen

1, 2nd edn, Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1928.

2. Falter, Hitlers Wähler, pp. 271–2.
3. Robert Scholz, “ ‘Heraus aus der unwürdigen Fürsorge’: Zur sozialen Lage

und politischen Orientierung der Kleinrentner in der Weimarer Republik.”
In Christoph Conrad and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz, eds.,
Gerontologie und Sozialgeschichte. Wege zu einer historischen Betrachtung
des Alters (Berlin: Deutsches Zentrum für Altersfragen, 1983), p. 332.

4. The higher portion was given by Elsa Matz in “Zahlenmäßige Grundlagen

für ein Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,” NLC 54, no. 209, 26 November 1927.
Matz included married women who were dependent on the savings of their
husbands in her figure. Other figures may only have included the husbands.

5. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in

the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), pp. 556–7; David Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 104–6; Young-

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Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 103–9.

6. Crew, Germans on Welfare, pp. 99–102, offers some instructive examples.
7. Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, pp. 91 and 122–3;

Feldman, The Great Disorder, p. 556.

8. Verhandlungen der Nationalversammlung, 1919–1920, vol. 333, pp.

5526–7.

9. “Wohlfahrtsfragen,” Frauenkorrespondenz, 3, no. 18, 3 June 1922; see also

notes on her speech in the Landtag in Frauenkorrespondenz 3, no. 28, 1
November 1922, and VdL, 1921–1924, vol. IX, p. 12577.

10. Annagrete Lehmann, “Tätige Liebe,” Frauenkorrespondenz, 22 December

1923.

11. VdR, 1924–1924, vol. 381, pp. 536–7 and 642–4; “Die Fürsorgepflicht für

die Kleinrentner,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 27, 9 July 1924;
“Kleinrentnerfürsorge,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 42, 22 October 1924.

12. Michael Hughes, Paying for the German Inflation (Chapel Hill and London:

University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 114 and 145–8.

13. Ibid., pp. 148–50.
14. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Kleinrentnerfürsorge,” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no.

49, 2 December 1926; Mueller-Otfried, “Eine dringende Forderung,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 2, 13 January 1927; “Kleinrentnerfürsorge,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 14, 7 April 1927; Therese Deutsch, “Klein-
rentnerfragen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 26, 30 June 1927; Klara Klotz,
“Eine dringend notwendige Forderung,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 34, 25
August 1927. See also VdR, 1924–1928, vol. 384, p. 533, vol. 389, p. 5808,
vol. 394, p. 12086, and vol. 395, p. 13755.

15. Mueller-Otfried, Kleinrentnernot, particularly pp. 4–8 and 12.
16. Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Wer schimpft, hat Unrecht,” Frauenkorrespondenz

9, no. 51, 22 December 1927, and Mueller-Otfried, Kleinrentnernot, pp.
12–16.

17. Therese Deutsch, “Denkschrift über Kleinrentnerfragen,” Frauen-

korrespondenz 10, no. 13, 29 March 1928; Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Nicht
Fürsorge, sondern Gerechtigkeit für die Rentner!” Frauenkorrespondenz 10,
no. 14, 5 April 1928, and Mueller-Otfried, “Die neueste Entwicklung der
Rentnerfrage,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 15, 12 April 1924; see also
Erika Altgelt, “Wie wird der Kleinrentner wählen?” Frauenkorrespondenz
10, no. 17, 26 April 1928.

18. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 424, pp. 1157–9; Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Rentner-

versorgungsgesetz gescheitert,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 7, 14
February 1929; RFA, “Der Rechtsanspruch des Rentnerstandes,” Frauen-
korrespondenz 11, no. 8, 21 February 1929.

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19. “Kleinrentnerfragen im Reichstag,” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 29, 17

July 1930; VdR, 1930–1932, vol. 444, p. 426.

20. “Aus der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, 15

June 1931. For Mueller-Otfried’s letter, see “Die Not der Kleinrentner,”
Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 1, 1 January 1932.

21. Jane Voigt, “Zur Rentnerfürsorge,” Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei

Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 8, 28 April 1921; Voigt, “Rentnerhilfe,”
Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 19/20, 4 November 1922.

22. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Das Rentnerhilfswerk des WkFA der DVp. in Schleswig-

Holstein,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 21/22, 21 November 1922.

23. Elsa Matz, “Zur Frage der Kleinrentnerfürsorge,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3,

no. 28, 14 July 1922; “Klein-Rentnerfürsorge,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no.
42, 24 November 1922.

24. Elsa Matz, Kleinrentnerfragen. Das Rentnerversorgungsgesetz, Flug-

schriften der Deutschen Volkspartei 71 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag,
1928). See also Elsa Matz, “Das Kleinrentnergesetz,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
4, no. 3, 2 February 1923.

25. See the summary of her speech at the 1924 national conference of the DVP:

“Fünfter Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei in Hannover am 29. und 30.
März,” NLC 51, special issue. See also Matz, Kleinrentnerfragen, p. 4, and
Matz, “Zur Frage der Rentnerversorgung,” NLC 54, no. 198, 9 November
1927, and the summary of her speech in front of the DVP small rentiers’
committee in Berliner Stimmen 2, no. 27, 1 October 1925.

26. See for example Elsa Matz, “Die neue Kleinrentnerdenkschrift des

Reichsarbeitsministeriums,” NLC 56, no. 5, 9 January 1929.

27. For some examples see Elsa Matz, “Die Kleinrentner-Interpellation der

Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 53, no. 29, 12 February 1926; Matz,
“Reichsarbeitsministerium und Rentnerfürsorge,” NLC 53, no. 89, 21 May
1926; Matz, Reichsrentnertagung,” NLC 53, no. 195, 29 November 1926;
Matz, “Regierungsparteien und Kleinrentner,” NLC 54, no. 51, 15 March
1927; Matz, “Eine Notlösung in der Kleinrentnerfrage,” NLC 54, no. 66, 6
April 1927; Matz, “Was nun?” NLC 54, no. 118, 30 June 1927; Matz,
“Zahlenmäßige Grundlagen für ein Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,” NLC 54,
no. 209, 26 November 1927; Matz, “Die Weihnachtsbeihilfe für die
Kleinrentner,” NLC 54, no. 220, 14 December 1927; Matz, “Das
Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,” NLC 55, no. 15, 25 January 1928.

28. Elsa Matz, “Die Zukunft des Rentnerversorgungsgesetzes,” NLC 55, no. 62,

4 April 1928, and Matz, “Wahlergebnis und Rentnerversorgungsgesetz,”
NLC 55, no. 104, 13 June 1928.

29. Elsa Matz, “Ein Fortschritt in der Rentnerfrage,” NLC 55, no. 226, 14

December 1928.

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30. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 428, pp. 5958–60.
31. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 424, p. 1174.
32. Elsa Matz, “Der Stand der Kapitalrentnerfrage,” NLC 57, no. 139, 22 July

1930. See also Elsa Matz, “Die Verzögerung des Rentnergesetzes,” NLC 56,
no. 224, 7 November 1929.

33. Matz, “Kapitalrentnernot!” NLC 58, no. 185, 23 September 1931; Matz,

“Kleinrentner und Wohlfahrtserwerbslose,” NLC 59, no. 30, 13 February
1932; Matz, “Kapitalrentner und Gesetzgebung,” NLC 59, no. 229, 21
December 1932; Matz, “Beseitigung von Härten in der Kleinrentner-
fürsorge,” NLC 60, no. 16, 26 January 1933. The connection between small
rentier disappointment and Nazi support is at the center of the argument in
Scholz, “ ‘Heraus aus der unwürdigen Fürsorge’. Zur sozialen Lage und
politischen Orientierung der Kleinrentner in der Weimarer Republik.”

34. “Tagung volksparteilicher Parlamentarierinnen,” NLC 56, no. 17. 25

January 1929.

35. Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, p. 103.

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–7–

Foreign Policy

We German women cannot stand back in this struggle. It is a pure, holy, and
non-violent struggle for the memory of our dead, who died for Germany, for
the future of the children and the unborn who need a Germany where life is
worth being lived.

Resolution of DVP women on German

women’s obligation to fight Versailles, June 1922

The First World War had intensified women’s interest in foreign affairs and
shown to what extent international events affected the family and the home. After
the defeat, women politicians were aware that the Treaty of Versailles impinged
on many spheres of German life and that foreign policy needed to be addressed
also as an interest of women.

Although women were rarely allowed to speak on

foreign-policy matters in the Reichstag, they felt that they shared responsibility
for Germany’s international standing and that they had to use their new political
rights to improve it wherever possible.

This was particularly important to DVP

and DNVP women, who saw a close link between their social and cultural poli-
cies and German foreign policy. Their concern about the declining birthrate, their
fight for a stricter morality, and the racial hygiene arguments of DNVP women
all had a crucial foreign policy component.

Given their maternalist ideology, women across the bourgeois party spectrum

envisioned a special role for themselves in foreign policy: if even German
women with their allegedly instinctive sense of justice condemned the peace
treaty and its consequences, then the hostile nations would recognize that
Versailles needed to be revised. Women from all bourgeois parties thus organized
a series of common protests against Versailles and its implementation. They
condemned the demand for the extradition of the Kaiser and the military leaders,
protested Germany’s territorial losses, attacked reparation measures such as the
delivery of milk cows to France, and led a long campaign against the charge that
Germany had started the First World War. They also opposed the military occu-
pation of Western Germany by the victors of the war and vehemently objected to
the presence of African soldiers in France’s occupation army.

Women also saw

themselves as guardians of the Germans living in areas annexed by other

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countries after 1918, particularly the territories won by Poland.

Referring to

their thinking about women’s cultural mission, they saw it as their special task to
maintain links to all Germans abroad and to support their struggle for preserving
their “Germandom” against foreign cultures.

Although women from the whole center-to-right spectrum supported these

efforts, divisive issues lurked behind their joint demonstrations of national soli-
darity. Whereas socialist women and some women on the left wing of the bour-
geois women’s movement derived a commitment to international reconciliation
from their maternalist ideology, most women in the DVP and DNVP expressed
a defiant nationalist and at times racist spirit and denounced pacifism. According
to them, German women ought to unite their people and educate the young in a
defiant nationalist spirit rather than working for international reconciliation. The
women on the right considered a lasting peace possible only after an extensive
revision of the Versailles peace order in favor of Germany. Many initially even
rejected the participation of women in international conferences where they
would meet representatives of countries supportive of the “war-guilt lie”. But
opposition softened after a while, particularly in the DVP, because nationalist
women recognized that they could use these conferences to raise sympathy for
Germany abroad and because they hated to leave the representation of Germany
to left-wing women.

Outrage at the Treaty of Versailles dominated the foreign-policy statements of

women from both parties in the early Weimar years. The DVP women, in partic-
ular, vociferously protested the policies of the victors and the alleged spineless-
ness of successive German governments; their talks on nationalism, unlike their
speeches on women’s position in the party, always received loud applause by the
men at DVP party meetings. Almost every women’s section of the DVP-
Nachrichtenblatt in 1919–1923 contained an angry article on foreign policy.
Already at the first party conference in April 1919 Emmy Voigtländer predicted
that the peace treaty, which was published a few weeks later, would mean a peace
erected on the graveyard of the German people, and she suggested that the denial
of the war-guilt charge was Germany’s best weapon against the claims of the
victors.

Jane Voigt, who spoke after Voigtländer, earned enthusiastic applause

when she conjured up the patriotic spirit of Germans in the German-Danish
border region, where it was already known that the victors of the war would
demand a plebiscite to redraw the border. Women made similar professions of
nationalism at the second party conference in October 1919, where Marie
Bernays gave a widely acclaimed speech that rejected pacifism while stressing
that women’s educational activity would strengthen the nation: Knowing “that
the best inheritance of the children is the heroism of the fathers,” German women
should make their children aware of this inheritance and give the nation new
courage for recovery.

Clara Mende’s attacks on Versailles even induced the

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French authorities in 1922 to prohibit her from speaking in the occupied West
German territories, as the DVP press reported with pride.

In this context, DVP women stressed that Versailles mattered to women not

only because of its economic consequences but also because it concerned their
role as the “natural” mediators between the generations. They argued that
Versailles besmirched Germany’s tradition and its war dead while condemning
the next generations to grow up in virtual slavery and dishonor. Unless German
women condemned Versailles and sought to revise it, they would be unable to
raise their children in the spirit of national tradition and authority they consid-
ered crucial for creating a strong and stable society. On the third anniversary of
the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, the RFA of the DVP wrote: “We
German women cannot stand back in this struggle. It is a pure, holy, and non-
violent struggle for the memory of our dead, who died for Germany, for the
future of the children and the unborn who need a Germany where life is worth
being lived.”

In a similar vein, Mende stressed that mothers had to strengthen

the national and religious feelings of their children and to keep awake the
memory of Germany’s glorious historial periods and great men.

Another

contribution to the women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt argued that
mothers should strive to preserve the spirit of Imperial Germany’s officer corps
and thus to raise their sons to be courageous, obedient, and respectful of
authority. “This educational influence of the much-castigated ‘militarism’ should
not be lost to us, if we want to maintain a youth capable of fighting.”

A DVP

activist from Prussian Saxony exhorted German diplomats going to an interna-
tional conference to demand complete equality with other peoples and recogni-
tion for Germany’s right to rise again: “For there is one thing that we, the German
women and mothers, demand: a future for our children.” German children should
grow up as free humans and not as slaves.

To make every German child aware

of his or her chains, the DVP women in the Reichstag proposed that the Treaty
of Versailles be taught to all students in their last year of school and that the fate
of Germans in the lost or occupied areas be included in the curriculum. Matz
justified these demands in talks with the Interior Ministry in June 1922.

Women in the DVP recognized the need to educate German women generally

on matters of foreign policy. They strove to show that reparations were respon-
sible for the rising prices that the housewife had to pay in the shops, and foreign
policy often took center stage at the conferences for regional or local women’s
councils and in the courses for women of all parties that Kardorff-von Oheimb
offered at her home in Goslar.

Mende and Stropp also advocated a more active

role for women in foreign policy. True to the theory that women ought to bring
their “female” qualities to all areas of politics and society, Mende encouraged
women to take responsibility for matters that had been considered the traditional
preserve of men, such as foreign policy, and suggested that German consulates

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in neutral countries employ women. These women should play a special role in
communicating the misery of the Germans to foreign countries.

When French

troops occupied Frankfurt am Main and other cities east of the Rhine river in
early 1920, Emma Stropp wondered what women could do to resist this renewed
humiliation. To fight on the “wagon circle,” as Germanic women once did, was
futile, even if many German women now longed for the opportunity. But women
could improve the situation by voting for the DVP and thus removing incapable
and spineless governing men from power: “Our weapon today is the ballot.”
Hatred of the men in the government (Regierungsmänner) for a moment even
seems to have deflected Stropp’s anger at the men in her own party, whose anti-
feminism she criticized more loudly than most DVP women.

It was only

consistent that Stropp also called for the admission of women to the diplomatic
service, arguing that famous female rulers had conducted an ingenious foreign
policy and that the greater sensitivity of women had historically enabled them to
understand foreign countries better than men. The poor record of male diplomats
in the early Weimar years, according to Stropp, was reason enough to place more
confidence in women.

One method of contesting the peace treaty that was suitable for women was

suggested by Voigtländer at the DVP’s first party conference: to deny the war-
guilt charge. Many Germans believed that the most punitive provisions of the
Treaty of Versailles were based on the claim that Germany and its allies had
started the war, and that the moral justification of the peace would crumble
without that one piece. Since women in all bourgeois parties agreed that morality
was primarily a women’s issue and that women, not having fought each other
with weapons in hand, would raise a more effective voice for justice than men,
women from the DVP and all other bourgeois parties became highly active in
protesting the war-guilt charge. In 1921 Voigtländer and Katharina Kardorff-von
Oheimb were instrumental in founding a committee to fight it, the German
Women’s Committee for the Struggle against the War-Guilt Lie (Deutscher
Frauenausschuss zur Bekämpfung der Schuldlüge, DFBS). This committee drew
women mostly from the DVP and DNVP, but the Center and Democratic Party
were also involved. Mende and Annagrete Lehmann chaired it for many years,
and the women’s press of the DVP and DNVP reported every meeting.

Voigtländer and Mende conducted an emotional campaign against the war-guilt
charge, arguing for example that it cost millions of Germans their lives by justi-
fying an immensely stifling and destructive peace.

Every admission of German

atrocities during the First World War, like every even remotely positive statement
on Versailles and its implications, was considered by the DVP women as support
for the “war-guilt lie” and thus as high treason. When three women from the left
wing of the German women’s movement traveled to an international conference
in London in 1924 and made some comments that seemed to reveal such a

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tendency, an outraged Mende demanded that the German Foreign Ministry deny
exit visas to these women. The Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie
published a declaration whose title, “An den Pranger” (“To the pillory”), implied
that the three women should be publicly exposed.

Another way for women to contain the negative effects of Versailles was to

foster connections with Germans in the occupied territories and abroad.
Consistent with the idea of the woman as the preserver of culture, the women of
the DVP agreed that these contacts were a special women’s duty. Women from
the DVP (and DNVP) visited almost every women’s meeting of the
Großdeutsche Volkspartei in Austria, a pro-German right-wing party, and of the
Deutsche Nationalpartei, a party of the German minority in Czechoslovakia.

Else Frobenius, who presided over the women’s committee of the German
Protective League for the Germans on the Borders and Abroad (Deutscher
Schutzbund für die Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschen), exhorted DVP women to
offer charitable help to Germans expelled from foreign countries and draw them
into the DVP. The presumption was that when these Germans one day returned
to their previous areas of settlement they would carry the nationalist spirit of the
DVP abroad and foster their connections with Germany.

In a practical effort to

strengthen the links among all ethnic Germans, DVP women organized holidays
in unoccupied Germany for children from territories under foreign occupation or
administration. They gave particular attention to children from the Rhineland so
as to undercut French schemes to separate this area from mainland Germany.

The leading women of the DVP also took part in the public campaign against

the extradition of Germany’s wartime leaders, whom the Allies considered
suspected war criminals but who were heroes to most Germans. During the
National Assembly’s subcommittee meetings examining the causes of Germany’s
breakdown, the women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt stressed the
heroism of the military figures Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, who
stood at the top of the Allies’ list of individuals to be prosecuted.

When the

German government in February 1920 hesitated on how to respond to the
Entente’s demand for the extradition of suspected war criminals, Stropp claimed
that most women, true to their “natural” inclination to unity, stood united behind
an indignant rejection of this demand. She even declared the matter a test case
for the ability of political women to overcome party differences and demonstrate
national unity. Women should live up to their claims of being the “guardians of
Germany’s national honor.”

Women from the DVP were also involved in the notorious protests against the

presence of non-European, particularly African, soldiers in the French occupa-
tion army in West Germany, dubbed the “Black Horror on the Rhine.” After a few
incidents that were blown out of proportion, many German newspapers started a
paranoid and racist campaign against the French occupation troops, claiming that

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France deliberately sent soldiers from its African colonies to Germany so that
they would rape and seduce German women. The press also insinuated that
France aimed to spread venereal disease among Germans, so as to undermine
German morality and to weaken the German racial stock.

Through its connec-

tions to morality, rape, and reproduction, this slander campaign addressed
“female” concerns. Women from all bourgeois parties, particularly the DVP and
DNVP, thus showed great interest in it. By emphasizing the perceived outrages
of the African soldiers, moreover, women could call into question the morality of
the foreign occupation of West Germany and the Treaty of Versailles in general.

For the DVP, Stropp set the tone when she wrote about African soldiers in the

Palatinate: “With their untamable bestiality, the negroes spread the most
dangerous sexual diseases.” She claimed, moreover, that French authorities sent
infected prostitutes to cities in the occupied area so as to further the spread of
venereal disease in Germany. She admitted that some German women accepted
sexual relations with Africans for a piece of chocolate, but the decisive point for
her was that the German authorities did nothing to stop all of this. German
women thus had to protest the abuses to the whole world so as to stop “the rapes
by bestialized savages, the system of brothels and prostitution, and demoraliza-
tion as well as contamination.”

When Luise Zietz of the Independent Socialists

held a Reichstag speech in which she mentioned German war crimes on one level
with the “Black Horror on the Rhine,” DVP women reacted with outrage. How
could a German woman make this comparison in the Reichstag? Mende, who
answered Zietz, attested to her a severe lack of feeling for her race and people.
In a characteristic way, Mende argued that the scandal was not that Africans
committed crimes – which she implied they would “naturally” do – but that the
French government sent them to Germany.

Women in the DVP continued to

protest the presence of non-European troops in France’s occupation army. They
even included the topic in a program paper submitted to the party conference of
1921 by Mende. The paper stated: “It is intolerable that colored troops, repre-
sentatives of low-ranking masses, exercise sovereignty over a high-standing,
white people in the midst of European cultural life. It is intolerable that the
purity, health, and strength of the German race are endangered by colored
peoples.”

In the Reichstag, Elsa Matz criticized the prohibition of the dema-

gogic and sexually explicit film Schwarze Schmach by the Reich Government,
arguing that the film would have a very useful effect on the public in the United
States and elsewhere even though she admitted that it was exaggerated and
blatantly distorted.

Even as late as January 1925, a woman writing for the

Nationalliberale Correspondenz conjured up the “bestiality of an occupation
force afflicted with venereal disease” and decried the fact that Germany had to
pay money for the occupation, which amounted to nothing less than “race shame
and the poisoning of the German race.”

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The aggressive nationalist tone of the DVP women reached fever pitch in

1923, after French and Belgian troops had occupied the heavily industrialized
Ruhr district in response to Germany’s default on reparations payments. The
German government called for passive resistance in the occupied area, and a
wave of hyper-nationalist outrage swept Germany. DVP women attempted to
apply international pressure on France through the remaining international chan-
nels of the women’s movement, and in the summer of 1923 the RFA organized a
conference of all DVP women parliamentarians in Bielefeld, close to the border
of the occupied Ruhr district. The meeting was a nationalist demonstration
during which the DVP women issued a series of protest notes.

After this

crescendo, however, the tone got more moderate when Stresemann became chan-
cellor and foreign minister on 12 August 1923. The women’s press of the DVP
hardly commented on the cessation of passive resistance by Stresemann on 26
September 1923. Although DVP involvement in the German Women’s
Committee against the War-Guilt Lie and other nationalist organizations
continued with the same intensity, the opinion of DVP women promptly rallied
behind Stresemann’s more conciliatory foreign policy.

The DVP women also

became more compromising with respect to international conferences: whereas
they had at first condemned participation of Germans in conferences with repre-
sentatives of countries supportive of the “war-guilt lie,” they now tended to stress
that patriotic women with proud bearing would be able to raise respect and
sympathy for Germany at these meetings. Representation of German women
abroad should not be left to pacifists, who were not representative of German
women as a whole.

Until the summer of 1923 women in the DNVP and DVP displayed an almost

identical attitude on foreign policy. Leading DNVP women, such as Schirmacher
and Spohr, were engaged for Germans in the eastern territories divided between
Germany and Poland. Schirmacher, always committed to the most radical nation-
alism, even called for resistance by all Germans, men and women, when hostili-
ties between Polish troops and German irregulars erupted along the disputed
border in Upper Silesia in 1921: “A burning country needs burning hearts. Up!
Go to the Upper Silesian front, burning hearts of German women!”

The DNVP

women were as involved in the German Women’s Committee against the War-
Guilt Lie as their colleagues from the DVP, and the hatred of France manifest in
the statements of DVP women in 1923 was even stronger among the DNVP
women. The DNVP was also very active in organizing vacations for children
from areas under foreign occupation or administration.

Women from both

parties – together with Catholic organizations and housewives’ leagues –
launched a campaign for the boycott of French and Belgian goods during the
Ruhr occupation.

The “Black Horror on the Rhine” was also one of the primary

concerns of DNVP women in the early 1920s. Paula Mueller-Otfried initiated a

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petition to the League of Nations using the same racist language as Stropp’s art-
icles, and Schirmacher addressed the issue several times in the National
Assembly. In a question she submitted to the government, she claimed: “The lust
of white, yellow, and black Frenchmen for German women leads to daily
violence.”

The women’s committees of the DNVP, which were responsible for

propaganda toward women, shamelessly used allusions to the “Black Horror” in
election campaigns. An election pamphlet from the state of Baden, for example,
asked German women in 1920 to consider that because of the revolution
“German women and girls now have to be sacrificed to Moroccans and Negroes
from Senegal.” In a leaflet for the May 1924 Reichstag elections, the DNVP
warned: “Women! Do you wish the black beasts to come to you, too? Those who
defile and rape your sisters on the Rhine and Ruhr? The Reds preach fraterniza-
tion and reconciliation even with white and black Frenchmen! Do you want to go
along? No??? Then vote for the DNVP!”

As late as 1928 the Frauen-

korrespondenz published a blatantly racist article against the few remaining
African soldiers in the occupied territories.

One difference was that women from the DNVP in their statements on foreign

policy tended to stress racism more strongly than their counterparts in the DVP.
This was not obvious in the “Black Horror” campaign, where almost everybody
except the radical Left employed racist language. But when DNVP women justi-
fied their interest in Germans abroad, they tended to argue that women, due to
their biological disposition as mothers, had a better understanding of race than
men. As RFA member Erika Altgelt put it: “The woman has a deeper feeling than
the man for the natural and fateful connection with the comrades of the Volk
(Volksgenossen), with the German land (Scholle); this is true even if that land
belongs to a foreign country.”

Schirmacher was particularly virulent in

defining international conflicts as racial struggles. In a speech to the national
conference of the DNVP in 1926, she argued that the First World War had been
a struggle of Europe’s mixed races against “the last original and cultural people
(Ur- und Kulturvolk) of the Indo-Germanic race, against us Germans.”

She

developed a delirious vision of Germany in the throes of a “negroized France”
(an allusion to the African soldiers in the French army) and “animalistic
Moscow” (her metaphor for “Jewish” bolshevism). Behind this double threat,
she suspected a Jewish world conspiracy. The only defense for the Germans, she
claimed, was to keep their race “clean” and to strengthen its Nordic elements.
Women, as mothers and educators, would play a primary role in this task.

She

thus gave women a central position in Germany’s international struggle while
reaffirming traditional gender divisions and the stress on motherhood. Unlike
Schirmacher, however, most DNVP women advocated a stronger gender separa-
tion than women from the DVP. Magdalene von Tiling, for example, argued that
women needed to become more knowledgeable in foreign policy so that they

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could raise their children in a more patriotic spirit, but she believed that foreign
policy would always remain in the hands of men and found nothing wrong with
that. Stropp’s and Mende’s calls for the deployment of women in Germany’s
foreign service hardly resonated among female DNVP activists.

DNVP women did not adopt the moderation that the DVP women displayed

from the moment Stresemann became the key person in German foreign policy.
While the DNVP leadership vehemently attacked the grand coalition government
formed by Stresemann on 12 August 1923, particularly after Stresemann decided
to call off passive resistance,

the hateful anti-French rhetoric of DNVP women

continued unabated. In January 1924 Spohr wrote that the only possible attitude
of German women toward France was an absolute “no”, an attitude required by
“the elementary völkisch instinct of self-preservation toward the most brutal and
determined conqueror Germany has had to face in a thousand years.”

Spohr

denied that Germany ever had the intention to violate the freedom of other
peoples or to annex any territory against the will of its population and claimed that
a peaceful understanding with France was impossible. When the DNVP Reichstag
group split during the vote on the Dawes Plan, a new reparations agreement, on
29 August 1924, the three women present at the meeting – Mueller-Otfried,
Schott, and Sperber – all sided with the intransigent party faction. The
Frauenkorrespondenz had claimed that the Dawes Plan was a scheme to transform
Germany into a “reparations colony,” that it was in some respects worse than
Versailles, and that it implied a renewed recognition of the “war-guilt lie”. The
often-invoked loyalty of women to party principles would have made it difficult
for DNVP women to vote for the Dawes Plan, although many men did so after
having pronounced equally emphatic rejections of the plan.

While the split vote triggered intense controversy in the party over participa-

tion in the government and the course of foreign policy, the RFA, so it seems,
attempted to stay above the troubled waters. The leading DNVP women prided
themselves on their consistent rejection of the Dawes Plan but tried at the same
time to lick the wounds that the party had inflicted on itself and made it clear that
they would not oppose the DNVP’s joining the government. An RFA commu-
niqué after the vote, for example, claimed that the majority of women in the party
had been strictly opposed to the Dawes Plan but that the main task of women now
was to hold the party together and to make sure that their own determined nation-
alism would become the basis of German foreign policy.

At a regional DNVP

women’s conference in Küstrin, a speaker questioned the party’s opposition to
participation in government and stressed: “More than ever the national cause
requires the cooperation of women. They have to help restore the heavily shat-
tered confidence [in the party].”

Although the ritualistic condemnations of the “war-guilt lie” and the outraged

reports on the situation of Germans under foreign occupation or administration

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continued, DNVP women, together with the party at large, adopted a more
moderate position in the following years, when the DNVP participated in two
governments that included Stresemann as foreign minister (1925 and
1927–1928). Occasionally DNVP women even began to voice the opinion that
patriotic women could do some good at international conferences.

The main

demand of DNVP women, beyond the revocation of the war-guilt clause, was
now the disarmament of the victor nations. The Treaty of Versailles included the
provision that all nations should disarm after German disarmament had been
completed. After Germany’s military might had been reduced to the levels
required by the Treaty, the German Foreign Office made the case that France and
Britain, in particular, failed to honor their part of the deal. DNVP women wanted
to see this position stressed more strongly. In a series of articles for the
Frauenkorrespondenz in June 1925, Reichstag member Ulrike Scheidel criti-
cized Stresemann for failing to secure a commitment to disarmament from the
victor nations, and from April to June 1927 Hannah Brandt published a series of
articles critical of Britain and France for rearming in violation of the clauses in
the Versailles Treaty.

But the moderation in the years after 1924 was tenuous – both in the DNVP at

large and among its women. In October 1925, the DNVP women applauded
when their party withdrew its ministers from the cabinet in protest against the
Treaty of Locarno, in which Germany committed itself not to challenge its
western border and signed arbitration treaties with its eastern neighbors Poland
and Czechoslovakia. The leading DNVP women supported the party line, which
considered Locarno another step of the policy of fulfillment, and they warned
against German membership in the League of Nations, envisioned by
Stresemann and his conference partners for 1926.

In June 1927, DNVP women

also launched a hateful press campaign against Gertrud Bäumer, who had
published a conciliatory article on her visit to the First World War battle site of
Verdun. Reporting her impressions, Bäumer expressed doubts about the meaning
of the carnage in 1916 and her amazement at the return of life to normalcy on
top of this atrocious battle field. In a vicious attack that was widely echoed by
DNVP women, the DNVP’s Hanover activist Bertha Hindenberg-Delbrück
accused Bäumer of lacking respect for the German war dead and criticized her
doubts about the meaning of the German sacrifices as outrageous and frivolous.
Bäumer replied that Hindenberg-Delbrück’s critique was distorting and
demogogic, but she was forced to make an awkward justification of her remarks
while essentially agreeing with the values and interpretations Hindenberg-
Delbrück had stressed.

In reaction to her article, Bäumer received countless

angry letters, some of which accused her of participating in the “Jewish
poisoning of the people” and asked her, although she was unmarried, to concen-
trate on mending her husband’s trousers.

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In the second half of 1928, the DNVP women’s press again became more

intransigent in foreign policy matters. The DNVP now stood in opposition to the
new government, a coalition from the DVP to the SPD under the leadership of
Social Democrat Hermann Müller. It could thus attack Stresemann’s foreign
policy more sharply than before. Hugenberg’s election to party chair in October
1928, moreover, signified a victory of the intransigent party wing, which had
always shunned a realistic foreign policy. Finally, the DNVP women perceived
an alarming growth of interest in pacifism in Germany and, in particular, in the
German women’s movement. In her leader articles for the Frauenkorrespondenz,
Lehmann claimed that Stresemann’s foreign policy had utterly failed and that he
had conducted a policy without honor and self-respect. Germany, she argued, had
long paid for all war damages inflicted on the enemies, so that all further
payments were simply punitive payments based on the “war-guilt lie.”

When

the pacifist International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship
(IAW) held a conference in Berlin in June 1929, around the tenth anniversary of
the ratification of the peace treaty, women from the DNVP launched massive
attacks against the conference’s German organizers.

DNVP women had tried to

convince the organizing committee to include a session on Versailles in the
conference program, but to no avail. As a consequence, RFA member Ilse Hamel
urged German women not to participate except as unofficial guests who should
point out the suffering of Germany as a result of Versailles. Denying that women
“by nature” welcomed international reconciliation, she called for women’s
demonstrations commemorating Versailles as a contrast to the IAW confer-
ence.

On 23 June, the German Women’s Committee against the War-Guilt Lie

indeed staged a big memorial event for Versailles during which Mende and
Lehmann spoke. To accentuate the somber tone of the meeting, the Committee
had asked the audience to wear dark clothing, and serious music was played
between the speeches (the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony and
a Bach organ fugue). The event was so well attended that Berlin’s large
Philharmonic Hall could not hold all visitors.

The Frauenkorrespondenz under-

pinned the message of the Versailles memorial event with a barrage of articles
arguing that all international women’s solidarity was treason so long as Germans
had to suffer from reparations and Versailles. Schirmacher even called for deter-
mined resistance against the victors, without revealing, however, how it should
be carried out: “Arise, the hour of struggle has arrived!”

After the IAW conference, DNVP women focused their attacks on the

proposed Young Plan, a new reparations settlement that eased some provisions of
the Dawes Plan and distributed German reparations payments over a longer
period. The DNVP, unencumbered by considerations of joining a centrist govern-
ment again, categorically opposed any further German payments and commit-
ments. Hugenberg even requested a referendum over a bill that would end all

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German payments and threatened those who signed the Young Plan with legal
prosecution for high treason. The bill also called for an official revocation of the
war-guilt charge. To broaden support for it, Hugenberg joined forces with the
NSDAP and other right-wing organizations. A popular vote on 2 November 1929
gave the referendum just enough votes to make a plebiscite over the bill manda-
tory. The plebiscite, however, failed by a clear margin on 22 December.

That

the Young Plan extended German payments into the 1980s gave DNVP women a
welcome opportunity to dust off their argument about women’s obligation to
prevent the enslavement of their children. As Spohr put it: “We have no right to
load our chains and the war-guilt lie onto the shoulders of our children and
grandchildren.”

The DNVP women were happy that the proposed bill called for

an official rejection of the war-guilt charge, and Lehmann defended the provi-
sion that people signing the Young Plan would be sued for high treason. This was
a thorny issue, because Reich President Hindenburg, who was popular among
DNVP women, would have to sign the Young Plan before it could take effect. But
Lehmann, who called the referendum a life-and-death question for Germany,
argued that the provision was necessary because it showed that the people behind
the referendum were serious about it.

In the Reichstag, Lehmann gave a speech

in support of the referendum, claiming that all reparations demands by the Allies
were based solely on the “war-guilt lie” and demanding yet again that instruction
on Versailles become mandatory in all German schools.

Shortly before her

death, Käthe Schirmacher mustered all her inflammatory rhetoric in support of
the referendum: “It is exciting to say no in times of deepest national shame and
national surrender – to resist, to fight. The Germanic people were always
fighters; their sign was the light-spraying hammer. Be cheerful, optimistic – be
Germanic! Swing the bright hammer of the referendum against the lie of
Versailles, against tributary payments, against national decadence, against the
spoiling of our present and our distant future. We can win, if we want to win.
Want it!”

In the context of their campaign against the Young Plan, DNVP women also

revived their critique of women’s alleged affinity to pacifism. At the national
party convention in Kassel in November 1929 women made the rejection of paci-
fism their main cause. Erna von Birkhahn, the chair of the LFA Mecklenburg-
Schwerin, sought to separate pacifism from Christianity by arguing that God
gave every people its “race and blood law” and a special task that it could not
complete without national self-assertion. She admitted that war contradicts the
character of Jesus but claimed that loving commitment to one’s own people and
state lends justice to war. Spohr added that the rearmament of Germany’s
wartime enemies as well as the quest for independence and expansion of colo-
nized peoples made pacifism and disarmament a foolish thing for Germany.

Loyal to Hugenberg’s ideas, the DNVP women continued to criticize almost

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every treaty Germany concluded as insufficient, and they frequently pointed at
alleged Polish threats to the east of Germany. Efforts of the IAW to prevent rear-
mament in 1931–32 received harsh critique, with DNVP women arguing that
cementing the present disarmament of Germany would perpetuate war rather
than preserving peace.

Consequently, the DNVP women supported the deci-

sion of the two housewives’ leagues to leave the BDF in 1932 because of a BDF
note on disarmament that the housewives considered too weak.

The DVP women followed a more moderate line on foreign policy while men

from their party occupied the Foreign Office: Stresemann from August 1923
until his death on 3 October 1929 and then Julius Curtius until October 1931.
They called for international reconciliation while always stressing that Versailles
and, in particular, the “war-guilt lie” were a great injustice to Germany. With
anger, they watched the DNVP women’s reaction to the Treaty of Locarno and
criticized Lehmann and her colleagues for claiming national feeling only for
themselves and their party. The DVP’s Martha Schwarz admitted that German
women would not understand most provisions of the treaty, but she naively
suggested that they should trust Reich President Hindenburg, who would surely
know the matter inside out.

Hoping to provide support for Stresemann’s foreign

policy, DVP women approved of participation in international women’s confer-
ences. In 1926, Elsa Matz and Gertraud Wolf attended the Paris conference of the
IAW. But the substantive issues at this conference were overshadowed by a
scandal that erupted after the French organizers of the conference mistakenly
raised the black-white-red flag of the German Empire before 1918 instead of the
black-red-gold flag of Weimar Germany. The women from the left-wing parties
and the Democratic Party in the German delegation rushed to take down the old
flag and demanded an immediate replacement. The DVP women, who revered
the old flag, felt insulted by this act. The affair led to a press campaign between
Gertrud Bäumer of the Democratic Party and Gertraud Wolf of the DVP, who had
both been present. Emma Ender, as chair of the BDF, finally reconciled the two
sides. The issue received so much attention because the German government
under Chancellor Hans Luther had just resigned in the wake of a crisis triggered
by its initiatives to rehabilitate the old flag.

DVP women also participated in

the IAW’s Berlin congress, which was so much maligned by the DNVP women.
In a speech at the conference, Matz sought to undermine the morality of
Versailles and the war-guilt thesis by blaming the peace treaty for widespread
misery.

This was exactly how DVP women envisioned supporting Germany’s

revisionist aims: to use participation in international conferences as a way of
undermining the legitimacy of Versailles and raising the sympathies of foreign
women. In the disarmament debate, Matz and other DVP women later criticized
the reluctance of France to disarm, but they did not go beyond the position of the
German Foreign Ministry.

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Despite the general preference for reconciliation after 1923, confrontational and

chauvinist tones occasionally resurfaced in the DVP. In 1925, for example, Mende
vented her frustration over the behavior of the Polish representative at the
Washington conference of the International Council of Women in a diatribe against
Polish culture, which she ranked much below German culture: “A state that is built
up upon the disloyalty of its people toward its previous rulers and upon ingratitude
toward its helpers can, of course, not be expected to assume a high moral point of
view in international life.”

DVP women, often in tandem with their sisters in the

DNVP, continued to publish propagandistic accounts of the plight of Germans in
Poland and along the “bleeding border” in the east.

Warnings about Poland’s high

birthrate occasionally also appeared in their propaganda arsenal.

In conclusion, the women from the DVP and DNVP took a very strong interest

in foreign-policy matters, but their activity usually reflected their maternalist
idea of women’s role in politics. Women, as spiritual or real mothers, were
considered to have a special role in fostering the connections of Germans in
occupied areas or foreign countries to the German Volksgemeinschaft and in
ensuring the continuity of this link across the generations.

As mothers, women

also had to protect future generations of Germans from the dishonor and
exploitation associated with Versailles and the “war-guilt lie.” Women’s involve-
ment in foreign policy further revolved around the importance of morality, where
women had long claimed a mission of their own. The “Black Horror” campaign,
with its strong racist elements, was declared a morality issue, and women from
both parties, regardless of whether they supported the official German foreign
policy or not, almost always advanced their arguments on the basis of morality –
be it the importance of the “war-guilt lie” or the injustice of French military
strength when considered in light of German disarmament.

Notes

1. “Zum 28. Juni 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 26, 30 June 1922.
2. See Doris Kaufmann, “Die Ehre des Vaterlandes und die Ehre der Frauen

oder der Kampf an der äusseren und inneren Front.” Evangelische Theologie
46 (1986): 277–92.

3. Claudia Koonz, “Conflicting Allegiances.” Signs: Journal of Women in

Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (1976): 663–83, here 672–3. From the fact that
women legislators rarely spoke on certain topics in the Reichstag we should
not infer that they were not interested in them.

4. Raffael Scheck, “Women Against Versailles.” German Studies Review 22

(1999): 21–42, here 24–7.

5. On women’s pilgrimages to the German-Polish border, see Elizabeth

Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border’: Gender and Rituals of

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Nationalist Protest in Germany, 1919–1939.” Women’s History Review 9, no.
2 (2000): 201–29.

6. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei (Berlin:

Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1919), p. 86.

7. Marie Bernays, “Wie stärken wir Frauen die deutsche Volkskraft?” Bericht

über den Zweiten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei (Berlin:
Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1920), p. 181.

8. “Volksparteiliche Frauen in den neuen Parlamenten,” NLC 51, no. 207, 12

December 1924.

9. “Zum 28. Juni 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 26, 30 June 1922.

10. Clara Mende, “Die nationalen Pflichten der deutschen Frau,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 5, 29 January 1920.

11. Helene Wenck, “Die Reichswehr und unsere Söhne,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

2, no. 27, 8 July 1920.

12. Ina Le Mang-Pfaff, “Die deutschen Frauen in Genf,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt

2, no. 39, 30 September 1920.

13. See, for example, Beda Prilipp, “Die großen Vier am Werk,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 24, 16 June 1922, and Magdalene von Tiling, “Zur
Frage der politischen Frauenpartei,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 13, 1
October 1931; “Kulturaufgaben des Reiches,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no.
24, 16 June 1922.

14. BA Koblenz, Nachlass Katharina Kardorff-von Oheimb (N 1039), vols. 25

and 37.

15. Clara Mende, “Wirkungslosigkeit des Frauenstimmrechts?” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 32, 11 August 1922; “Sitzung des Reichs-
frauenausschusses,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 42, 21 October 1920.

16. Emma Stropp, “Feind im Land!”, DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 15, 15 April

1920. For Stropp’s critique of antifeminism in the DVP, see chapter 3.

17. Emma Stropp, “Die Außenpolitik und die Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3,

no. 41, 10 November 1922.

18. Scheck, “Women against Versailles,” p. 26.
19. Emmy Voigtländer, “Immer noch Begriffsverwirrung,” DVP-Nachrichten-

blatt 3, no. 13, 31 March 1921.

20. Clara Mende, “Wenn deutsche Frauen ins Ausland gehen,” and “An den

Pranger,” both in NLC 51, no. 25, 20 February 1924.

21. See for example “Bericht von der Frauentagung der Dt. Nationalpartei in

Troppau,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 3, no. 40, 27 October 1922; “Volks-
parteiliche Frauenarbeit 1922,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 5, 2 March
1923; “Großdeutscher Frauentag in Wien,” NLC 52, no. 99, 26 May 1925;
Annagrete Lehmann, “Vom Großdeutschen Parteitag in Bregenz,”
Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 24, 14 June 1928.

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22. Else Frobenius, “Kulturaufgaben, für die wir eintreten müssen,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 20, 20 May 1920, and Luise Marelle, “Der
‘Schutzbund’ – neue Aufgaben der deutschen Frau” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
2, no. 23/24, 17 June 1920. On Frobenius and her engagement for the
Germans living abroad, see also Lora Wildenthal, “Mass-Marketing
Colonialism and Nationalism: The Career of Else Frobenius in the
‘Weimarer Republik’ and Nazi Germany.” In Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik
und Geschlecht (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000).

23. Käthe Rahmlow, “Nun erst recht!” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 6, 16 March

1923, and Ilse Szagunn, “Über die Arbeit der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der
Frauenausschüsse Groß-Berlins,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 23, 9
November 1923.

24. “Satyrspiel, Beobachtungen und Gedanken einer Frau während der Sitzung

vom 18. November des Untersuchungsausschusses,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt
1, no. 9, 27 November 1919.

25. Emma Stropp, “Das Auslieferungsverlangen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no.

7, 12 February 1920.

26. Sally Marks, “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice

and Prurience.” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 297–334; Gisela
Lebzelter, “Die ‘Schwarze Schmach’: Vorurteile – Propaganda – Mythos.”
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no. 1 (1985): 37–58; and Keith Nelson,
“ ‘The Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I
Diplomacy.” Journal of Modern History 42, no. 4 (1970): 606–27.

27. Emma Stropp, “Der sexuale Schrecken im besetzten Gebiet,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 18, 6 May 1920.

28. “Aus der Nationalversammlung,” and Clara Mende, “Die zweite deutsche

Nationalversammlung,” both in DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 21, 27 May
1920. See also VdR, Nationalversammlung, vol. 333, pp. 5695–6.

29. Die Deutsche Volkspartei und das Versailler Friedensdiktat, Flugschriften

der DVP, vol. III-3 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1921).

30. VdR, 1920–1924, vol. 354, p. 6949.
31. “Gegen die ‘Kulturschande’,” NLC, 52, no. 13, 21 January 1925.
32. “Gegen Hungerblockade und Schandregiment: Die weiblichen

Abgeordneten der D. Vp. an der Grenze des besetzten Gebietes,” DVP-
Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 14, 6 July 1923.

33. The only explicit report on the break-off of passive resistance in the DVP

women’s press I could find was a declaration in support of Stresemann from
the WkFA Solingen (DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 22, 26 October 1923).
That the RFA did not issue a similar declaration may indicate ambivalence
about Stresemann’s measure, which was seen as a shameful capitulation by
many rightists.

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34. “Sturmzeit,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 20, 28 September 1923, and

Gertraud Wolf, “Internationale Tagungen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 19,
14 September 1923.

35. Käthe Schirmacher, “Für Oberschlesien,” Frauenkorrespondenz 2, no. 19,

25 June 1921.

36. Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the Early

Weimar Republic,” pp. 49–51.

37. Frauenkorrespondenz 4, no. 4, 28 March 1923.
38. See Verhandlungen der Nationalversammlung, vol. 341, interpellation no.

1898 (quoted), and vol. 343, interpellation no. 2771. See also Scheck,
“German Conservatism,” pp. 49–50.

39. “Deutsche Frauen!” BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 8; Pamphlet in

GStA Berlin, XII, IV, vol. 187 (emphasis in the original).

40. Maria Vogts, “Zehn Jahre besetztes Rheinland,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10,

no. 48, 29 November 1928.

41. Erika Altgelt, “Frauenveranstaltungen beim Verein für das Deutschtum im

Ausland,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 23, 23 June 1927. See also “Zum
Ostmarkentag in Oberschlesien,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 18, 5 May
1927.

42. Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Schwarze Schmach,” in: Führer durch den

Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Köln a. Rh. vom 8. bis
11. September 1926. Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle,
[1926], pp. 30–2. BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1–44 (DNVP), vol. 3 (1).

43. Käthe Schirmacher, “Frankreichs farbige Truppen,” Frauenkorrespondenz

7, no. 51, 13 July 1925.

44. Magdalene von Tiling, “Zur Frage der politischen Frauenpartei.”
45. Liebe, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei, p. 74.
46. Elisabeth Spohr, “Unser Erbfeind Frankreich,” Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no.

10, 19 January 1924.

47. Helene Freiin von Watter, “Kontroll- und Versklavungsmaßnahmen im

Sachverständigengutachten (Teil II),” Frauenkorrespondenz 5, no. 24, 18
June 1924, and other articles by Watter in the following issues. See also
Raffael Scheck, Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics,
1914–1930, Studies in Central European Histories (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1998), pp. 176–9.

48. “Die Entscheidung des 29. August – ein Anfang,” and Dr. von Rundstedt,

“Gewissensfragen,” both in Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 35, 3 September
1924.

49. “Landesparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Cüstrin-Neustadt am

18. und 19. Oktober 1924,” Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauensmänner
und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein Soldin 6, no.

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10, 31 October 1924. See also Annagrete Lehmann, “Besinnung,” Frauen-
korrespondenz 6, no. 40, 8 October 1924.

50. “Nationalbewußtsein und internationale Zusammenarbeit,” Frauen-

korrespondenz 8, no. 35, 26 August 1926. See also “Frauenfragen,” in Weiß,
ed., Politisches Handwörterbuch, p. 213.

51. Hannah Brandt, “Zum Zeichen der Abrüstung – I. Programm und

Tatsachen” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 17, 28 April 1927, and the
following issues until June 1927.

52. Ulrike Scheidel, “Was bedeuten die Abmachungen von Locarno?”

Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 90, 26 November 1925; Scheidel, “Und nun …
?” Frauenkorrespondenz 8, no. 6, 4 February 1926; Annagrete Lehmann,
“Zum Vertrag von Locarno,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 88, 22 October
1925, and Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Stellung der deutschnationalen Frauen
zu Locarno,” Frauenkorrespondenz 7, no. 89, 24 November 1925.

53. Bäumer, “Mai über Verdun,” Die Frau 34, no. 9 (June 1927): 513–17; see

also Bertha Hindenberg-Delbrück’s open letter to Bäumer, in
Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 25, 23 June 1927. The Frauenkorrespondenz
refused to publish Bäumer’s response and claimed to have received many
letters expressing outrage over her remarks and satisfaction over
Hindenberg-Delbrück’s article. See “Schlußwort an Frau Dr. Gertrud
Bäumer,” Frauenkorrespondenz 9, no. 28, 14 July 1927.

54. Gertrud Bäumer, “Parteifanatismus über Gräbern,” Die Frau 34, no. 11

(August 1927): 666–72.

55. Annagrete Lehmann, “Rückblick und Ausblick,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10,

no. 52, 27 December 1928; Lehmann, “Kriegsschuldlüge und ‘Repara-
tionen’,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 3, 17 January 1929.

56. Ulrike Scheidel, “Kriegsächtung und Kriegsverzicht? Entstehung und

Bedeutung des Kellogg-Pakts,” Frauenkorrespondenz 10, no. 36, 6
September 1928. For background on the IAW, see Rupp, Worlds of Women,
pp. 21–6.

57. Ilse Hamel, “Zum bevorstehenden internationalen Frauenkongreß in

Berlin,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 22, 30 May 1929. See also Irene
Stoehr, Emanzipation zum Staat? (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990), pp.
128–31.

58. Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 24, 13 June 1929; Alice Freifrau von Bissing,

“Zehn Jahre Versailles,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 26, 27 June 1929.

59. Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Lüge von Versailles,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11,

no. 25, 20 June 1929.

60. Elisabeth Friedenthal, “Volksbegehren und Volksentscheid über den

Youngplan und die deutschnationale Sezession” (unpublished PhD disserta-
tion, Universität Tübingen, 1957).

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61. Elisabeth Spohr, “Kampf dem Tributplan,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 36,

5 September 1929.

62. Annagrete Lehmann “Das Volksbegehren gegen die Versklavung des

deutschen Volkes,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 38, 19 September 1929.
See also Lenore Kühn, “Was will der Young-Plan?” Frauenkorrespondenz
11, no. 39, 26 September 1929, and Annagrete Lehmann, “Allerlei
Bedenken!” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 41, 10 October 1929.

63. VdR, 1928–1930, vol. 426, pp. 3323–5.
64. Käthe Schirmacher, “Zum Volksbegehren,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no.

43, 24 October 1929.

65. Frauenkorrespondenz, vol 11, no. 38, 19 September 1929; “Frauenreferate

auf dem Parteitag in Kassel: Pazifismus und deutsche Selbstbehauptung I.
Referat: Erna v. Birkhahn”, and “Pazifismus und deutsche Selbst-
behauptung II. Referat Spohr,” both in Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 47, 21
November 1929.

66. Annagrete Lehmann, “Erklärung nationaler Frauenkreise an die Genfer

Abrüstungskommission,” and Erika Kames-Boelcke, “Deutsche Frau und
Abrüstungskonferenz,” both in Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 17, 1
December 1931.

67. Freda von Rechenberg, “Generalversammlung der RVDH,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 14, no. 12, 15 June 1932; see also Schmidt-Waldherr,
Emanzipation durch Professionalisierung?, pp. 114 and 135–41, and Hönig,
Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, pp. 131–42, who claims that the BDF
declaration was a pretext for the housewives’ leagues, which had wanted to
leave the BDF for a long time.

68. M. S. [Martha Schwarz], “Frauengedanken zu Locarno,” NLC 52, no. 219,

25 November 1925.

69. Elsa Matz, “Internationale Frauenarbeit,” NLC 53, no. 119, 8 July 1926;

“Noch einmal der ‘Flaggenvorfall’ beim Pariser Frauenkongreß,” NLC 53,
no. 125, 21 July 1926; Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, pp.
129–30.

70. “Zum Frauenweltbund-Kongreß” and “Rede der Reichstagsabgeordneten

Frau Dr. Matz auf dem Abend der Parlamentarierinnen des Frauen-
weltbundes,” both in NLC 56, no. 128, 20 June 1929. See also Clara Mende,
“Versailles,” and Martha Schwarz, “Politische Betrachtungen zum interna-
tionalen Frauenkongreß in Berlin,” both in NLC 56, no. 133, 27 June 1929.

71. Elsa Matz, “Die Abrüstungsfrage und die Frauen,” NLC 58, no. 176, 10

September 1931; Clara Mende, “Die Frauen zur Frage der Abrüstung,” NLC
58, no. 217, 5 November 1931.

72. Clara Mende, “Der internationale Frauenbund in Washington, 4.-14. Mai

1925,” NLC 52, no. 103, 2 June 1925.

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73. “Helft den deutschen Volksgenossen!” NLC 52, no. 157, 27 August 1925; H.

M. [Hilde Margis], “Im Schneidemühler Optandenlager,” NLC 52, no. 185,
7 October 1925; Martha Schwarz, “Reichsfrauenausschuß der Deutschen
Volkspartei,” NLC 57, no. 236, 4 December 1930; Harvey, “Pilgrimages to
the ‘Bleeding Border’.”

74. For a good expression of this feeling, see Emma Stropp, “Friede und

Frauen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 3, 15 January 1920.

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–8–

Women’s Local Politics

With lovely generosity, she was always willing to put her art of singing into
the service of party meetings; giving joy to others was for her a necessity of
life.

From the obituary for a member of the DNVP

women’s group in Stettin (October 1932)

What activities did women develop at the grass-roots level, and how did these
activities reflect the themes of the women who were active at the national level?
According to Helen Boak, women in local politics were confined to doing the
“dirty work,” such as collecting dues, conducting door-to-door propaganda, and
doing low-level administrative jobs. Their thankless work won women the ritual
praise of the male party leaders but no political influence, as Boak confirms by
using statistics that show women’s representation in political assemblies
becoming smaller proportionally to the size of their town or village.

There is

definitely much truth to this picture: women often picked up membership dues
at the door – not a pleasant job given the notoriously bad payment discipline of
bourgeois party members. During the inflation, dues were sometimes collected
in foodstuffs in rural areas, which demanded heavy physical work at a time when
few people were motorized. Handing out party leaflets on the streets could be
dangerous in regions where violence-prone leftists or, later on, Nazis dominated
the scene. Yet, the picture emerging from available local party newsletters from
East Elbian regions, Schleswig-Holstein, Westphalia, and Berlin is richer than
the emphasis on the “dirty work” suggests. Women in many places developed an
intense activism in the DNVP as well as the DVP. As they frequently claimed,
they aimed to promote the feeling of “home” and “family” within the local party
organization – thus extending their roles as mothers and housewives to the party.
They were often responsible for party festivities, made coffee and baked cake,
and performed as singers, musicians, or actresses. Women also used many of
these festivities to raise funds for the party, for example by setting up lotteries.
Another mainstay of local women’s activities was providing social services for
the poor – usually party members: women set up soup kitchens, distributed gifts,
and organized rural holidays for poor city dwellers. Women from both parties

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also tried hard to improve the political training of local women. In cooperation
with the national women leaders, they offered lectures on political and social
issues as well as workshops on speech-making and political organization.

In the district of Lauban, a city in Western Silesia, for example, a district

women’s committee of the DNVP had been formed early on but faltered after the
death of its chairwoman in early 1921. A year later, the DNVP district organiza-
tion revived the women’s committee by inviting female party members to a cele-
bration of the Kaiser’s birthday (27 January). In a keynote address, district secre-
tary Otto Mießner commemorated the Kaiser and praised the monarchy. When
he explained why he had chosen the Kaiser’s birthday for the assembly, he
pointed out: “The German woman has always been a loyal stalwart of tradition
and a priestess of German loyalty. If we add to this the truly female ability to
commiserate deeply, then we have the foundations on which today’s celebration
rests.”

The women’s committee constituted itself under a new chairwoman, and

Mießner joined its board, which was not unusual because local women’s commit-
tees often invited men to make it clear that they pursued no selfish women’s poli-
cies. The committee published a declaration in favor of monarchism and the
restoration of everything “good” that the Revolution had destroyed; the leaders
of the women’s committee participated in the women’s meeting preceding the
DNVP’s national conference in nearby Görlitz in October 1922. The chairwoman
summarized the meeting in the local party newsletter and led a discussion of the
issues raised in Görlitz, particularly the reform of divorce legislation.

But

women in the Lauban district were often most active in places where no women’s
committee existed, and the wisdom of forming women’s committees was not
recognized everywhere. Frequently the heavy workload of rural women was an
argument against forming a women’s committee, even if many women did attend
the local party gatherings.

Women were also active in mixed party meetings and committees. The news

bulletins of local party assemblies in the Lauban district frequently mention a
strong presence of women, and many women were elected to party offices. At a
meeting of the local party committee of the city of Lauban in August 1921,
twenty-three board members were elected for the six city subdistricts, including
eleven women. But the almost perfect numerical equality is misleading. The
context shows that all the men were elected as chair or vice chair of the sub-
district boards, whereas the women’s responsibility was defined as “strict organ-
ization, collection of dues, etc.”

Other incidents confirm that women were

primarily responsible for the collection of membership dues, delivered mostly in
goods and foodstuffs in 1922–23, and the organization of social events, during
which they provided coffee and cake and stage entertainment. Women also made
gifts to the party or imparted money from their inheritance to it. They supported
the party’s charitable and welfare activities, such as funding for a local nurse and

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the collection of food for poor party members. The wealthy widow of a German
officer killed in German East Africa was such a generous contributor and active
fund-raiser that the local party newsletter honored her with an article about her
own activities in East Africa.

Women’s efforts to promote the feeling of the party as a big family received

support from party secretary Mießner, who during social events occasionally
played a piano solo or accompanied his wife, a singer. In 1921–23 the local party
published its own newsletter, which gave much space to family news, such as
weddings and obituaries of party members. The local DNVP also supported a
daily newspaper sympathetic to its views, and it was due to women’s financial
support that this newspaper once avoided bankruptcy.

In contrast to most

national leaders, a majority of the active women were married – frequently to
men from the party. Although the region was famous for a strong presence of the
DNVP’s worker group (Deutschnationaler Arbeiterbund), most of the active
women belonged to the nobility or were married to white-collar employees or
independent tradesmen. The activities of the DNVP women in the Lauban
district focused on local concerns. Except for the report on the RFA meeting in
Görlitz and a letter by Paula Mueller-Otfried to a local party member (published
in the party newsletter), traces of the concerns expressed by the nationally active
women of the DNVP are hard to find.

This may be due to the weakness of the

district women’s committee, which even after its restoration did not develop
impressive activities, or to limited documentation: the party newsletter faltered,
like many others, during the inflation in 1923.

In Soldin, a city and district east of Frankfurt an der Oder, the women’s

committee left better traces, and the local party newsletter published much more
about the DNVP’s national women’s politics. The district women’s committee
had connections to the RFA, which organized a political training workshop in
Frankfurt an der Oder in 1920.

In April and November 1922 Margarethe Behm

gave talks to the women’s committee, in which she appealed to women to inform
themselves about politics and to attack Versailles, which she called the cause of
all misery in Germany.

In July 1924 the district women’s committee organized

a rally against Versailles, stressing that only a Germany reconstituted as a great
power would become a force for peace in Europe, and in October a woman from
the district women’s committee gave an address to the regional party assembly in
Küstrin, where she stressed the special role of women in reconciling the party
after its Reichstag group had split during the vote on the Dawes Plan.

Until

1930, when the party newsletter stopped appearing, the women’s district
committee displayed continuous activity in contact with the women leaders in
Berlin. Elisabeth Spohr repeatedly appeared on the DNVP’s district ballot for the
Prussian Landtag elections, and RFA chairs Behm and Lehmann had good rela-
tions with women on the Soldin district committee.

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Close connections to the RFA were typical also for women’s groups in two

districts of the Prussian province of Pomerania: Stolp, in the easternmost tip of
the province (just northwest of Danzig), and Stettin, the port city on the mouth
of the Oder River. Both districts benefited from the frequent visits of Ilse-
Charlotte Noack, who sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1921 to 1932 and
devoted much energy to building up a powerful women’s structure in these
DNVP strongholds. As in Lauban, women in Stolp organized coffee parties
(Kaffeekränzchen) with political speeches, music, poems, and short patriotic
plays. The homemade cakes received as much praise as in Lauban, but the
focus on the speeches was stronger. The audience was usually female. Most of
the women’s activities here happened in women’s committees built up on the
initiative of Noack. As in Lauban, wealthy women, often nobles, were most
active in the women’s committees. They organized food distributions to poor
regions and established a foundation for free lunches for the poor (“deutschna-
tionaler Mittagsdank”). A girls’ section of the Bismarckbund, the DNVP’s
youth organization, effectively supported the DNVP women’s social activi-
ties.

A similar picture emerges from the newsletter for the district of Stettin,

the capital of Pomerania, published 1925–32. Noack’s activities here were
powerfully assisted by Lotte Plath, a DNVP representative in the Pomeranian
provincial diet and contributor to the Frauenkorrespondenz. The women’s
committee organized political talks, social events, and “women’s afternoons”
(Frauennachmittage) with discussion rounds on specific topics. They also
gathered for the commemoration ceremonies on the Kaiser’s birthday, the
Queen Luise day, and the memorial days of Auguste Viktoria. The district
women’s committee took up some issues debated by the national women
leaders such as public morality, women’s role in provincial and communal poli-
tics, divorce legislation, and women’s standing in the professions. The local
DNVP newsletter reprinted articles from the Frauenkorrespondenz and even
published reviews of books from women leaders of other parties. The DNVP
women in the district of Stettin were also active in supporting their party’s
political agenda, particularly during the presidential elections of 1925 and the
campaign for a plebiscite on the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag in 1931.
Welfare activities also belonged to their main concerns. They collected coal
and potatoes for the poor, who could sign up for free distribution during the
winter, and in 1931 they organized a concert for the DNVP winter aid founda-
tion.

In Stolp and Stettin, where a good structure of women’s committees

existed, most of the women’s local activities seem to have taken place in
connection with those committees.

Exceptionally rich documentation exists for East Prussia, Germany’s exclave

on the Baltic, for 1920–22. Therese Deutsch, member of the Prussian Landtag
from 1921 to 1932 (with the exception of a few months in 1928), and Else von

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Sperber, Reichstag representative from May 1924 to 1928, were particularly
active here. Deutsch pioneered the development of the regional women’s struc-
ture of the DNVP in 1919–21. She was the secretary of the East Prussian
women’s committee, which had an equally diligent deputy secretary, Clotilde von
der Groeben. Deutsch and von der Groeben traveled through the countryside,
gave talks, and initiated the establishment of many local women’s committees.
Both were effective and well-liked speakers who often drew an audience of five
hundred people even in small villages.

In their speeches, they elaborated on the

rights and duties of the newly enfranchised women and stressed their responsi-
bility as educators to work for the dissemination of a religious and patriotic
spirit.

In many places, DNVP women forming a women’s committee also

inspired the growth of DNVP youth groups. The Volksgemeinschaft idea was
particularly strong in this isolated area, where many from the lower classes,
notably the rural workers, voted for the DNVP. The social engagement of the
women thus assumed special importance. In the winter of 1920 the women’s
committee from Königsberg, the capital, organized farm holidays for 137 poor
children and forty-six adults from their city, so as to bridge the gap between town
and country. The same women’s committee also saw to it that wealthier DNVP
members let poor women affiliated with the party repair their clothes and linens.
Women’s committees organized lotteries to benefit poor party members and
organized food collections for Germans in Upper Silesia, another area where
Germans felt threatened by Poland.

Social events and political training also figured among the activities of the

East Prussian DNVP women. The Christmas parties of the Königsberg women’s
committee with their “living pictures” (stehende Bilder) of patriotic scenes were
famous. In June 1921 the women’s committee in Sensburg, a district city in the
south of the province, invited party members to attend a party meeting in folk
dress and to participate in a lottery for the treasury of the local party organiza-
tion. The women sold eight thousand lottery tickets; wealthy party members
donated the prizes. The local DNVP newsletter advertised these successful
festivities as a model to the whole party.

To benefit the political education of

women, the women’s committees organized courses for female speakers; test
speeches could be given on such topics as: “The war-guilt lie”, “What does it
mean to be a German?”, and “Antagonisms between town and country.”

Women’s committees were interested in national issues (particularly the legisla-
tion on abortion, the status of midwives, and school reform), and the LFA organ-
ized a series of speeches on such topics. Deutsch and other well-known DNVP
women offered “office hours” in Königsberg to discuss new bills with party
members.

They fostered contacts with the Danzig women’s group under Anni

Kalähne, which regularly organized meetings attended by women from all East
German regions.

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The DNVP women in East Prussia were enormously active in the early 1920s,

but they were even more critical of engagement for women’s rights per se than
the national leaders. Many East Prussian DNVP women criticized the women’s
rights movement as anti-national and selfish.

In an article on women’s repre-

sentation in parliaments, von der Groeben argued that male deputies in most
fields represented women well and that the real women’s questions were insepa-
rable from the well-being of the people. She thought that only a few DNVP
women should sit in parliament – primarily to advise men on women’s questions
and to check the influence of women from parties with a worldview hostile to the
DNVP. Von der Groeben wanted only those women to sit in parliaments who
represented women’s “true” professions (housewives, mothers, nurses, and
educators), but not women motivated by a general political interest, such as
Schirmacher.

The party newsletter printed lengthy articles by women against

the right of women to sit on juries and to become judges; here the East Prussian
women’s committees opposed the women in the DNVP Reichstag group. With
Deutsch and von Sperber, the East Prussian DNVP women had a Prussian
Landtag and a Reichstag representative for some time, but the fact that the
DNVP group in the provincial diet for East Prussia consisted of twenty-eight
men but no woman in 1921 did not seem to bother them.

Clara Papendieck, the

chair of the East Prussian women’s committee in late 1920, summarized their
priorities best when she defined the woman as the guardian of three pearls fallen
from the crown of the beloved empress: family, church, and fatherland.

Notable activism of DNVP women can also be traced in Westphalia, where

many women’s committees had been formed. Women in this area appear to have
done a particularly large share of the thankless party work, such as fund-raising
and distributing propaganda for meetings. A report on a meeting of members of
the local DNVP group in the town of Bückeburg, for example, praises the women
for having ensured that the meeting hall was full. At the end of the meeting, a
woman asked for donations for people from the Ruhr district, then under Franco-
Belgian occupation.

The memoirs of Anni Kalähne, the chair of Danzig’s

women’s committee and member of the Volkstag, confirm many aspects visible
in party newsletters. Kalähne stressed the social activities of the Danzig women’s
committee; it encouraged farmers to send monthly packages with foodstuffs to
poor rentiers, sent city children to the countryside for vacations, and collected
eggs, potatoes, and clothes for distribution to the poor. Kalähne mentioned that
she had not much sympathy for women’s rights although she often experienced
the condescending attitude of male city officials toward politically active
women.

Berlin, where women’s activities in several local party sections are well docu-

mented, differs from the more provincial or rural districts. Here the DNVP’s
entire local activity, not only the “dirty work,” relied on women. For the district

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of Berlin-Northwest (approximately today’s Moabit section), a unique source
exists that offers numerical information on local party membership: from
February 1919 to March 1920 the local party newsletter published the names of
new party members. Of 2,518 new members, the sex could be determined in
2,435 cases. In this group, there were 1,515 women, who constitute 62.2 percent
of the members whose sex is identifiable. Unmarried women (649) were strongly
represented and almost equal in numbers to married women (709). Of 157
women the marital status could not be detected. Unfortunately, the lists give the
professions of only 158 women, although it is highly probable that in this urban
environment a large portion of both unmarried and married women were
working. Among the women whose occupation is given, two groups predomi-
nate: sisters belonging to religious orders (62) and teachers (56).

The strength

of the first occupation was due to the existence of a house of a religious women’s
order in the district, whereas women teachers belonged to the politically most
active professional groups in all bourgeois parties. A social profile of the women
in the local DNVP is difficult to establish, but there certainly was a mixture of
upper-class women (mostly nobles or independently wealthy women), women
with academic backgrounds, women from white-collar professions, and lower-
class women, particularly domestic employees. The latter were well organized
and politically very active in Berlin.

Other sources confirm that women joined the DNVP’s Berlin-Northwest

group in great numbers. At the end of May 1919, for example, the local DNVP
newsletter reported about a DNVP protest meeting against the Treaty of
Versailles. The meeting was disturbed by the heckling of young men from the
Independent Socialists, whereupon the attending DNVP members yelled back at
them, stood up on the benches, and climbed on the podium to better refute the
hecklers. The newsletter report insisted that the behavior of the party members
had exacerbated the chaos and made it impossible for the trained speaker to
effectively rebut the hecklers. The author thus admonished party members to
retain discipline in such situations, admitting that “this may be particularly hard
for the newcomers in politics, our women, who are more easily carried away by
their feelings than the men.” It turns out that the vast majority of the DNVP
members present were female party members. The report thus concluded: “By
the way, the rioters would have been less bold had more of our male party
members been present.”

Complaints that few men participated in the DNVP’s Berlin sections appear

frequently in the local party publications. At a party assembly in Berlin-
Northwest the chairman complained that the majority of the audience was
female. “But how shall our fatherland recover if our best men remain passive?”

An article of the DNVP newsletter in the same district thanked women in
December 1919 for their work as helpers of the party. They had diligently visited

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party members, distributed propaganda, handed out ballots, collected member-
ship fees, and tackled administrative tasks. “Unfortunately there are only a few
male helpers. In this respect, too, women embarrass us, the men … Whoever
knows how much a woman of the character we respect dislikes working in public
and approaching people who she does not know will understand the magnitude
of the sacrifice that these female helpers make for our cause.”

The comparative

passivity of men showed even in the “German National Chorus,” which was
founded by party members but was restricted in its repertoire by its dramatic
shortage of tenors and basses. Some articles scornfully reproached the men for
not taking part more enthusiastically in the paramilitary home guards set up as a
middle-class defense against worker unrest and asked why women did not pres-
sure their husbands harder to join these units, an exhortation that must have made
little sense to the many unmarried women in the party.

Some activities of the Berlin women resembled those of DNVP women in

small towns and rural areas.

Train rides and boat excursions to idyllic places

around Berlin were standard fare of women’s committees in every section of
town. So were charitable activities. Party women, for example, signed up as
guardians for orphans.

Women’s committees also gathered donations for distri-

bution as Christmas gifts to poor party members in 1923. But demand soon
outgrew the readiness to help: when some women asked the party for free pota-
toes and for help in finding cheap rooms, the LFA Berlin stated that it was, after
all, a political organization and had no resources for such services (although food
was later distributed to poor party members by the DNVP women’s committees
in Stettin and Danzig).

Women’s engagement for the social events of the local

party, moreover, was less important in Berlin than in the other areas, maybe
because far more unmarried women belonged to the party than in rural or small-
town districts. Party meetings thus were not the “family affair” that they might
have been in places where husband and wife both belonged to the DNVP. By
contrast, the intellectual activities of the Berlin women’s committees were more
challenging and vibrant than those of the other districts. Berlin benefited from
the presence of Reichstag and Prussian Landtag members as well as the head-
quarters of the RFA. There was never a lack of female speakers. District women’s
committees put on a rich fare of lectures and workshops on all the topics relevant
to the national women’s leaders and female parliamentarians, and the party
newsletters provided information on most of them. Unlike in the countryside,
issues of interest to professional women, who made up a large part of the urban
party membership, received much attention. In 1923 the LFA Berlin also organ-
ized a series of lectures and workshops on public speaking, which was offered
with success in several Berlin districts.

Women in the Berlin DNVP were much better represented in the local assem-

blies (the city parliament and the district assemblies) than their party colleagues

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elsewhere, although they were still dramatically underrepresented if one
considers the probable strength of female party membership and the degree of
women’s engagement for the party. But the Berlin DNVP counted in its rows a
number of well-known women politicians. Asta Rötger, Gertrud Becker,
Margarethe Braunert, and Else Ulbrich were active and influential in the city
parliament (Ulbrich later moved to the Landtag), whereas Minna Hölzel, a repre-
sentative of domestic employees, was most notable in the assembly of the
wealthy Tiergarten district. Although professional women probably played an
important role in sustaining the Berlin DNVP’s activity, housewives also figured
prominently on the ballots and in the assemblies.

Rötger, a housewife herself,

became her party’s foremost expert on local politics. In 1929 she summarized her
experience in the Berlin city parliament, expressing longing for the “good old
days” before 1918, when a few male notables managed city politics. In typical
fashion, she blamed the Left for having introduced partisan politics into
communal politics, implying that the old city fathers, all from a socially exclu-
sive group, had stood above it.

In late 1930, the RFA of the DNVP sent out a questionnaire to the regional

women’s committees to gauge the level of women’s activity after party splits had
occurred earlier in the year. Selective results were published in Die
Deutschnationale Frau throughout the spring and summer of 1931, but their
celebratory message belies their informative value. Nevertheless, the kind of
women’s activities mentioned in these reports confirms the picture emerging
from local newsletters. Strong activism seems to have persisted mostly in those
areas where the DNVP was strong, such as Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Danzig,
and some areas of Württemberg. All regional women’s committees claimed that
most women in the party had remained loyal to Hugenberg, the radical party
chairman elected in 1928, although a few admitted having had difficulties. To
gain a more detailed picture of the situation, the RFA chair Annagrete Lehmann
visited women’s committees in thirteen Reichstag districts in the summer of
1931. Although her report was generally positive, she gained the impression that
in several regions the men in the DNVP did not adequately support the activities
of the women’s committees. She stressed that women have to make their influ-
ence felt not simply through numbers but also qualitatively, by contributing to the
party in their own “womanly” way. She praised several fund-raising efforts by
women’s committees but urged the women to do more word-of-mouth propa-
ganda and daily small work for the party – the “dirty work.”

Good documentation for the local politics of DVP women exists mostly for

Schleswig-Holstein, East Prussia, and Berlin. In Schleswig-Holstein, at the time
still a province of Prussia, the DVP women’s organization got a good start
through the lively participation of women in the campaign for the plebiscite in
the German-Danish border region (March 1920).

Jane Voigt, who coordinated

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much of that activity, became famous in the process and was elected to the
Prussian Landtag a year later. Very active also were the DVP women from
Altona, now a suburb of Hamburg but in the 1920s an independent city and part
of Schleswig-Holstein. Elisabeth Cimbal, a housewife from Altona, was the
engine of the women’s activities and acted as chair of the WkFA Schleswig-
Holstein. Clara Mende helped the activities of Schleswig-Holstein’s DVP women
through lectures in front of party assemblies and women’s committees.

Unlike

the DNVP women in East Prussia, the DVP women of Schleswig-Holstein
believed that women had to be represented in the party and in political assem-
blies in greater numbers. At a women’s conference of the DVP in February 1921,
Cimbal argued that women could be particularly effective in instilling families
with DVP ideology. But to interest them in party work, the DVP had to invite at
least one female speaker to its conferences. Cimbal further argued that too many
tasks were waiting in local politics that women could tackle better than men;
women should thus press for better representation in all local party offices and
assemblies.

The efforts for better representation appear to have been

successful. In the by-elections to the DVP board of the province in early 1921,
for example, four women (and no men) were elected.

The pressure for better

representation of women, however, was always accompanied by the assurance
that women would only work for the best of the nation or party and not pursue
any particularistic goals. In 1922 Cimbal reported: “The women’s rights aspect
is completely missing from the work of women in the women’s committees. To
stress it would in my opinion be a mistake, even though we, the women, of course
have the duty to help our sisters as much as possible and to limit injustice; yet
the work of women within the party is not meant to advance specific women’s
interests but to contribute to the common good.”

Although the representation of women in the Schleswig-Holstein DVP appears

to have been good in comparison to that in other areas, occasional complaints
surfaced regarding the tendency of men to elect women to unimportant commit-
tees. Lisbeth Haas, an expert on communal politics, criticized the fact that in one
town assembly a woman had been elected to a bath committee, even though no
baths existed, and that men before important meetings often informed women
poorly.

In the fall of 1922, Cimbal drew pessimistic conclusions about women’s

work in the Schleswig-Holstein DVP, even though she admitted that it had reached
an intensity rivaled by DVP women in few other provinces. She complained that
prejudice against women in politics was still widespread among women and men
– except during election campaigns, where women helped diligently. Cimbal
decried the limits thus placed on women’s political activity because she consid-
ered women as the natural bearers of the idea of a movement – implying that
without their engagement the DVP would become too much of an interest group
and would lose its idealistic aspect. She also argued that a woman without polit-

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ical education could no longer be a true partner to her husband and a responsible
parent, because all aspects of life had become politicized.

The activities of the DVP women in Schleswig-Holstein focused on charity

and the political education of women. Help for poor rentiers was the main focus
of their charitable work,

and they also participated in programs to allow chil-

dren from the occupied areas to spend their vacations in Schleswig-Holstein;
four hundred children had thus been served in 1921.

For their political educa-

tion, DVP women found ways that spoke for the greater open-mindedness of the
DVP in comparison to the DNVP. In Flensburg, women formed a reading circle;
they read newspapers from the entire political spectrum and then discussed the
different viewpoints of all parties. In Altona, members of the women’s committee
attended rallies of other parties and discussed their insights.

Altogether,

Schleswig-Holstein saw successful activity by women in the DVP, in spite of the
deficits mentioned above. The intensity of women’s work in the Schleswig-
Holstein DVP was unique, at least in comparison to other provinces. Only in
Berlin did women’s activities assume a similar dynamic, but Berlin was a much
smaller and more concentrated political area than Schleswig-Holstein.

The

strong female representation in the party offices of the Schleswig-Holstein DVP
also reflected on the engagement of a dedicated group of women. These women
were in touch with all the topics of concern to the national DVP women leaders,
particularly the fate of Germans in occupied and lost territories and issues
regarding motherhood and marriage, on which the DVP’s legal expert Anna
Mayer gave frequent talks and seminars in Schleswig-Holstein. The DVP
newsletter for the province gave much room to women’s issues and reprinted
articles from the women’s section of the DVP-Nachrichtenblatt. Unfortunately
the newsletter, like so many others, faltered during the inflation, and activities of
women in the province are thus hard to follow after 1923.

In East Prussia, the DVP women’s work was encouraged by two nationally

known women: Margarethe Poehlmann, member of the Prussian Landtag from
1919 to her death in December 1923, and Milka Fritsch, member of the
Reichstag from March 1923 to May 1924. Like Deutsch and von Groeben for the
DNVP, Poehlmann and Fritsch made lecture tours through the province to
encourage the buildup of women’s committees. Women from the DVP, like the
local DNVP women, were also active in building up the party’s youth groups.
But their work was less political than that in Schleswig-Holstein and more
focused on social events and charity. In a report of its activities, the Königsberg
women’s committee in 1920 praised its own efforts to mobilize women, but all
activities it mentioned had to do with social events and charity; women had, for
example, produced clothes for the children of poor families.

Characteristic was

a report summarizing one of many “tea evenings” of the Königsberg committee:
after a heartfelt welcome speech by the chairwoman of the women’s committee,

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a patriotic play, titled “Disarmed Germania,” was performed. The play’s message
concerned the value of work for the nation. To state the point more clearly and
to represent the Volksgemeinschaft of work, people in various professional
clothes surrounded the stage during the performance. A piano recital of works by
Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann followed, children with flowers danced, and
then the guests were invited to the rich buffet grouped around a show of the chil-
dren’s clothes made by the women’s committee. The commentary in the local
DVP newsletter said: “With this event the women’s group has shown once again
that art, work, and social enjoyment can go hand in hand with politics.”

Similar events are reported from smaller towns. But despite the generous

efforts of Poehlmann and Fritsch the women’s work of the DVP got a slow start
in comparison to that in Schleswig-Holstein and the DNVP’s efforts in East
Prussia. Only in late 1920 did a DVP women’s committee for East Prussia
formally constitute itself. At this time only fifteen local women’s committees
existed in the entire province.

More activity was reported from Westphalia in

1920: In the district of Hameln the women had divided themselves among the ten
electoral subdistricts (ten women for each) and distributed ballots and propa-
ganda leaflets according to a general plan. Women, moreover, had done secre-
tarial work in the DVP’s campaign office and carried out much propaganda work
for the party. The DVP advertised the Westphalian women’s committee as a
model for women’s engagement in the party.

In Hamburg, another active

women’s committee existed that put much emphasis on social events in addition
to the monthly political meetings. Dr. Olga Herschel, member of the local
women’s committee, stressed that women had to get used to being in a party, and
she hoped that social events would give the “party Moloch” a gentle and human
face. Women from the committee visited plays together or organized a Christmas
party for children. Herschel suggested: “Should it not be the most noble duty of
the woman to insert the female aspect of joy into the busy treadmill of party
life?”

The Berlin women’s organization of the DVP, like its counterpart in the

DNVP, developed an unusually intense activity. An inquiry of 1930 showed that
nowhere else at the time was the ratio of DVP women’s committees to local
party groups as high as in Berlin.

The DVP women were engaged in an above-

party organization focusing on women’s issues, the Political Cooperative of the
Women of Greater Berlin (Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Frauen von Groß-
Berlin). The DVP women’s committees of the three electoral districts of Greater
Berlin (including Potsdam and many suburbs) also cooperated intensely.

1919 they merged many of their functions under the leadership of Dr. Ilse
Szagunn, a physician from Berlin-Charlottenburg.

The relatively small size of

these three densely populated districts and the good public transportation
system made such cooperation feasible. Not only did they lower costs by partly

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merging their functions, the three Greater Berlin women’s committees also made
widely praised attempts to finance their activities through auctions of self-
produced art and Christmas decorations.

Drawing on the presence of the

party’s most distinguished women (members of the Reichstag and the Prussian
Landtag), the Greater Berlin women organized workshops on the full range of
issues relevant to the national women leaders.

They also did social and chari-

table work by holding office hours for people in economic difficulties, offering
free lunches to rentiers, listing open jobs, and sending city children to the coun-
tryside for vacations. They seem to have given the social side of their activity a
little less emphasis than their local counterparts from the DNVP, but they often
undertook instructive excursions informed by maternalist concerns, such as a trip
to the milk distribution center in Berlin-Weissensee.

In 1924 they started their

most famous initiative, the Mother’s Aid Wandering Basket (Mütterhilfe
Wanderkorb), which amounted to the lending out of baskets with items necessary
for the raising of small children. Mothers with newborns could borrow without
charge a package containing everything from baby bottle to stroller. The initia-
tive quickly became so famous that the DVP opened an exhibition on it. The DVP
women set up lotteries for its benefit, and the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb was
quickly expanded.

Patriotic festivities also figured among the activities of the

DVP women in Greater Berlin: they organized their share of memorial events for
Queen Luise, Auguste Viktoria, and Bismarck. In 1925, they rented the Prussian
State Opera House for a celebration of a millennium of Rhineland history that
featured “living pictures,” recitals, and music – in short, all the nationalist kitsch
typical for provincial DNVP events.

The engagement for women’s rights

played a subordinate role in the women’s committees of Greater Berlin. Although
Szagunn, in the name of the three Greater Berlin women’s committees,
demanded at the first national party conference in 1919 that women’s rights in
the social sphere be widened, she immediately stressed that these rights were
only meant to allow women to take over more duties.

Later, she pointed out that

the Greater Berlin women wanted to complement men’s activities in the party but
stressed that the women’s work was by no means directed against the men.
Instead, she envisioned organic cooperation; in some places the activity of the
women’s committees had been so successful already that she claimed there was
no need any more for separate women’s committees.

The social composition of women active in Greater Berlin’s DVP is harder to

establish than for the DNVP. But as in the DNVP, housewives and professional
women (teachers, nurses, shop assistants) figured strongly among the local-
election candidates of the DVP.

Berlin’s DVP women did have a comparatively

good representation in assemblies and on party boards, but there was a steep
decline after 1929. They occasionally complained about insufficient representa-
tion, but they also criticized the disinterest of local women in city politics –

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although more women than men seem to have voted for the DVP in Berlin as well
as in the nation at large.

Regardless of the more spectacular initiatives, such as

the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb, much of women’s local activity happened incon-
spicuously. Anni Klingspor, for example, chair of the Berlin WkFA and second
vice chair of the DVP in Berlin, was not much noted until she died in 1926 and
received her obituary in the local party newsletter. Klingspor, so it said, had
displayed the best womanly qualities and worked quietly and self-sacrificingly
for the party and the poor.

What do these local studies suggest for the work of DVP and DNVP women

on the state and Reich level? First, the communication between women at the
local level and the national women leaders of both parties was largely dependent
on the personal engagement of prominent women from the center. In Berlin, this
communication was very good, but this was not true for some rural districts,
although nationally known women representatives, such as Mende, Matz, Behm,
and Lehmann, took extensive lecture tours even outside their election districts
and beyond election time. In the DNVP, every regional and local group was
required to subscribe to the newsletter of the RFA, but in February 1932 a DNVP
circular complained that some women’s committees had still not complied.

is noteworthy that the local activities of women did not always take place in
connection with the district or local women’s committees. Although many
women’s committees at least at the district level existed in most places examined,
women were sometimes very active even without a local women’s committee.
The efforts of both RFAs to train women politically, however, depended on a
strong women’s structure or the frequent presence of leading party women. The
reading circles of the DVP women in Schleswig-Holstein, the intellectually chal-
lenging lectures of both parties in Berlin, and the speakers’ courses of the DNVP
in East Prussia were impressive achievements, but other local women’s groups
seem to have done very little for the political education of women. The RFAs of
both parties often complained about a lack of trained speakers – particularly in
the early and late years of the Weimar Republic.

Regarding the contents of women’s local activity, it becomes clear that women

were instrumental in fostering an intense club culture (Vereinskultur) with a
variety of social events. In urban areas, this club culture appears to have been
more gender-segregated than in rural regions, where the party was often a family
affair. In general, women on the local level cooperated more intensely with the
men of the party than did the national women’s leadership of the parties. The
women in the DVP’s provincial organizations strongly encouraged male partici-
pation in women’s committees, and women from both parties were just as eager
to organize festivities for women alone as for mixed party groups. A telling
example of inconsistent separation was a DNVP women’s committee meeting in
a little Westphalian town: the women invited a male speaker for a lecture but took

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 150

out their embroidery and discussed their work for the party after the speaker had
left.

Whether the specific women’s events were more frugal than the men’s

events, as Nancy Reagin has observed in prewar Hanover, cannot be substanti-
ated, except if one wants to read much (too much?) into the names of meeting
places of a Berlin DVP district group: whereas the men met at the hotel
Jägerheim (Hunter’s Lodge) for their Stammtisch, the women’s committee held
its meetings in the café Rotkäppchen (Red Riding Hood).

Social welfare and

charity work were important in every case study – often in connection with the
women’s work for the party’s club culture. This probably came out of the tradi-
tional social engagement of women, which the First World War had powerfully
reaffirmed, and it mirrored the activities of the leading women in the two parties
in the Reichstag and the state parliaments. It also harkened back to the wide-
spread idea among bourgeois women that their new political rights implied a
social duty.

Almost all local women’s activities reflected the notion of different gender

roles. Women took over primarily supportive or maternal roles, be it through
cooking and baking or through initiatives such as the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb.
True to their maternalist vision of their own political role, these women
conceived of the party as a home and family in which they would play the role
of the housewife and mother in a broad sense. Contrary to the teachings of
Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, the notion of different gender roles was not
connected to equal rights demands, which played a subordinate role almost
everywhere. There can be no question that the leading women from both parties
felt next to no grass-roots pressure to pursue women’s rights issues, except
maybe in relation to the specific interests of some professional women in urban
centers. Many rural areas even restrained the leading women’s temptation to
consider women’s rights more directly, as the attitudes of the DNVP women from
East Prussia demonstrate. When a DVP guideline for women speakers warned
that women’s rights issues should be avoided in front of rural audiences, it
reflected a similar state of affairs in the DVP, whose women were more
“tempted” than DNVP women to raise such issues.

Notes

1. Nachrichtenblatt des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins Stettin 8, October

1932.

2. Boak, “Women in Weimar Politics,” pp. 374–5 and 389.
3. “Zum 27. Januar,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei des

Kreisvereins Lauban 2, no. 2, February 1922.

4. “Aus dem Vereinsleben,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei

des Kreisvereins Lauban 2, no. 10, December 1922.

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5. “Aus unseren Ortsgruppen,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei

des Kreisvereins Lauban 3, nos. 4–5, April–May 1923.

6. “Aus unseren Ortsgruppen,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei

des Kreisvereins Lauban 1, no. 3, August 1921.

7. “Etwas von Frau von Prince,” Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen

Volkspartei des Kreisvereins Lauban 2, no. 2, February 1922.

8. Ortsgruppe Lauban, Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei des

Kreisvereins Lauban vol. 2, no. 8, October 1922, p. 39.

9. See Paula Mueller-Otfried, “Die Aufgaben der deutschen Frau,”

Nachrichten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei des Kreisvereins Lauban,
vol. 3, nos. 4–5, April–May 1923.

10. “Politische Lehrgänge für Frauen,” Monatsmitteilungen für die

Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei
Kreisverein Soldin 2, no. 8, 31 August 1920.

11. “Vortrag Margarethe Behm,” in: Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauens-

männer und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein
Soldin 4, no. 3, 31 March 1922, and “Margarethe Behm. Deutschnationale
Frauenversammlung am 1. November 1922,” Monatsmitteilungen für die
Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei
Kreisverein Soldin 4, no. 10, 1 November 1922.

12. “Los von Versailles! Deutsche Schwestern!” Monatsmitteilungen für die

Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei
Kreisverein Soldin 6, no. 6, 6 July 1924, and “Landesparteitag der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Cüstrin-Neustadt am 18. und 19. Oktober
1924,” Monatsmitteilungen für die Vertrauensmänner und Mitglieder der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Kreisverein Soldin 6, no. 10, 31 October
1924.

13. Alfred Schacht, “Zehn Jahre Kreisverein,” Deutschnationale Blätter

(Kreisverein Stolp) 9, no. 2, April–May 1929.

14. “Bekanntmachungen,” Nachrichtenblatt des Deutschnationalen Volks-

vereins Stettin 1, no. 14, 16 October 1925. See also vol. 7, December 1931.

15. Der Parteifreund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen Volkspartei,

Landesverband Ostpreußen, 1, no. 13, 17 August 1920.

16. See for example Der Parteifreund. Amtliches Blatt der deutschnationalen

Volkspartei, Landesverband Ostpreußen 1, no. 13, 17 August 1920.

17. Lilli Karge, “Landaufenthalt unserer Kinder,” Der Parteifreund, nos. 32–3,

23 December 1920, and “Gründung der Frauengruppe der Dnat. Vp. in
Königsberg,” Der Parteifreund 2, no. 7, 17 February 1921. See also Der
Parteifreund 2, no. 30, 28 July 1921, which also mentions the food collec-
tions for Upper Silesia.

18. Der Parteifreund 2, no. 26, 30 June 1921.

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19. Der Parteifreund 3, nos. 11–12, 25 March 1922.
20. Der Parteifreund 2, nos. 45–6, 20 November 1921, and vol. 3, no. 4, 28

January 1922.

21. “Erziehungsfragen” (three parts), Der Parteifreund 1, nos. 27–9, 11, 18, and

25 November 1920, “Über weibliche Laien- und Berufsrichter,” Der
Parteifreund 2, no. 25, 23 June 1921, and “Deutsches Recht und deutsche
Frauen,” Der Parteifreund 2, nos. 40–1, 16 October 1921.

22. Clotilde von der Groeben, “Frauenvertretung in den Parlamenten,” Der

Parteifreund 2, no. 11, 17 March 1921.

23. Der Parteifreund 2, no. 10, 10 March 1921.
24. “Kaiserin-Geburtstagsfeier in Cranz,” Der Parteifreund 1, no. 26, 4

November 1920.

25. Nachrichten aus dem Landesverband Westfalen-Ost der DNVP 2, no. 5, 1

May 1923.

26. Anni Kalähne, “Lebenserinnerungen,” in Staatsarchiv Bremen, Nachlass

Dietrich Schäfer, vol. 7.21 (not paginated). See also Anni Kalähne, “LFA
Danzig,” Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 9, 1 August 1931.

27. I thank my research assistant Kerry West, who in October 1998 tabulated the

numbers from the 1919 and 1920 issues of the local paper Mitteilungen des
Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest”.

28. See Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest”

17, no. 8, 1 June 1921.

29. “Aus dem Vereinsleben,” Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins

“Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no. 6, June 1919.

30. Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no.

7, July 1919.

31. “Unsere Helferinnen,” Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins

“Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no. 12, December 1919.

32. Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest” 15, no.

12, December 1919, and vol. 16, no. 5, April 1920.

33. A good source, besides the already quoted references, is the newsletter

Deutschnationaler Volksfreund. (Das amtliche Nachrichtenblatt des
Landesverbandes Berlin der DNVP und seiner Kreise), published in
1922–23.

34. Deutschnationaler Volksfreund 4, no. 9, 1 May 1922.
35. Deutschnationaler Volksfreund 5, no. 28, 2 December 1923, and no. 29, 12

December 1923.

36. See Deutschnationaler Volksfreund 5, no. 16, 15/20 August 1923, and no.

25, 11 November 1923.

37. See Mitteilungen des Deutschnationalen Volksvereins “Berlin-Nordwest”

16, no. 9, 15 June 1920, and vol. 17, no. 3, 1 February 1921.

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38. Asta Rötger, “Zur Kommunalpolitik,” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no. 40, 3

October 1929; “Eine deutsche und evangelische Frau,” Frauen-
korrespondenz 14, no. 15, November 1932. See also Nancy Reagin, A
German Women’s Movement (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 6–7, on similar feelings expressed by conserva-
tive women in Hanover before 1914.

39. Annagrete Lehmann, “Aus der Arbeit unserer Landesfrauenausschüsse,”

Die Deutschnationale Frau 13, no. 8, 15 July 1931.

40. Jane Voigt, “Frauenarbeit in der Nordmark,” and Margarethe Karding,

“Versammlungen der Ortsgruppen,” both in Mitteilungen Deutsche
Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 1, no. 14, 16 September 1919.

41. See for example the report on the party conference of the province, in Mitteil-

ungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 2, no. 18, 6 October 1920.

42. “Frauentagung der Deutschen Volkspartei in Neumünster,” Mitteilungen

Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 4, 12 February 1921.

43. Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 8, 28 April

1921.

44. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Frauenausschüsse und ihre Arbeitsgebiete,” Schleswig-

Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 2, 29 January 1922.

45. Lisbeth Haas, “Die Frau in der Kommunalpolitik,” Schleswig-Holsteinische

Stimmen 4, no. 13, 12 July 1922.

46. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Warum soll die Frau Politik treiben?” Schleswig-

Holsteinische Stimmen 4, nos. 17/18, 21 October 1922.

47. Jane Voigt, “Zur Rentnerfürsorge,” Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei

Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 8, 28 April 1921, and Voigt, “Rentnerhilfe,”
Schleswig-Holsteinische Stimmen 4, no. 19/20, 4 November 1922.

48. “Sitzung des Wahlkreisfrauenausschusses in Itzehoe am 9. Oktober 1921,”

Mitteilungen Deutsche Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 21, 7
November 1921.

49. Cimbal, “Frauenausschüsse und ihre Arbeitsgebiete.”
50. “Aus dem Geschäftsbericht der Gesamtpartei,” Mitteilungen Deutsche

Volkspartei Schleswig-Holstein 3, no. 24, 23 December 1921.

51. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 4, 1 October

1920.

52. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 7, 15 November

1920 (emphasis in the original).

53. “Gründung des Wahlkreisfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei

Ostpreußens,” Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 9,
15 December 1920.

54. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volkspartei Ostpreußen 2, no. 1, 15 August

1920.

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55. Olga Herschel, “Eine Aufgabe für Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-

Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 47, 25 November 1920.

56. Berliner Stimmen 7, no. 15, 13 April 1930.
57. See Chapter 3 in this volume.
58. “Aus den Frauenausschüssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 3, 15 January

1920.

59. “Finanzfragen der Frauenausschüsse,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 2, 19

January 1923.

60. “Aus den Frauenausschüssen,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 8, 19 February

1920.

61. Berliner Stimmen 3, no. 9, 1 June 1926.
62. “Frauenausschüsse der D.V.P.,” NLC 51, no. 93, 11 June 1924, Berliner

Stimmen 1, no. 4, 27 April 1924, and NLC 58, no. 15, 12 April 1931.

63. Berliner Stimmen 2, nos. 21 and 24, 23 May 1925 and 27 June 1925.
64. Bericht über den Ersten Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 13. April

1919, pp. 47 and 66.

65. Ilse Szagunn, “Über die Arbeit der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der

Frauenausschüsse Groß-Berlin,” DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 4, no. 23, 9
November 1923.

66. Berliner Stimmen 2, nos. 27 and 29, 1 October and 10 November 1925, and

vol. 5, no. 7, mid-April 1928.

67. Ida Klockow, “An die Frauen,” Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 45, and “Das neue

Deutschland und die berufstätige Frau,” Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 44, 10
November 1929, with complaints about the poor representation of women.
See also Berliner Stimmen 5, no. 12, Early July 1928, with the assertion that
52.5 percent of the DVP vote in Berlin came from women.

68. Berliner Stimmen 3, no. 7, 1 July 1926.
69. Rundschreiben des RFA, no. 2, 15 February 1932, in NStA Osnabrück,

DNVP, vol. 83.

70. Rundschreiben des RFA, no. 13, 24 November 1932, in NStA Osnabrück,

DNVP, vol. 83.

71. “Aus dem Landesverband,” Nachrichten aus dem Landesverband Westfalen-

Ost der DNVP 2, no. 3, 1 March 1923.

72. Berliner Stimmen 6, no. 39, 28 September 1929. See Reagin, A German

Women’s Movement, p. 42.

73. Elisabeth Cimbal, “Vorschläge zu einem ländlichen Organisationsplan,”

DVP-Nachrichtenblatt 2, no. 46, 18 November 1920.

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 156

–9–

The Nazi Challenge

“… sounds like an old fairy tale.”

A DVP woman commenting on the

Nazi image of women (1932)

Works by Ian Kershaw on public opinion and by Robert Gellately on consent and
coercion in Nazi Germany stress the amazing speed with which the Nazis won
broad approval after taking power in early 1933. To be sure, the Nazis did unleash
a wave of terror directed mostly at the Communists, but the importance of enthu-
siastic approval for the new government much beyond the previous constituency
of the NSDAP cannot be denied.

Only six months after the end of the conflict-

ridden and extremely polarized Weimar Republic, the Hitler government had
destroyed all other parties besides the NSDAP and taken control over a vast array
of non-Nazi organizations – in most cases without encountering any resistance.
This rapid success would be hard to explain without considering the profound
disaffection with the Weimar Republic shared by the widest circles of the
German public. In the context of catastrophic unemployment and growing
misery, the idea and pratice of government based on a democratically elected
parliament had been thoroughly discredited by 1930. The subsequent haphazard
attempts to form a presidential regime – relying on a field marshal who turned
eighty-five in 1932 and had retired for the first time in 1911! – did not fare much
better. How did the women of the DVP and DNVP react to the agonizing crisis
of the early 1930s, and how did they relate, and perhaps contribute, to the condi-
tions that allowed the Nazis such a smooth success after January 1933?

To answer these questions, it is important to consider that the parameters for

women’s politics in the DVP and DNVP changed profoundly after 1930. Until
then, much of the women’s political activity had happened in parliaments and
parliamentary committees, where right-wing women cooperated constructively
with women and men from the middle parties. This work was difficult to carry
on after 1930 as parliamentary rule was breaking down and Chancellor Heinrich
Brüning increasingly resorted to government by presidential decree. For the
women involved in the DVP, the very weakness of their party after the Reichstag
elections of September 1930 precluded effective parliamentary work. Only Elsa

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 157

Matz remained in the Reichstag, and, prolific as she was, she could not cover the
broad range of issues debated by women from her party in earlier years, partic-
ularly after the DVP exchanged participation in government for a powerless and
pathetic opposition in the fall of 1931. At the same time, Hugenberg shifted the
DNVP’s parliamentary politics from critical cooperation toward fundamental
opposition and propaganda, witnessed most spectacularly when the DNVP
together with the Nazis walked out of the Reichstag in February 1931.

Although

a few notable women associated with the DNVP workers’ movement left the
party in response to Hugenberg’s course, the majority of activist DNVP women
frequently applauded him and his strictly anti-democratic course.

After the July

1932 Reichstag elections, in any case, orderly parliamentary procedures became
nearly impossible because the Nazis and Communists now shared more than half
the seats and debates easily escalated into fist fights.

The last pre-Nazi govern-

ments tried to convene the Reichstag as rarely as possible because they sought
ways to establish a presidential regime independent of parliamentary majorities.
None of the DVP and DNVP women elected to the Reichstag from July 1932 on
ever spoke a single public word in it. The chaos and paralysis typical for the
Reichstag was duplicated in almost every state diet that held elections in the
early 1930s. The SPD-led Prussian government, which had stayed in office
because no other government could be formed after the Landtag elections of
April 1932, was illegally dismissed by Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen in July
and replaced by an authoritarian caretaker government. Meanwhile, mass unem-
ployment and political violence led to a breakdown of the social order limiting
the opportunities for regular campaigning by all parties between the Communists
and Nazis. Meetings were interrupted by armed units of hecklers, violence
against political opponents was the rule, and the feverish pace of election
campaigns particularly in 1932 – with two Reichstag elections, two rounds of
presidential elections, and the Prussian Landtag election – drained the energies
of the more moderate parties and spread a sense of resignation among many
politicians from the SPD to the DVP and DNVP.

With unemployment reaching catastrophic proportions, the position of profes-

sional women and of leading women in the bourgeois parties came under
increasing threat. Women were pushed to leave the job market and to make room
for men. The pressure was strongest on married women (the so-called “double
earners”) because of the widespread but erroneous notion that most married
women neglected their motherly “duties” only to supplement an already suffi-
cient income from their husbands. Meanwhile, women from the DVP and DNVP
watched with a mixture of anxiety and fascination the meteoric rise of the
NSDAP, which cut deeply into their own voter pool. After some successes in
local and state elections in 1929 and 1930, the NSDAP gained over 18 percent
of the national vote in September 1930 (more than six times as much as 1928),

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and it doubled that share in July 1932, becoming the largest party in the
Reichstag. Its losses in the Reichstag election of November 1932 were too small
to allow a revival of regular legislative proceedings. The growth of the Nazi
Party, which continued to exclude women from its parliamentary groups, helped
diminish the number of women in parliaments, while the militarization of poli-
tics by male street fighters did not bode well for women’s voice in politics. As
early as January 1930, political women thus became increasingly disillusioned
with the promise of equality and with their power in politics, and they reacted
with bitterness or resignation. The discussion of a women’s party was revived,
but many politically active women seem to have withdrawn into private life.
Women from the DVP and DNVP tried to defend women’s place in politics, but
the limits imposed on their parliamentary activity tended to encourage ideolog-
ical stands at the expense of pragmatism in their work. As early as January 1930,
Martha Schwarz of the DVP drew a pessimistic picture. In over ten years, she
said, women had had little impact on political life, and many had become critical
of democracy and the established parties. She stressed that women in parliaments
were measured against unusually hard standards; this was particularly unfair
given that there were so few of them, and parliamentary women thus had to cover
so many fields that it was easy to find them making mistakes. Although Schwarz
attested to women’s strong belief in (supposedly male) leadership, of which she
herself approved, she believed that the impact of women was necessary for the
survival of democracy. Appealing to the cultural mission of the German women’s
movement, Schwarz claimed that only women could overcome the corrupt
aspects of democracy.

Later in the year, the poor positioning of women on the

DVP’s ballots for the Reichstag elections of 14 September provoked bitter
critique from the RFA, which claimed that under these circumstances the DVP
would lose the votes of many women. The document attested to male party
members’ ” complete lack of psychological understanding for the work and
mentality of women.” The Central Board (Zentralvorstand) of the DVP acknowl-
edged the complaint but decided not to change the ballots.

In the DNVP, the

continued poor consideration of female candidates at all levels of political life
also drew criticism. The Frauenkorrespondenz pointed out, for example, that the
bourgeois party groups in the Saxon Landtag included not one woman after the
elections of June 1930.

In 1931 Annagrete Lehmann criticized that many

regional sections of the DNVP seemed to believe that they could dispense with
the work of women. She pointed out that the party was most successful in places
where cooperation between women and men worked best.

The stunning success

of the NSDAP in spite of its professed hostility to women’s rights, however,
undercut the claims of leading right-wing women for better representation. At a
BDF leadership meeting in October 1930, Emma Ender warned: “After a party
that blatantly ignores the existing political rights of female voters [the NSDAP]

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 159

has nonetheless made such big gains, we have to expect that in all parties the
already weakened position of women will become even weaker as a consequence
of this experience.”

The defense of women’s rights against the Nazis therefore was a central theme

of right-wing women toward the end of the Weimar Republic. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler had proposed to limit civil rights to married women. Party ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg, in his book Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, had defended
male polygamy and encouraged Germans to welcome illegitimate children as
long as they were of Aryan stock.

Although the NSDAP tried to downplay its

own anti-feminism in the final Weimar years, bourgeois women were concerned
that the Nazis would try to consign women to reproduction, mothering, and
housework. The NSDAP’s affinities with neo-paganism and Germanic cults,
moreover, made many bourgeois women worry about the integrity of the
churches after a Nazi takeover. Here, too, the NSDAP tried to allay the worst
fears at the time of its greatest electoral successes, but Nazi support for the
German Christian movement (Glaubensgemeinschaft Deutsche Christen), a
group within the Evangelical Church that promoted a “Germanic Christianity”
and embraced much of the Nazis’ völkisch ideology, indicated that the NSDAP
aimed to win control over Germany’s largest Church.

Those women in the DVP

and DNVP who were affiliated with the Evangelical Church thus were particu-
larly apprehensive about the Nazi successes.

In the DVP, party solidarity prevented the leading women from attacking the

cautious rapprochement with the NSDAP engineered by chairman Eduard
Dingeldey in response to pressure from the DVP’s right wing.

The women,

however, made no secret of their opposition to the world view and the political
methods of the Nazis. They criticized the Nazis in the women’s section
(Frauenrundschau) of the Nationalliberale Correspondenz and published a
pamphlet that attacked the Nazis’ program and politics in a fictional dialogue
between DVP supporter Frau Wächter (meaning Mrs. Guardian) and Nazi
supporter “Frau Hilter [sic].”

They targeted in particular the Nazi view of

women. The “Frauenrundschau” frequently quoted or paraphrased the anti-femi-
nist statements of Nazi politicians and scoffed at them. Shortly before the
Reichstag elections of July 1932, it reported the claim of a Nazi leader that the
ballot offended the dignity of women because it prevented them from relying on
the chivalry of men. The commentary said: “We can only heartily wish that the
Nazi women will draw the conclusions from this statement and abstain from
voting during the next elections. By doing so, they will render a great service to
themselves and to the fatherland.”

With sharp criticism, DVP women demol-

ished the Nazi phrases about the sanctity of motherhood: “What stands behind
these words is nothing but a denigration of the woman and her personality, and
amounts to her exclusive subjection under her biological task.”

Referring to

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Hitler’s claim that women were too good for the crudity and baseness of politics,
Elisabeth Lürßen pointed out that the NSDAP itself had done much to push
German politics to such low levels.

As late as spring 1933, DVP women

defended the achievements of the German women’s movement, particularly the
right of women to the professions and to political activity. In comparison, the
Nazi image of women, according to an article in the Nationalliberale
Correspondenz, appeared to come from an “old fairy tale.”

In the Prussian

Landtag, Anny von Kulesza denounced the Nazis’ praise of biological mother-
hood by appealing to the idea of spiritual motherhood: “broadened spiritual
motherhood is the source of strong, precious, life-shaping, and socially effective
forces.” Her statement drew applause even from the DNVP.

The methods and the character of the Nazi movement were another target of

the DVP women. Much as they praised authority and powerful leadership, they
stressed that subordination under a leader had to happen freely and in full aware-
ness of one’s own responsibility. They usually referred to subordination under a
respected and proven leader such as Stresemann or Hindenburg. By contrast,
they saw the NSDAP as a party that demanded blind submission to Hitler and
lured the masses with materialistic promises. The Nazis, according to DVP
women, thus obliterated individual responsibility, a fundamental value of
German culture and the Protestant ethic.

This critique applied also to the style

of the Nazis, mostly to their violence and cynicism. One event, in particular,
provoked the wrath of DVP women: in 1931 a Nazi youth leader advised high
school students to react to unpopular authority figures with a contemptuous
smile that they could then deny when confronted. DVP women attacked this
advice as a summons to falsehood and cowardice and as an attempt to undermine
the authority of teachers.

Based on their Christian world view, leading DVP

women juxtaposed the responsibility of the individual toward God with the mass
hysteria unleashed by the Nazis and criticized Nazi support for the German
Christian movement.

In a speech in front of the Prussian Landtag, Anny von

Kulesza defined National Socialism as a “Christian form of religious paganism”
and pointed out that the Evangelical German Christian movement received its
political instructions from the Nazi Gregor Strasser, a Catholic.

Although the Volksgemeinschaft idea stressed by the Nazis appealed to DVP

women, they criticized that the Nazis had emptied the concept of its idealistic
and conciliatory content by using it as an appeal to primitive mass instincts;
instead of promoting peaceful cooperation among the classes, the Nazis were
accused of awakening spurious hopes in the lower classes and thus exploiting
class differences for their electoral advantage. Articles by DVP women sought to
demonstrate, in particular, that the Nazi vision of Volksgemeinschaft discrimi-
nated against women by demanding their return to the home – another case
where Nazi rhetoric masked a materialistic goal with idealistic rhetoric. DVP

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women also argued that the Nazis’ economic program contained socialist
elements. This was tantamount to another charge of materialism because bour-
geois politicians saw socialism as a purely materialistic philosophy and thus
opposed to the idealistic Volksgemeinschaft. The upshot was that the NSDAP
was a “typical party” regardless of its lofty Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric.

DVP women, moreover, did not share the racist foundation on which the Nazi

concept of Volksgemeinschaft rested. In the DVP, the Volksgemeinschaft
continued to be defined as a harmonious community of production involving all
professional groups. DVP women denied that Germany could be saved through
the solution of an imagined race problem and claimed that the Nazis’ anti-
Semitism was motivated by materialistic concerns, too.

Although DVP women

had participated in the racist “Black Horror” campaign, only very few of them
expressed a racist definition of the Volksgemeinschaft. This was mostly true for
Else Frobenius, the DVP’s leading expert on Germans residing outside of the
Reich, who often stressed the racial ties between Germans around the world.

Elsa Matz occasionally used völkisch language and alluded to völkisch themes,
but nothing in the context indicates that she meant this in a racist way. If she did,
she never bothered to spell it out.

Yet, whereas the sharpness of DVP women’s

critique of Nazi anti-feminism left nothing to be desired, their critique of Nazi
anti-Semitism was rather muted. To be sure, the Nazis did tone down their anti-
Semitism in the early 1930s and focused their propaganda on more immediate
concerns such as the overcoming of the depression, but Nazi anti-Semitism could
not be ignored given that the terror of the paramilitary Nazi SA was frequently
directed at Jews even before Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship.

Occasionally, the DVP women were also implicated in anti-Semitic acts
promoted by their party. In October 1932, for example, the DVP organized a
campaign rally in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall featuring speeches by Matz and
leading men of the party. Signs were posted at the doors saying that Communists,
Nazis, and Jews could not be admitted.

Whenever their party leadership attempted to pave the way for a rapproche-

ment with the Nazis, the leading DVP women reacted with uneasiness. Party
loyalty induced them to justify these moves, but their declarations poorly masked
their concerns. When the DVP joined forces with the Nazis by supporting the
Stahlhelm referendum for an early dissolution of the Prussian Landtag in 1931,
Martha Schwarz, the general secretary of the DVP and editor of the
“Frauenrundschau” section of the NLC, defended this step by pointing to the
alleged corruption of the Prussian government. But Schwarz employed a rhetor-
ical device that revealed her disagreement: she framed her defense of the
Stahlhelm referendum as a series of critical questions each coupled with a
response defending the referendum. Whereas the questions were piercing and
sharp, the responses were weak and artificial. Obviously, no matter how much

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she disliked the left-to-center Prussian government, Schwarz saw little merit in
this referendum, which would have dissolved the Landtag less than a year before
regular elections were due to take place and brought about a paralyzing Nazi
victory in Prussia sooner rather than later.

The passionate support the

“Frauenrundschau” gave to Hindenburg’s reelection campaign a few months later
forms a stark contrast to its muted endorsement of the Stahlhelm referendum.
When the DVP leadership began advocating the NSDAP’s entry into the govern-
ment in late 1931, the “Frauenrundschau” got into a similar quandary as during
the Stahlhelm campaign. Else Broekelschen-Kemper defended this decision on
the surface, but her opposition to the Nazis was unmistakable.

The DVP

women’s rejection of cooperation with the Nazis had already provoked conflicts
with some right-wing women’s organizations and the DNVP women before.
During the referendum against the Young Plan, DVP women found themselves
in opposition to the DNVP and some right-wing women’s leagues that had
connections to both parties. The Bund Königin Luise, a women’s league aligned
with the Stahlhelm, received strong criticism from DVP women for its support
for the referendum against the Young Plan; this led to an exodus of DVP
members from the Bund Königin Luise.

With anger, DVP women also

recorded that the women in the DNVP declared themselves time and again to be
the only nationally-minded women present in parliaments.

Yet, behind the defiant anti-Nazi statements of DVP women lurked self-doubt

and resignation. They recognized that the rise of the Nazis from a splinter party
to a mass movement had been impossible without the support of women.
Initially, DVP women stressed that the NSDAP received the majority of its vote
from men, which was true until July 1932.

But their claims that woman was the

“natural” protector of the political center because she was opposed to violence,
civil war, and revolution sounded increasingly hollow. After all, by September
1930 the Nazis had likely won more women’s votes than the DVP and DNVP
together. Gradually, the DVP women admitted that the party system of the
Weimar Republic had failed. They quickly attributed this to the materialistic poli-
cies of the SPD and the Center Party, but they also criticized themselves for
having failed to educate the German woman to be a responsible citizen and thus
to be more resistent to the Nazis. It appeared as if the suffrage had come as a
surprising and hardly earned breakthrough for which German women were not
yet ready. This argument, of course, held women to a stricter standard than men,
but it was understandable given the hopes of 1918–19 that women’s involvement
would lift politics to a higher moral level. But DVP women also recognized that
the poor economic situation during much of the Weimar Republic had under-
mined the legal gains of women, so that the NSDAP threatened to take away
rights whose benefits women had rarely felt. Sometimes, the critique of DVP
women was even directed at the hostility toward women in the non-Nazi parties.

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Martha Schwarz argued in 1930: “This restraining of women in all parties may
well have contributed to the fact that many women voting for the Nazis could
hardly have been bothered by the hostility of this party toward them.”

The mixture of skepticism and resignation was also typical for the attitude of

DVP women after 30 January 1933. The “Frauenrundschau” balked at the
summary condemnation of the Weimar Republic and the achievements of
Stresemann by the new Nazi-led government, and DVP women criticized the
decision to schedule new elections because they expected it to produce more
upheaval rather than stabilization. But they did not voice any criticism of the
massive wave of terror the Nazis now directed against the political left with the
help of a purged state and police apparatus. Dingeldey, the party leader, did not
want to alienate the new government because he expected a deadlock between
the NSDAP-DNVP coalition and the opposition after the next elections, in which
case the DVP would be able to tip the scales. Elsa Matz even tried to prepare
DVP women for the entry of the DVP into the Nazi-led government. She claimed
that National Socialism (NSDAP) and National Conservatism (DNVP) should be
complemented by the National Liberalism of the DVP.

At the Reichstag elec-

tions of 5 March 1933, however, the NSDAP together with the DNVP won an
absolute majority, and the DVP was reduced to two seats out of 647. There was
nothing left but Dingeldey’s dream that the DVP would one day become the
refuge for disgruntled NSDAP and DNVP voters. In this sense, the DVP activist
Henny Pleimes appealed to her party to preserve the “courage to be in a
minority” and to wait until the DVP would become the rallying point of a “true
Volksgemeinschaft” for people with liberal and national views.

The last edition

of the “Frauenrundschau,” dated 23 March 1933, contained an article by Schwarz
that once again attacked the anti-feminism of the Nazis. Schwarz pointed out that
the Nazis still refused to let women serve in parliaments and that the number of
women in the Reichstag had further declined due to the Nazi gains. But it finally
dawned on her that representation in the Reichstag might soon have no impor-
tance any more. It is characteristic of the resignation of DVP women in this
period that she considered this thought to be a soothing one. Moreover, Schwarz
pointed to a Goebbels speech that seemed to her to indicate that the Nazis would
not be as restrictive toward the professional and political work of women as DVP
women had feared.

At this point, the DVP women’s structure seems to have

broken down already. Whereas Anny von Kulesza supported Dingeldey’s aim to
keep the party alive, Elsa Matz was dismantling the DVP’s Berlin section,
encouraging its members to join forces with the “great national movement” of
the Nazis.

Like the DVP women, the leading women of the DNVP reacted with ambiva-

lence to the rise of the Nazis. But while DVP women were torn between opposi-
tion and resignation, DNVP women shifted between critique of some points and

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emphatic approval of others. Whereas the Nazis’ anti-feminism and their
approach to religion provoked strong resistance from DNVP women, too, they
widely shared the racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis. The irrelevance of
parliamentary politics, the pressure on women’s rights, the radicalization of the
DNVP under Hugenberg, and the competition from the Nazis all helped to make
the leading DNVP women after 1930 highly receptive to the ideas of those
women who had always combined an engagement for women’s rights with viru-
lent racism: the völkisch women’s activists inspired by the late Käthe
Schirmacher. Before 1930, the ideas of the völkisch activists had been powerful
but not dominant in the DNVP, but they became the primary agenda of the
DNVP women in the last years of the Weimar Republic. That many in the
German medical community had meanwhile accepted a connection between
racial hygiene and the notion of Nordic supremacy must have boosted the credi-
bility of these ideas among DNVP women.

The leading DNVP women after

1930 therefore affirmed racial and political goals that were very similar to those
of the Nazis, but they simultaneously staked out a claim for German women to
participate actively in the buildup of a racial state. This is neatly expressed in the
following statement by Ilse Neumann, member of the DNVP group in the
Prussian Landtag, from December 1930: “It is impossible for Germanic women’s
thinking to leave the fight for the new Germany to men, to let them do all the
cleaning up and building up and maybe receive some place in the new Germany
later on.”

The attacks of DNVP women on the anti-feminism of the NSDAP hardly

differed from those of the DVP women. Neumann, for example, repeatedly
argued that the Nazi cult of motherhood, though in itself praiseworthy, could not
be limited to the biological meaning of motherhood. In other words, women with
their maternal sense could be beneficial to society in a variety of social functions
– as advocates of spiritual motherhood had claimed decades earlier.

The tone

of the critique was particularly sharp in 1932, when Nazi provocations against
the DNVP multiplied. DNVP women protested angrily when the Nazis repeat-
edly rejected DNVP women as candidates for committees in town parliaments by
arguing that women should play no role in politics. In some cases, the Nazis thus
made possible the election of a left-wing man instead of a DNVP woman.

The

Nazis’ refusal to allow women into their parliamentary groups often drew the
criticism of DNVP women, but it also allowed them to point out that the DNVP
was the “only” party sending right-wing women into parliaments – the very
claim that so angered DVP women.

Even some of those women who had previ-

ously rejected the “Germanic Christianity” cult of the radical right now resorted
to the claim that the Germanic tribes had allegedly revered women and accorded
them positions of power. Following on this argument, it was possible to deny that
the NSDAP was truly völkisch. Here the racist ideas of DNVP women merged

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with their defense of women’s rights. As late as February 1933 Alexa von
Porembsky, a member of the RFA and the Pan-German League, argued that the
NSDAP had a völkisch image of men but a “foreign” image of women. This
conjured up the danger, according to Porembsky, that the Nazi man would shun
the more self-assertive and bold Nordic woman and choose a more submissive,
but racially inferior, wife. This would spoil the “racial quality” of the German
people.

Along the same lines, Porembsky in 1932 had also defended women’s

right to work by arguing that the economic system of the Weimar Republic was
disadvantageous to women because it was not truly “German” but that this would
change in the future völkisch state.

Given that many women in the DNVP were, like their counterparts in the DVP,

connected to the Evangelical Church, they also worried about the Nazis’ attitude
toward religion and the Churches. Relentlessly, DNVP women tried to convince
the Nazis that the völkisch state had to be built on a religious foundation and that
a nationalist movement without connection to God would become self-absorbed
and arbitrary. Else Meyer, a DNVP activist from Hildesheim near Hanover,
warned that the Nazis would erect a “cultural dictatorship against conscience”
should Christianity cease to be the basis of culture and education in the Nazi
state.

The involvement of the German Christian movement in church elections

was condemned by DNVP women as a politicization of the Evangelical Church
by the Nazis.

Repeatedly, the DNVP women’s press pointed out that racial

thinking and Christianity did not contradict each other and that the former even
received “nobility and value” through the latter. This thesis rested on the claim
that God had wanted racial differences between the peoples and that he had
organized the races in a hierarchy of historical tasks and, implicitly, of values.

Occasionally the DNVP women’s press condemned acts of violence

committed by the Nazis. It was not the Nazi terror in the streets, however, that
triggered these condemnations but rather some brawls in the Reichstag involving
Nazi deputies. The Deutschnationale Frau used these incidents to drive home its
claim that the Nazis sorely needed the leadership and discipline of the DNVP
under Hugenberg. Sometimes the confrontation with the NSDAP led DNVP
women to stress their conservative view of the state. Magdalene von Tiling, in
particular, pointed out that the state rested on divine authority and should not be
abused or changed arbitrarily by interest groups and parties. But this approach,
probably provoked by the Nazis’ quasi-socialist message, harkened back to the
supposed “legitimacy” of the German Empire before 1918 and had nothing to do
with the defense of the Weimar Republic.

The mass hysteria triggered by Nazi

propaganda as well as the Hitler cult also figured as targets of DNVP women’s
critique. Paula Mueller-Otfried was particularly disgusted by the veneration of
Hitler by many German women. But Mueller-Otfried and other DNVP women
always tried to distinguish their own veneration of Hugenberg from the Hitler

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cult, thereby following the same argumentative paths that DVP women used
when justifying their adoration of Stresemann and Hindenburg. Ilse Hamel, for
example, argued that submission under the authority of a leader was absolutely
Germanic (“urgermanisch”) but that it had to be directed toward an experienced
and ingenious leader such as Hugenberg.

She and other DNVP women insinu-

ated that submission under Hugenberg happened in freedom and self-respect,
whereas Hitler seduced the masses and made them devoid of will. DNVP women
thus attacked the Nazis for their electoral successes, implying that these
successes were unethical because they had been won by the seduction of the
masses. Yet, all this confrontation could not erase the feeling of kinship most
DNVP women felt toward the Nazis. DNVP women loved to present their own
party as the experienced political force and the Nazis as the impatient but well-
intended youth at their side. This partnership was symbolized by the mature and
portly Hugenberg next to the young and impetuous Hitler. Based on this image,
DNVP women claimed that the DNVP deserved a leadership role in the national
opposition – or at least equal rights – because the DNVP acted on higher ethical
principles than the Nazis.

Yet in the end, DNVP women above all wanted to

ensure that the racial state to be erected by the Nazis, of which they approved,
would welcome German women’s collaboration in public as well as private
venues.

Despite all their criticisms, the DNVP women in this period never forgot what

united them with the Nazis, namely their racialized vision of the Volks-
gemeinschaft. The racist message of the leading DNVP women permeated their
articles, speeches, and programmatic writings. Die Deutschnationale Frau
poured out a mass of untranslatable völkisch jargon to encourage women to
become the breeders and educators of a racially conscious people.

Elsa von

Lindequist, the newsletter’s editor at this time, demanded for example that the
“Judaization” of German culture finally be stopped and expressed the hope that
all Germans would one day be proud of having a pure race.

A school program

drafted by DNVP school experts – including several women – called for the
dismissal of Jewish and atheistic teachers and demanded that racial education be
given a central place in the school curriculum.

Alexa von Porembsky and Dr.

Irmgard Wrede, both members of the RFA and the Pan-German League, organ-
ized conferences on racial hygiene and presented its concepts in many articles for
Die Deutschnationale Frau. The racial hygienicists whose theories were thereby
promoted, foremost among them Hans K.F. Günther, divided the German people
into a hierarchy of six types, ranging from the most appreciated “Nordic” race to
the members of the “eastern-Baltic race”, who were depicted with contempt. As
non-Germanic people, the French, the Slavs, and the Jews were considered even
lower in value. The basic axioms of these teachings, which received an eminent
place in the school curriculum of the Third Reich, stated that the mixture of races

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spoiled racial quality and that the higher racial types should be encouraged to
procreate more than the others. DNVP women therefore recommended to their
readers and listeners that women should “marry up” the quality scale.

They

failed to explain, however, how certain people could “marry up” without
members of the higher racial types “marrying down” and thus spoiling the race.
A particularly elaborate proposal came from the pen of the DNVP physician Dr.
Annemarie Burgund a few weeks before Hitler became chancellor. Burgund
demanded that “racially inferior” persons be placed in asylums and that two cate-
gories of citizenship be introduced: a privileged one for “people’s citizens”
(Volksbürger) of pure Aryan stock, and a lower one for “state citizens”
(Staatsbürger) of lesser value or of alien racial background. Burgund also took
up the proposal of Pan-German leader General Leopold von Vietinghoff-Scheel
to build up a network of so-called “race guardians.” These state-appointed offi-
cials would monitor the racial composition of the population and advise the
Aryan population in their choice of a marriage partner. Burgund obviously
expected that the office of the race guardian would open an excellent job oppor-
tunity for women squeezed out of jobs during the depression.

The culmination

of the DNVP women’s embrace of racial hygienic thought was a programmatic
document of February 1933 that defined the German woman above all as the
guardian of the race.

The crescendo of racist statements by DNVP women encountered almost no

opposition in the party. Only Else Meyer, a DNVP activist with connections to
the Evangelical Church, voiced critical remarks after reading the NSDAP’s
cultural program in July 1932: “Such a disputed issue as the race question
requires the most careful clarification before it is made into an instrument of
mass education. Otherwise, it becomes mere phraseology.”

It is obvious that

those women who had the closest ties to the Evangelical Church, such as Paula
Mueller-Otfried and Magdalene von Tiling, remained ambivalent about racial
hygienic ideas, probably because the women promoting them often referred to
theories of “Germanic Christianity”, according to which Jesus was an Aryan
whose ideas had been distorted by Jews and other non-Germanic peoples.

The

leadership of the Evangelical Church officially rejected these theories in spite of
growing sympathy for them within all ranks of the Church.

Yet the intensifica-

tion of the DNVP women’s racism received full support from Annagrete
Lehmann, who was chair of the RFA, member of the DNVP’s National Völkisch
Committee, and one of the vice-chairs of the party.

Given its connections to reproduction and education, two agreed-upon

women’s spheres, the racist campaign was defined by DNVP women as a
specific women’s mission. Although some men in the party, particularly those
organized in the National Völkisch Committee, shared in the outpouring of racist
ideas, it appears that the women stressed this issue more than the men. Whereas

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the Frauenkorrespondenz/Die Deutschnationale Frau was full of racist ideas in
1930–33, the general party newsletter Unsere Partei (later: Deutschnationale
Front) contained only a single explicitly racist article in this entire period –
written by Alexa von Porembsky!

But it should also be stressed that the

emphasis of the DNVP women’s campaign was on racial hygiene and that they
generally avoided hateful anti-Semitic statements. It seemed as if they still
followed Johanna Richter’s 1922 recommendation that women should fight
Jewish cultural influence not through violent outbursts but through educational
work. Yet their approach anticipated the spirit of the discriminatory Nürnberg
Laws of 1935 and the Nazi sterilization and euthanasia programs.

The DNVP women’s reactions to the appointment of the Hitler cabinet on 30

January 1933 confirmed that the common ground between them and the Nazis
was stronger than the dividing power of the Nazis’ attitude concerning women
and religion. Die Deutschnationale Frau reacted enthusiastically to the end of the
hated Weimar Republic, the repression of the left, and the beginning of a state
built on völkisch principles. Even Mueller-Otfried and Tiling, whose Church
connections might have evoked more caution, were overjoyed that the Weimar
Republic had been destroyed.

Elisabeth Spohr, the most experienced DNVP

representative in the Prussian Landtag, was enthusiastic about what she called
the “liberation from the icy wind of the Marxist world view that had frozen all
national-völkisch and Christian life with a deadly force.”

At a time when Nazis

murdered and imprisoned their left-wing opponents, Annagrete Lehmann
expressed her satisfaction with Hitler’s “fascinating reckoning with Marxism.”
Like other DNVP women, she understood that the Nazi terror operated outside
the realm of traditional legality but made it clear that she forgave the Nazis their
“occasional excesses.”

At an RFA meeting in the middle of February 1933, Ilse

Neumann called on the DNVP to stress its völkisch attitude and its anti-Semitism
even more. At this meeting, the RFA presented a short programmatic document
that combined the racist engagement of the DNVP women with their more tradi-
tional conservative, religious, and militaristic spirit. The first task of the German
woman was, according to the document, to be the “guardian and caretaker of the
race.” But women should play this role not only, as Nazi ideologues had claimed,
in their home and family but also in public life.

Soon after the March 1933 elections, however, the mood of the leading DNVP

women soured. Whereas Lehmann, who was present at almost all meetings of the
party leadership, hoped that the DNVP and NSDAP would organically merge
and form a synthesis of Hitler’s and Hugenberg’s aims, the reality was that the
Nazis bullied DNVP members to join the NSDAP. Hugenberg ran into increasing
difficulties with Hitler and the other Nazis in the cabinet. Lehmann was happy
that the Nazis either took over or dissolved the traditional women’s organiza-
tions, but she could not understand why the DNVP women, having done so much

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to fight the democratic tendencies of the German women’s movement, were not
invited to participate in this process.

At the end of June 1933, Hugenberg

resigned from the Hitler cabinet and the DNVP dissolved itself, not seeing any
remaining avenue for an independent existence.

What did the women who had been active in the DVP and DNVP do in the

Third Reich after the dissolution of their parties? Evidence is sparse and scat-
tered, but there are examples of prominent women who continued some public
activity: Else Frobenius, who published an adulatory book on Nazism and
women in 1933 (Die Frau im Dritten Reich), continued her journalistic career
throughout the Third Reich.

She joined the NSDAP on 1 May 1933 and was a

member of many specialized Nazi organizations. She published extensively in
newspapers and magazines and frequently spoke on the radio. She moved her
previous engagement on behalf of the Germans outside Germany, and her
promotion of German colonies, seamlessly into the agenda of the Third Reich.

Elsa Matz remained director of her high school in Berlin-Charlottenburg
throughout the Third Reich. She participated in many activities of the NS-
Frauenschaft, the Nazi women’s organization, and faithfully supported the local
NSDAP section. She applied for NSDAP membership in late April 1933 but was
rejected almost two years later because of an anti-Nazi remark she had uttered
during an election campaign rally in October 1932. Matz then asked Rudolf Hess
and the NSDAP Party Court to reconsider her application. She pointed out: “I
endeavor to lead my school … in the National Socialist spirit. Many events prove
this. I cooperate closely with the NS-Frauenschaft of my local party section and
with the NS-Volkswohlfahrt. Mine was the first school that organized the dona-
tion of baby baskets for the ‘Mother and Child’ action, and we collected signifi-
cant sums for the Winter’s Aid program. My work outside my profession, partic-
ularly in the Colonial Women’s League and the German Gymnastics League, also
corresponds to the goals of National Socialism.”

As proof that she had fought

“against the pacifist lie” and for a national education before 1933, Matz
submitted a 1929 article from the left-leaning magazine Die Weltbühne, which
depicted her as a tyrannical school director who imposed military discipline on
her Berlin school, making her girls walk in goose step and sing nationalist
songs.

Several SS officers acquainted with Matz submitted letters of support

for her, but the head of the Party Court, Walter Buch, rejected her plea. As one
of the twelve Nazis elected to the Reichstag in 1928, Buch wrote that he did not
remember Matz as “the kind of woman whom we like to welcome in our move-
ment.”

Buch conceded, however, that Matz could be admitted once the restric-

tions on the admission of new party members were eased. Matz finally was
admitted into the party in November 1939, but some party members challenged
her membership even then, though apparently without success.

In late 1941,

Matz was asked by the NSDAP to travel to Italy to study the effects of

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Mussolini’s school reform on the physical education of girls, but the evidence
does not show whether she completed the trip.

Like Frobenius, Matz easily

transferred her activities into the Third Reich; she probably had to change little
in the direction of her school, and her work for the Nazi program “Mother and
Child” recalls the Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb initiated by the Berlin DVP in the
1920s. The only inconvenience was that she had been in the Reichstag and had
made some remarks against the Nazis. Matz remained director of her school until
1946. As a retiree, she resettled in Lower Bavaria and helped organize social
services for German refugees. She died in Munich in 1959, having just received
the German National Medal (Bundesverdienstkreuz) for her work in the
Reichstag and in the development of the German education system for girls.

Clara Mende, Matz’s predecessor at the head of the RFA, had become disillu-

sioned with the DVP as early as 1928, when she failed to secure reelection to the
Reichstag (which she ascribed to the influence of anti-feminism in her party).
She then received an appointment as head of the new section for household
matters in the Reich Economics Ministry and consequently stepped down from
her seat in the DVP’s Party Board (Parteivorstand). Hopeless about the DVP’s
future, she joined the DNVP in 1932 but played no role in the leadership of that
party.

After the Nazi takeover, she became a member of the Reichs-

schrifttumskammer, which allowed her to continue publishing in the Third Reich.
Mende also continued working as director of her home-economics school in
Berlin-Tempelhof. Her application for NSDAP membership was rejected,
however. A report commissioned by the judges of the Party Court found that she
had done nothing against the Nazis after their takeover but had occasionally crit-
icized the NSDAP in the Reichstag (the Nazi press used to call her
“Lügenklärchen” – Little Lying Clara). That Mende had good contacts to Gertrud
Scholz-Klink, who in 1934 became the leader of the NS-Frauenschaft, helped her
to continue her professional activity throughout the Third Reich but was not
enough to guarantee her NSDAP membership. Mende died in 1947.

Ilse

Szagunn, the physician and energetic organizer of the Greater Berlin women’s
committees of the DVP, stayed on as a member of the Prussian State Health
Council (Landesgesundheitsrat) and as executive officer of the League of
German Women Physicians (Bund Deutscher Ärztinnen); in 1934, she defended
the Nazi sterilization laws.

Unlike Mende and Matz, Anny von Kulesza kept

her distance from the NSDAP in the brief period of the Third Reich that she
witnessed before her death in October 1934. At her funeral, former DVP
chairman Dingeldey gave a speech that vindicated Stresemann and criticized the
Third Reich. Everything indicates that she would have approved.

Evidence on the DNVP women is less complete. Dr. Irmgard Wrede, a young

RFA member, got herself arrested by the Gestapo in Breslau on 15 June 1933 for
anti-Nazi activities. A friend had denounced her to the secret police for remarks

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directed against Hitler. Given her virulent racism, it is likely that she criticized
Hitler for his anti-feminism rather than for any abuse of human rights.

Wrede’s

arrest led to a flurry of legal and political initiatives by Hugenberg (then still in
Hitler’s cabinet), Annagrete Lehmann, and Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven, the
party’s legal expert. In a personal discussion with Hitler six days after the arrest,
Hugenberg received the assurance that Wrede would be freed without delay.

The fact that she could publish a book in Nazi Germany only two years later
suggests that her run-in with the Gestapo did not affect her career in the Third
Reich.

As for Mueller-Otfried, she had to step down from the leadership of the

Evangelical Women’s League, but she was close to retirement anyway. She was
still working on the board of a league against the international traffic in girls in
the later 1930s. She died in 1946.

Although Tiling had hoped for cooperation

with the Nazi regime, she lost her position as leader of the Evangelical umbrella
organization VEFD and had to resume her teaching profession until her retire-
ment in 1938. She stayed aloof from the Nazi regime but also did nothing to
oppose it.

Lenore Kühn, who joined the Managing Board of the BDF in the

early 1930s, had already promoted the Nazi cause by encouraging her colleagues
not to let the Nazis’ anti-feminism estrange the BDF from the NSDAP: “The
women’s movement, on the contrary, belongs organically into National
Socialism.”

After the Nazi takeover, she worked briefly for the journal

Deutsche Kämpferin edited by the völkisch women’s activist Pia Sophie Rogge-
Börner.

She had to supplement the meager income from her publications with

occasional work for publishing houses and by giving piano lessons. She left
Berlin in 1943 after her home had been destroyed in a bombing raid and
pondered working in an ammunitions factory to help avoid Germany’s defeat.
She died in West Germany in 1955.

Ilse Hamel, one of the völkisch women’s

acitivists who was acquainted with Kühn and Rogge-Börner, received an
appointment as an expert for women’s questions in Joseph Goebbels’
Reichsschrifttumskammer, the office in charge of monitoring literary production
in the Third Reich.

Käthe Schirmacher did not live to see the Nazis’ coming to

power, but she was revered by the Third Reich for her nationalism and racism.
The Nazis conveniently belittled her engagement for women’s rights and ignored
her lesbianism.

What Annagrete Lehmann did after the dissolution of the

DNVP is unclear. Like Hugenberg, she may have spent the rest of the Nazi years
in retirement. She died in 1954. Most other DNVP women probably concentrated
on working in their own leagues, where this was still possible, or withdrew from
public life.

Altogether, the women’s response to the Nazi challenge is ambiguous. The

harshest criticism launched by the women from both parties was in terms of their
defense of women’s rights against the Nazis’ anti-feminism and their concern
over the Nazis’ control of the Evangelical Church. The first theme was shared by

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most parties; even the SPD used it in its propaganda against the Nazis – with the
famous campaign poster showing an angry SA man with a whip watching a
woman tie his boot.

Yet the defense of women’s rights meant different things to

women from the DVP and to those from the DNVP. Whereas the leading women
of the DVP adhered to ideas that were at least related to the liberal tradition of
individual rights, it seems to me that the DNVP activists in this period meant
something rather different. The equality of the sexes stressed in particular by the
völkisch women’s activists in the DNVP never implied that Germanic women
would actually be free to make their individual choices regarding such issues as
reproduction, choice of a mate, or upbringing of the children. Völkisch activists
simply claimed that a pure-blooded Nordic woman, free of all “foreign” influ-
ences, would instinctively choose a prescribed path. This would mean that she
would be bold, free, and intensely nationalist, and that she would follow an
instinctive sense for racial hygiene that “foreign” cultural influences had
allegedly disturbed. If a Nordic woman failed to display this kind of behavior, it
would only prove that she was either racially impure or ideologically misled. This
line of thought showed all the circular reasoning typical for Nazi hermeneutics.

It did not leave room for individual choice and freedom. By implying a certain
behavior that Nordic women would have to adopt on the basis of their genes, this
approach was in reality very constraining. The völkisch women’s activists thus
shared an idea of emancipation that was far removed from the western and liberal
notion of individual and natural rights. In the worldview of völkisch women,
there were rights, but no choices.

Ironically, the Nazis’ bark turned out to be worse than their bite with respect

to women’s rights and church issues. After an initial push to get women out of
the work force, directed mostly against academic women, the Nazi regime felt
compelled to reverse its policies. After 1936, with war preparation creating a
labor shortage, and particularly in the later years of the war, the regime begged
women to join the labor force in ever greater numbers. Even in the initial years,
the reverses women faced with respect to their professional rights were less
severe than expected. As some of the DNVP women had hoped, moreover, the
population policies of the Nazi regime required the work and expertise of many
women, be it in social work or in the medical apparatus.

Whereas the restric-

tive policies of the Nazis toward women thus did not fully confirm the fears of
the DVP and DNVP activists before 1933, the Nazi policies that were designed
to encourage motherhood and to raise the birthrate would have found their
emphatic approval. Women from both parties had always stressed that actual
motherhood was women’s highest profession, even though it should not be the
only avenue open to them. Nazi marriage stipends and rewards to mothers of four
or more children (secretly called “Karnickelorden” – rabbit medal) breathed the
spirit of many DVP and DNVP women’s policies from the Mütterhilfe

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Wanderkorb to their joint involvement in the National League for Large Families.
The fears that the Nazis would infiltrate and manipulate the Evangelical Church
appeared justified in the short run, but this threat, too, turned out to be less
serious than predicted. Hitler did appoint members of the German Christian
movement to leading positions in the Church, but Nazi control remained incom-
plete, and Hitler pursued no consistent policy – even losing interest in the
German Christian movement after a few years. With massive support for the
regime coming out of all ranks of the Evangelical Church, the issue of Nazi
control over the Church was a moot point. Although all Churches might have
been threatened had the Nazi regime won the Second World War, the regime
chose not to put too much pressure on them before and during the war.

While women from both parties launched a weak critique of the Nazis’

methods, they drastically underestimated the danger of a full-blown dictatorship.
Only very late, if at all, did DVP women comprehend that the fight for women’s
representation in parliament made little sense in a dictatorship, and DNVP
women grossly erred in their belief that Hitler would reward their racism and
their fight against the democratic women’s movement by letting them participate
in the buildup of the völkisch state. Even the defense of women’s rights made
little sense without a defense of the sanctity of law in general.

This the women

of both parties did not do, and they would have been at a loss if asked to explain
which state and which law they wanted to uphold. Having thus failed to hold the
Nazis to the most basic legal standards during their terror against the Left,
women from the DVP and – in particular – the DNVP had no ground to stand on
when the Nazis pressed for the dissolution of their parties and organizations. For
DVP women, resignation and disappointment with the Weimar system was so
strong at this point that they could hardly object to the end of their party activity.
DNVP women, in turn, had found so much common ground with the Nazis that
the continuation of a separate party organization can hardly have appeared a
worthy cause to them. Still, it is possible that right-wing women’s resistance
against the NSDAP was important for a while in keeping a disproportionate
number of women voters loyal to the DVP and DNVP. Those districts that
counted women’s and men’s votes separately for a longer period of time show
that the portion of women’s votes for the DVP and DNVP rose to its highest
levels after 1928 before dropping down to “normal” levels around 1932 – the
year when the NSDAP is assumed to have closed its gender gap.

At a time

when male voters rapidly left the DVP and DNVP for the smaller-interest parties
and, ultimately, the NSDAP, there seems to have been a delay in the same move-
ment of women. This would indicate that there was a grain of truth in the often
stated claim of bourgeois women that women tended to be more loyal to their
parties than men.

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 174

Notes

1. “Kann die berufstätige Frau Hitler wählen?” NLC 59, no. 60, 24 March

1932.

2. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich

(London: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 53–62, and Robert Gellately,
Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Peter Fritzsche makes the same point
in Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),
pp. 217–35.

3. Hiller von Gaertringen, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei.” In Eric

Matthias and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Das Ende der Parteien 1933 (Düsseldorf:
Droste, 1960), pp. 554 and 618.

4. The two defecting women were Else Ulbrich, member of the Prussian

Landtag, and Margarethe Wolff, Behm’s successor at the helm of the League
for Female Home Workers. See Günter Opitz, Der Christlich-soziale
Volksdienst: Versuch einer protestantischen Partei in der Weimarer Republik,
Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien,
37 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1969), pp. 150, 178, and 217. For an early example
of solidarity with Hugenberg in the DNVP women’s press, see Annagrete
Lehmann, “Ernste Entscheidungen,” Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 16, 17
April 1930. Numerous articles in Die Deutschnationale Frau from March,
April, and October 1932 give testimony to a Hugenberg cult of Lehmann
and other leading DNVP women.

5. Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik

(Düsseldorf, Droste, 2002), pp. 431–2, 436–8, and 466–9.

6. Martha Schwarz, “Frauen und politischer Zeitgeist,” Berliner Stimmen 7, no.

2, 12 January 1930.

7. Kolb and Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik, p.

1111 (meeting of 24 August 1930). See also Elsa Matz’s bitter criticism of the
DVP at a BDF meeting later in 1930: Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauen-
vereine, p. 269.

8. “Keine bürgerlichen Frauen im sächsischen Landtag,” Frauenkorrespondenz

12, no. 28, 10 July 1930. See also Dora Schwaak, “Wie sind die Frauen in
den städtischen Körperschaften vertreten?” Frauenkorrespondenz 11, no.
45, 7 November 1929.

9. Annagrete Lehmann, “Aus der Arbeit unserer Landesfrauenausschüsse,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 13, no. 8, 15 July 1931.

10. As quoted in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, p. 255.
11. Arendt, Hering, and Wagner, eds., Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik vor

1933, pp. 101 und 148.

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12. Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler:

Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1979), pp. 126–28; Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian
Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996); and Kurt Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer
Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1981), chapter 4.

13. For a detailed account of DVP politics in this period, see Larry E. Jones,

German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System,
1918–1933 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
1985), chapters 29 and 31. Hans Booms offers a summary, “Die Deutsche
Volkspartei.” In Erich Mathias and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Das Ende der
Parteien 1933: Darstellungen und Dokumente (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1960).

14. RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —, Frau Hilter?” Flugschriften der

DVP 78, Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1931.

15. “Nationalsozialisten und Frauen,” NLC 59, no. 46, 4 March 1932 (Frauen-

rundschau 8).

16. Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt, “Die Stellung des Nationalsozialismus zur Frau,”

NLC 59, no. 67, 6 April 1932 (Frauenrundschau 13).

17. Elizabeth Lürßen, “Warum sind wir Frauen in der Politik?” NLC 59, no.

136, 21 July 1932 (Frauenrundschau 24).

18. “Kann die berufstätige Frau Hitler wählen?” NLC 59, no. 60, 24 March

1932 (Frauenrundschau 11). The Evangelical women’s movement shared
this rejection of Nazism’s attitude toward women. See Lange, Protestan-
tische Frauen auf dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus, p. 103.

19. VdL, 1932–33, vol. I, p. 891.
20. Else Broekelschen-Kemper, “Der Nationalsozialismus als Kulturfrage,”

NLC 58, no. 3, 6 January 1931 (Frauenrundschau 1).

21. “Frauen und Nationalsozialismus,” NLC 58, no. 42, 25 February 1931

(Frauenrundschau 8); RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —, Frau
Hilter?” pp. 9–10; Anny von Kulesza, Frauenfragen der Gegenwart,
Flugschriften der DVP 79 (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1931), pp.
18–19.

22. Elsa Matz, “Kulturpolitische Motive im Wahlkampf,” NLC 57, no. 171, 3

September 1930; “Ist das christlich?” NLC 59, no. 136, 21 July 1932
(Frauenrundschau 24). See also RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —,
Frau Hilter?” and von Kulesza, Frauenfragen der Gegenwart, as well as
Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik.

23. “Frauengedanken über den Nationalsozialismus,” NLC 59, no. 199, 2

November 1932 (Frauenrundschau 35).

24. “Volksparteiliche Frauenkundgebung in Berlin,” NLC 57, no. 176, 10

September 1930 (Frauenrundschau 29); Johanna Lange, “An der Schwelle

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des neuen Jahres,” NLC 57, no. 251, 30 December 1930 (Frauenrundschau
42); “Frauen und Nationalsozialismus,” NLC 58, no. 42, 25 February 1931
(Frauenrundschau 8); “Ist Politik unweiblich?” NLC 59, no. 140, 27 July
1932 (Frauenrundschau 25).

25. See RFA der DVP, ed., “Wissen Sie schon —, Frau Hilter?”; von Kulesza,

Frauenfragen der Gegenwart; and “Frauen und Nationalsozialismus,” NLC
58, no. 42, 25 February 1931 (Frauenrundschau 8).

26. See for example Else Frobenius, “Frauenarbeit für deutsches Volkstum,”

NLC 53, no. 98, 8 June 1926. See also Helene Fock, “Das bevölkerungspoli-
tische Problem in den Grenzlanden,” NLC 53, no. 179, 3 November 1926.

27. See for example Matz’s comments in the Reichstag in June 1925, VdR,

1924–1928, vol. 386, pp. 2344–6 (particularly pp. 2345D-2346A), which
employ völkisch language. See also “Kulturaufgaben des Reiches,” NLC 52,
no. 115, 24 June 1925.

28. See Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft

in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999).

29. Geheime Staatspolizei to Präsidenten der RSK, 26 April 1938, in BA Berlin-

Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center, Reichsschriftumskammer 2100,
Clara Mende.

30. MS [=Martha Schwarz], “Volksentscheid in Preußen,” NLC 58, no. 152, 6

August 1931 (Frauenrundschau 22).

31. Else Broekelschen-Kemper, “Die Frauen und der Weg der Deutschen

Volkspartei,” NLC 58, no. 243, 16 December 1931 (Frauenrundschau 34).

32. “Frauen und Volksbegehren,” NLC 56, no. 198, 3 October 1929; “Königin-

Luise-Bund und Deutsche Volkspartei,” NLC 56, no. 210, 18 October 1929.

33. “Druckfehler-Berichtigung,” NLC 56, no. 148, 16 July 1929.
34. Martha Schwarz, “Der neue Reichstag und die Frauen,” NLC 57, no. 185, 24

September 1930 (Frauenrundschau 30), and Schwarz, “Reichsfrauen-
ausschuß der Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 57, no. 236, 4 December 1930
(Frauenrundschau 39). See also Helen Boak, “ ‘Our Last Hope:’ Women’s
Votes for Hitler: A Reappraisal.” German Studies Review 12, no. 2 (1989):
289–310.

35. Schwarz, “Der neue Reichstag und die Frauen.” See also Else Broekelschen-

Kemper, “Reaktion?” NLC 59, no. 221, 8 December 1932, and Martha
Schwarz, “Die Frau im öffentlichen Leben der Gegenwart,” NLC 60, no. 53,
23 March 1933 (Frauenrundschau 8).

36. Elsa Matz, “Entschiedenheit und Klarheit bei den Wahlen: Ein Wort an die

Frauen,” NLC 60, no. 39. 1 March 1933 (Frauenrundschau 6).

37. Henny Pleimes, “Der Mut zur Minderheit,” NLC 60, no. 44, 8 March 1933

(Frauenrundschau 7).

38. Schwarz, “Die Frau im öffentlichen Leben der Gegenwart.”

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39. Kulesza to Dingeldey, 28 April 1933; Matz to Dingeldey, 29 April 1933,

both in Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlass Eduard Dingeldey (N 1002), vol
97. See also Kolonialpolitisches Amt an SS-Sturmführer Grimm, 17
February 1936, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center, Akten
des Obersten Parteigerichts Z Kammer.

40. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 20–30.

41. Ilse Neumann, “Die Verantwortlichkeit der Frau gegenüber Volk und Staat,”

Frauenkorrespondenz 12, no. 51, 18 December 1930.

42. Ibid.
43. See for example “Warum sind wir Frauen deutschnational?” Unsere Partei

10, no. 7, 5 April 1932.

44. Annagrete Lehmann, “Entscheidungswahlen,” Die Deutschnationale Frau

14, no. 7, 1 April 1932; Paula Reincke, “Hamburg muss sich entscheiden!”
Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, [no number] 10 April 1932.

45. “Die völkische Tagung am 4. und 5. Februar in Berlin,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 15, no. 4, 15 February 1933. Porembsky believed that the
DNVP shared the Nazi image of women – though to a lesser degree because
the DNVP, unlike the Nazis, admitted women to parliaments and supported
women’s committees.

46. Alexa von Porembsky, “Vom Berufensein,” Deutschnationale Frau 14, no.

5, 1 March 1932.

47. Else Meyer, “Nationalsozialismus und Bildungswesen,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 14, no. 13, 1 July 1932.

48. See Magdalene von Tiling, “Der alte and der neue Staat,” Die

Deutschnationale Frau 14, election issue, 23 October 1932, und no. 21, 30
October 1932; Elisabeth Spohr, “Nationale Frauen und Staatsautorität,” Die
Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 21, 30 October 1932; and many other articles
in Die Deutschnationale Frau during 1932.

49. Pfarrer Steiner, “Der Nationalsozialismus in seiner Stellung zu Christentum

und Kirche,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 12, 15 June 1932; see also
Neumann, “Die Verantwortlichkeit der Frau gegenüber Volk und Staat.”

50. Tiling, “Der alte und der neue Staat.” See also Schneider-Ludorff,

Magdalene von Tiling, p. 42.

51. Ilse Hamel, “Hugenberg – Deutschlands Führer zur Freiheit,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 14, no. 13, 1 July 1932, und Mueller-Otfried, “Waffen für
den Wahlkampf,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 14, 10 July 1932.

52. Elisabeth Spohr, “Kraftvolle Grenzmarkpolitik ist Preußens Pflicht,” Die

Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 8, 20 April 1932; Elisabeth Spohr, “Das
Gesetz unseres Handelns,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 19, 1 October
1932, and the articles in Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, election issue, 23

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October 1932. See also C. Weitzenmüller, “Schulungstagung in Rudolstadt,”
Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 10, 15 May 1933.

53. Ria Jansen, “Wir katholischen deutschnationalen Frauen,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 14, no. 8, 20 April 1932; Alexa von Porembsky, “Zur Frage
der Vererbungsgesetze,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 22, 15
November 1932; “Völkische Tagung in Breslau,” Die Deutschnationale
Frau 14, no. 20, 14 October 1932; Freda Freifrau von Rechenberg, “Von der
Rassenkunde zum völkischen Staat,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 22,
15 November 1932.

54. Elsa von Lindequist, “Warum sind wir deutschnational? (Fortsetzung),” Die

Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 5, 1 March 1932.

55. “Unsere Schulforderungen an den Preußischen Landtag,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 14, no. 9, 1 May 1932.

56. Alexa von Porembsky, “Zur Rassenfrage,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14,

no. 19, 1 October 1932.

57. Annemarie Burgund, “Deutschlands Zukunft im Lichte der Bevölkerungs-

frage,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 24, 15 December 1932, and Die
Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 2, 15 January 1933.

58. Rundschreiben Nr. 3, 17 February 1933, in Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv

Osnabrück, Erw. C 1, Band 83, Bl. 9–11; the programmatical document is
quoted in “Was hat das bisherige System an moralischen Werten
verwirtschaftet?” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 4, 15 February 1933.

59. Meyer, “Nationalsozialismus und Bildungswesen.”
60. See for example Magdalene von Tiling, “Das Problem einer deutschen

Religion,” Frauenkorrespondenz 6, no. 28, 16 July 1924. See also Lange,
Protestantische Frauen, p. 228.

61. See Kurt Meier, “Der ‘Bund für deutsche Kirche’ und seine völkisch-antiju-

daistische Theologie.” In Kurt Nowak and Gérard Raulet, eds., Protestant-
ismus und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt (M), New
York, Paris: Campus, 1994, pp. 177–98), and Nowak, Evangelische Kirche,
pp. 244–61.

62. Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi Right,” pp. 149–50. Lehmann had close

contacts to Hugenberg and access to all party leadership meetings in this
period, but she apparently did not promote racial hygienic ideas among the
male party leaders. She rarely spoke at the party leadership meetings. For a
diary summarizing these meetings, see Hermann Weiß and Paul Hoser, eds.
Die Deutschnationalen und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik. Aus dem
Tagebuch von Reinhold Quaatz 1928–1933, Schriftenreihe der Viertel-
jahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 59 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989).

63. Alexa von Porembsky, “Der völkische Gedanke in der DNVP,” Unsere

Partei 10, no. 17, 1 September 1932.

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64. Kaiser, Frauen in der Kirche, pp. 163–5; Lange, Protestantische Frauen auf

dem Weg in den Nationalsozialismus, pp. 103–4.

65. Elisabeth Spohr, “Vom Eise befreit …,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no.

8, 15 April 1933.

66. Annagrete Lehmann, “Furchtlos und treu,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15,

no. 9, 1 May 1933; Annagrete Lehmann, “Nationale Gegenrevolution,” Die
Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 6, 15 March 1933.

67. Rundschreiben Nr. 3, 17 February 1933, in Niedersächsisches Staats-

archiv Osnabrück, Erw. C 1, Band 83, Bl. 9–11; the programmatical
document is quoted in “Was hat das bisherige System an moralischen
Werten verwirtschaftet?” Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 4, 15 February
1933.

68. Lehmann, “Furchtlos und treu” and Lehmann, “Volkwerdung,” Die Deutsch-

nationale Frau 15, no. 11, 1 June 1933.

69. Referring to information in Frobenius’ unpublished memoirs, Lora

Wildenthal states that Frobenius left the DVP in 1925: see Wildenthal,
“Mass-Marketing Colonialism and Nationalism: The Career of Else
Frobenius in the ‘Weimarer Republik’ and Nazi Germany.” In Ute Planert,
ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus
in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2000), p. 337.
Frobenius must have erred here. She was reelected to the RFA in November
1928, and she continued to contribute to the “Frauenrundschau” of the
Nationalliberale Correspondenz until early 1933; in some of her articles she
wrote as a representative of the RFA. For her reelection in 1928, see
“Tagung des Reichsfrauenausschusses der Deutschen Volkspartei,” NLC 55,
special edition, 27 November 1928.

70. See documents in the folder Reichskulturkammer 2101, Else Frobenius, at

the BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center.

71. Matz to Hess, 2 May 1935, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document

Center, Akten des Obersten Parteigerichts Z Kammer.

72. “Antworten,” Die Weltbühne, 2 July 1929, pp. 37–8. See also BA Berlin-

Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center, Akten des Obersten Parteigerichts Z
Kammer.

73. Buch to Breithaupt, 8 August 1935, in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin

Document Center, Akten des Obersten Parteigerichts Z Kammer.

74. NSDAP Parteikanzlei Korrespondenz Elsa Matz, BA Berlin-Lichterfelde,

Berlin Document Center.

75. “Allgemeine Bermerkungen,” in BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document

Center, NSLB Listen.

76. Ilse Brehmer and Karin Erlich (coeditor of vol. 2 only), Mütterlichkeit als

Profession? Lebensläufe deutscher Pädagoginnen in der ersten Hälfte

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 180

dieses Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Band 2: Kurzbiographien (Pfaffenweiler:
Centaurus, 1990 (vol. 1) and 1993 (vol. 2)), pp. 175–6.

77. “Notiz,” NLC 55, no. 224, 12 December 1928, and Clara Mende, “Die Frau

bei den englischen Wahlen,” NLC 56, no. 122, 13 June 1929. For Mende’s
entry into the DNVP, see the note in Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 5, 1
March 1933.

78. See documents in the folder Reichskulturkammer 2100, Clara Mende, BA

Berlin-Lichterfelde, Berlin Document Center.

79. Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex (New York: Oxford University Press,

1995), p. 155.

80. BA Koblenz, Kleine Erwerbung 860 (Anny von Kulesza), with Dingeldey’s

speech and biographical materials.

81. Die Deutschnationale Frau 15, no. 12, 15 June 1933. See also Bundesarchiv

Berlin-Lichterfelde, Alldeutscher Verband R 8048, Band 489, and
“Völkische Tagung in Breslau,” Die Deutschnationale Frau 14, no. 20, 14
October 1932.

82. See the correspondence on Wrede in BA Koblenz, Nachlass Hugenberg (N

1231), vol. 39, particularly Hugenberg to Hitler, 22 June 1933, and enclosed
materials.

83. Irmgard Wrede, Gedanken zum Geldproblem (Bückeburg: Grimmesche

Hofdruckerei, 1935). The book occasionally mirrors Wrede’s adherence to
racial-hygiene theories, as when she rejects the idea of a world currency by
arguing that genetics teaches that the universe prefers differentiation (p.
167).

84. “Deutsches Nationalkomitee zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels,” in BA

Koblenz, Restnachlass Lang-Brumann (Kl. Erw. 65), vol. 1. See also Kaiser,
Frauen in der Kirche, pp. 165 and 168–9.

85. Schneider-Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling, pp. 43–4.
86. As quoted in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in der Weimarer

Republik, p. 147. See also ibid., pp. 160 and 284.

87. BA Koblenz, NL Kühn, vol. 72 (Autobiographische Lebensläufe und Werke).
88. BA Koblenz, NL Kühn, vols. 1 and 284. See also Detlef Kühn, “Lenore

Kühn – eine nationale Mitstreiterin der Frauenbewegung.” Nordost-Archiv,
nrs. 61–62/63–64 (1981): 39–56/31–54.

89. BA Koblenz, NL Kühn, vol. 284 (letter of 25 November 1936).
90. Scheck, “Women in the Non-Nazi Right,” pp. 146–8.
91. Gerhard, Unerhört, p. 376; Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, chapter 5.
92. Compare, for example, Carl Schmitt’s claims that Germany should adopt a

democracy without parliamentarism and that it should restrict political
participation by excluding certain “undesirables” from political rights. The
implication is that the “desirable” Germans would conform to a certain

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 181

imagined range of behavior. If they did not, they may likely be “undesir-
ables.” Schmitt thus advocates a democracy with a very restricted latitude
for individual choice and freedom. See Carl Schmitt, Die geistes-
geschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 1926).

93. See Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer und Täterinnen: Frauenbiographien

des Nationalsozialismus, Die Frau in der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt (M):
Fischer, 1996); Ute Frevert, “Frauen,” in Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml,
and Hermann Weiß, eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 3rd edn.
Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1998; Jill Stephenson, “Women,
Motherhood and the Family in the Third Reich.” In Michael Burleigh, ed.,
Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and Leonie Wagner, Nationalsozialistische
Frauenansichten: Vorstellungen von Weiblichkeit und Politik führender
Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt (M): dipa-Verlag, 1996), pp.
102–13.

94. Bergen, Twisted Cross, pp. 192–205; Helmreich, German Churches Under

Hitler, pp. 338–43.

95. See the similar argument for the BDF in Hönig, Der Bund Deutscher

Frauenvereine in der Weimarer Republik, p. 149.

96. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 84–5;

Falter, Hitlers Wähler, pp, 140–1; Boak, “ ‘Our Last Hope:’ Women’s Votes
for Hitler: A Reappraisal.”

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 182

Conclusion

What did DVP and DNVP women consider most important about their political
activity during the Weimar Republic? Most of them would likely give answers
centered on their nationalism. They would stress that they hoped to integrate
conservative and not yet politicized women into the German nation and to ensure
that the state would stop impeding women’s ability to be useful in places where
they could strengthen the nation. Building a strong German nation structured
according to a harmonious Volksgemeinschaft was their highest priority. This
runs like a red thread through all of their activities, from the buildup of a
women’s structure in the hectic early years to the protests against Versailles, the
struggle against “trash and dirt,” the protection of small rentiers, and to the
defense of women’s rights against the Nazis. How successful were they in
reaching their aims? The answer here has to be more hesitant and ambiguous.
The women from both parties did make great strides in mobilizing women in
some areas – the DVP in Schleswig-Holstein and Berlin, the DNVP in East
Prussia, Pomerania, and Berlin – but it appears that most of the mobilization
successes occurred in the early years of the Weimar Republic (until 1923), when
the threat of communist insurrection and foreign aggression loomed large. In
1924, stagnation seems to have set in, and the decline of both parties prevented
a revival of women’s activities in the disastrous last years of the Weimar
Republic.

The claim for women’s rights was always secondary to the DVP and DNVP

women’s interest in a strong nation. The guiding principle for the safeguarding or
expansion of women’s rights was the well-being of the nation, more than some
“natural” right that had to be granted for reasons of justice. The DVP and DNVP
women thus did little to promote an expansion of women’s rights and even backed
some measures hostile to women’s rights (such as the DNVP’s support for the
dismissal of married women from the civil service after 1931). The conservatism
of the women in many local party branches and the influence of the housewives’
organizations in both parties meant that a more determined struggle for women’s
rights would have alienated much of the rank and file. Still, the leading women of
the DVP considered the women’s rights enshrined in the Weimar Constitution
important enough to make the rejection of Nazi anti-feminism their strongest line

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 183

of defense against the Nazis. For the DNVP women, the defense of women’s
rights after 1930 meant above all a claim to help shape a future racial state
together with the Nazis. Even the völkisch women’s activists of the DNVP hardly
saw their stress on women’s rights as resistance to the Nazis: if it was the nature
of Germanic culture, as they believed, to grant equal status to men and women,
then a truly völkisch state would automatically grant women equality. All one had
to do was to remind the men on the radical right of this.

The focus on Volksgemeinschaft instead of interest politics, besides reflecting

the idealistic roots of the German bourgeois women’s movement, allowed polit-
ical women to gloss over the serious rifts between the interests of the various
professional groups they represented. This helped the women politicians of both
parties to preserve a large degree of coherence among themselves. There were a
few notable defections in reaction to policies of the male party leadership, but
these were not a result of controversies within the women’s structure of the
parties. It is possible that the women’s Volksgemeinschaft vision, had it been
honored and pursued more broadly by their male colleagues, could have become
a force for stability in their parties before the conflicts of special interests
compromised the parties’ credibility and tore them apart. By the same token, the
Volksgemeinschaft vision of right-wing women was not above suspicion. At its
best, it was a nostalgic longing for a national unity that many Germans believed
had existed in August 1914; at its worst it was a partisan, even racist, ploy to
justify middle-class interest politics and to denounce the left-wing parties.

Did the women of the DVP and the DNVP help prepare German women for

Nazism? The lines of continuity from the mainstream German women’s move-
ment, whose ideological parameters the DVP and DNVP women shared, to
Nazism have attracted much discussion. It is easy to highlight continuities from
the thinking of Germany’s mainstream bourgeois women’s movement to the
Nazis, particularly with respect to allegedly inborn differences between the
sexes, but the argument becomes pointless considering that these same mentali-
ties defied conventional categories of left and right and persisted even after
1945.

As in so many other cases, the connections between the Weimar Republic

and the Third Reich are complex and sometimes surprising – attesting to the
unusually broad appeal of the Nazis. Who would have thought in the 1920s that
the DVP’s Ilse Szagunn, an enlightened and independently minded physician
who cooperated with Adele Schreiber, a member of the SPD from a converted
Jewish family, would in 1934 defend the eugenic legislation of the Third Reich?
Consider also that Käthe Schirmacher and some young DNVP women inspired
by her, such as Porembsky and Wrede, combined an outspoken claim for
women’s rights with Nazi-style racism. Still, the efforts of DVP and DNVP
women to mobilize conservative women for the nation and, in particular, the
DNVP women’s demonstrations that racial hygienic thought and Christianity

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 184

were compatible may well have eased many women’s decision to vote for the
Nazis and to support the Nazi regime. Politically passive women from the middle
and upper classes did learn from the First World War that their realm was no safe
haven protected from the storms of national and international politics. After
1918, the women politicians from the DVP and DNVP made sure that this
message was kept alive and led a large number of these women into party polit-
ical activity. That right-wing women were to some extent mobilized before 1930
cannot have hurt the Nazis during their rapid rise to power in the early 1930s –
it might even have helped to accelerate this process. There is no doubt that the
bulk of former DVP and DNVP voters sooner or later supported the Nazis.

By the early 1930s, the women from the DVP and DNVP had lost their ability

to offer a constructive alternative to Nazism. This was typical for the entire polit-
ical spectrum between the Communists and Nazis, but it was sobering given the
ambitious aim with which bourgeois women had entered Weimar politics: to
create a Volksgemeinschaft held together by women’s maternal mission for the
nation. This mission had misfired both in the parties and in the nation at large.
Not through their fault alone, women had failed to acquire a strong enough posi-
tion in the parties to prevent the parties’ disintegration along the lines of narrow-
interest politics, and women’s inter-party connections were never strong enough
to reverse this process on a nationwide level. It therefore appears that the Nazi
threat turned the women politicians in the DVP and DNVP into what they had
struggled for so long not to become: representatives of specific women’s inter-
ests. Yet even this is not strictly true. The fixation of right-wing women on
defending women’s rights was in a sense an admission that their own mission for
a Volksgemeinschaft had failed and that the Nazis offered a more feasible way of
building it up – even if most DVP and some DNVP women did not adopt the
massive racism implicit in the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft. Devoid of
their own political vision, right-wing women essentially wanted to make sure that
their maternalist idea would carry over into the new Volksgemeinschaft and that
they could participate in its construction. The complaints of the leading right-
wing women about the Nazis’ closet socialism, threat to religion, and views on
women seemed relatively minor in comparison to what united them with the
Nazis. The haste shown by some leading DVP women to join the NSDAP was a
logical consequence of the failure of their own mission, and the joy, even ecstasy,
with which DNVP women greeted the destruction of the Weimar Republic and
the bloody repression of the Left confirms that the bonds uniting them with the
Nazis had become more powerful than what separated them.

– 185 –

Conclusion

02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 185

Note

1. See Christine Wittrock, Weiblichkeitsmythen: Das Frauenbild im Faschismus

und seine Vorläufer in der Frauenbewegung der 20er Jahre (Frankfurt:
Sendler Verlag, 1983), p. 1; Wagner, Nationalsozialistische Frauenansichten.

– 186 –

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02 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:41 pm Page 224

abortion, 87, 88, 89, 99, 141
alcohol abuse, xii, 95–6, 98–9
Altgelt, Erika, 59, 124
anti-Semitism, 6, 25

DNVP and, 6, 9, 10, 25, 27, 34–5,

58, 90, 94, 124, 165, 167, 169

DVP and, 7, 162
of NSDAP, 8, 162, 165

apartments, see housing
Auguste Viktoria, empress of

Germany and queen of Prussia, 11,

13, 25, 140, 149

Austria, ix, 121

Baden, 7, 86, 124
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 127
Bartels, Beate, 67, 97
Bassermann, Ernst, 52
Bassermann, Julie, 52
Bavaria, 19, 32, 39, 171

see also BVP and Wolf, Gertraud

Bäumer, Gertrud, 3, 7–8, 24, 17,

151

controversy over Verdun article,

126

flag dispute, 129

BDF, 10, 36, 37, 38, 77, 129, 159

and DDP, 24, 27, 38
and Nazism, 7–8, 172, 184
ties to DVP and DNVP, 37–8, 54

Becker, Gertrud, 93, 94, 145
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 127

Behm, Margarethe, 7, 33, 36, 54, 59,

139, 150

biographical background, 25
building up women’s committees,

24–6, 31

defending women’s suffrage, 54
in parliament, 27
legislation for home workers, 73
speech on voting age, 92
voting for women’s access to juries,

see also home workers

Berlin

local elections, 58, 144–5, 149–50
school scandal, 93–4
site of IAW conference, 127, 129
women’s local activism in, 59, 142–

5, 147, 148–50, 164, 171, 183

Bernays, Marie, 85, 86, 87–8, 91, 94,

118

Birkhahn, Erna von, 66, 90, 128
Bismarck, Otto von, 12, 149
Bismarckbund, 140
birthrate, 76, 86–91, 99, 173

relevance for foreign policy, 1–2,

117, 130

Black Horror on the Rhine, 59, 117,

121–4, 130, 162

see also racism

Boak, Helen, 85, 137
Boehm, Elizabet, 75
Bonin, Margot von, 25, 31

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Brahms, Johannes, 148
Brandt, Hannah, 31–2, 89, 93, 126
Braunert, Margarethe, 145
Brickenstein, Cecilie, 36
Broekelschen-Kemper, Else, 86–7, 88,

163

Brüning, Heinrich, 111, 157
Buch, Walter, 170
Bund deutscher Ärztinnen, see

League of German Women

Physicians

Bund Königin Luise, 12, 20n57, 163
Burgund, Annemarie, 168
BVP, 5, 27, 92, 99

Catherine the Great, 12
Center Party, 37, 60, 73, 87, 89, 97,

99, 163

background of women in, 10
in Prussian government, 8
mobilization of women, 24, 27, 39
National School Bill and, 92–3
on foreign policy, 120
on married women in the civil

service, 69–70

on small rentiers, 110–11, 112
women’s votes and, 5

children-rich families, 86, 87, 88,

173–4

see also abortion and birthrate

Chopin, Frédéric, 148
Christian Social Party, 25
churches, 11, 24, 26, 37, 72, 90, 142

Evangelical, 8, 9, 18n34, 23, 36,

37, 54, 93, 99, 160, 166, 168,
169, 174

threatened by Nazis, 160, 166,

172–3, 173–4

see also DEF, Evangelische

Frauenhilfe, Katholischer
deutscher Frauenbund, and VEFD

Cimbal, Elisabeth, 146–7
citizenship of women, 66–7
civil law, 66, 77, 87
civil servants, female, 65, 68–70, 77,

183

Communists, 24, 70, 87, 88, 89, 90,

93, 110, 157, 158, 162, 183, 185

and female vote, 27
on domestic employees, 72

Conservative Party, 25, 36, 54
constitution, see Weimar Constitution
cottage industry, see home workers
Curtius, Julius, 129
Czechoslovakia, 121, 126

Danzig, 27–8, 49–50, 111, 140

local women’s activism, 141, 142,

144, 145

Dawes Plan, 125, 127, 139
DDP, 3, 8, 27, 37, 38, 49, 50, 55, 65,

120, 129

and alcohol abuse, 96
background of women in, 10
failed merger with DVP, 24
in Prussian government, 8
National School Bill and, 92–3
on abortion, 87
small rentiers and, 108, 110, 112
target of anti-Semitic propaganda, 7
women’s committees in, 39, 54
women’s movement and, 24

DEF, xi, 23, 25, 36, 172
demobilization, 50, 67
Depression, Great, 67, 90, 110–11,

112–13, 162, 168

Detmering, Margarethe, 93
Deutsch, Regine, 39
Deutsch, Therese, 75, 88, 95, 96–7,

109

building up women’s organization

in East Prussia, 141–2, 147

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Index

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Deutsche Nationalpartei, 121
Deutsche Kämpferin, 172
Deutsche Tageszeitung, 27, 55
Deutsche Zeitung, 54
Deutscher Frauenbund, 37
Deutscher Jungmädchendienst, see

German Young Women’s Service

Deutscher Rentnerbund, see German

Rentiers’ League

Deutscher Schutzbund für die Grenz-

und Auslandsdeutschen, see

German Protective League for the

Germans on the Borders and
Abroad

Deutschnationaler Arbeiterbund, 139
Die Deutschnationale Frau, 29, 145,

166, 167, 169

Diehl, Guida, x
Dingeldey, Eduard, x, 34, 160, 164,

171

disarmament, see Versailles, Treaty of
divorce legislation, 87, 89, 99, 138, 140
domestic employees (servants), 5,

71–2, 77, 143, 145

domestic industry, see home workers
Dransfeld, Hedwig, 39
Düringer, Adelbert, 71
DVP-Nachrichtenblatt, 34, 51, 97,

118, 119, 121, 147

East Prussia, 9, 11, 31, 54, 75, 89

DNVP women’s structure in,

140–2, 146, 148, 150, 151, 183

DVP women’s structure in, 35,

147–8

education, see schools
Elizabeth I, 12
Ender, Emma, 7, 38, 129, 159–60
Esser, Hermann, 112
eugenics, 87–8, 102n36, 184

see also racial hygiene

Evangelical Church, see churches,

Evangelical

Evangelische Frauenhilfe, 23
Evans, Richard, 7–8

film, 97, 98, 122
First World War, see World War I
France, 86–7, 88, 117–26, 129, 130
Frauenkorrespondenz, 29, 32–3, 55,

59, 67, 97, 124, 127, 140, 150,
159, 169

on Dawes Plan, 125
on disarmament, 126

Frederick the Great, 12
Freytagh-Loringhoven, Axel von, 172
Fritsch, Milka, 75, 147–8
Fritzsche, Peter, xii, 4
Frobenius, Else, 121, 162, 170, 171
Frobenius, Hermann, 33

Garnich, Lotte, 75, 98–9
Gellately, Robert, 157
German Christian Movement, 160,

161, 165, 166, 174

German League Against the

Emancipation of Women, 54,

62n26

German Protective League for the

Germans on the Borders and
Abroad, 121

German Rentiers’ League, 108, 109,

112

German Women’s Committee for the

Struggle against the War-Guilt Lie,
see war guilt

German Young Women’s Service, 37,

Germanic women, 120, 165
Gestapo, 171–2
Gewerkverein der Heimarbeiterinnen,

see home workers

– 227 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 227

Gierke, Anna von, 7, 27, 41–2n19, 58,

108

Glaubensgemeinschaft Deutsche

Christen, see German Christian
Movement

Goebbels, Joseph, 164, 172
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95
Goltz, Rüdiger von der, 97
Groeben, Clotilde von der, 54, 141–2,

147

Großdeutsche Volkspartei, ix, 121
Günther, Hans K. F., 167

Haas, Lisbeth, 146
Hamburg, 38, 146, 148
Hamel, Ilse, 90–1, 127, 167, 172
Helfferich, Karl, 13
Hergt, Oskar, 25, 30, 55
Herschel, Olga, 148
Hertwig-Bünger, Doris, 67, 69, 71, 87
Hess, Rudolf, 170
Heyl, Hedwig, 75
Hielscher-Panthen, Elsa, 75
Hindenburg, Paul von, 121, 128, 129,

157

venerated by right-wing women,

13, 128, 161, 162, 163, 167

Hindenberg-Delbrück, Bertha, 75,

126

Hitler, Adolf

cult of, 13, 161, 166–7
on women’s rights, 160

Hobsbawm, Eric, 12
Hoffmann, Adolf, 26
Hoffmann(-Bochum), Hedwig, 60, 70,

Hofmann-Göttig, Joachim, 26
Hölzel, Minna, 145
home workers, 25, 28, 73
housewives, 30, 65, 73–77, 85, 119,

123, 137, 142, 145, 149, 183

differences between rural and

urban, 5

DNVP and, 9, 38, 75
DVP and, 8, 38, 75
effect of World War I on, 3, 74
leaving BDF, 129
relation to domestic employees,

rural, 5, 74–7
urban, 5, 8, 73–7

housing, 86, 87, 88
Hugenberg, Alfred, 127–9, 145,

169–70, 172

as party leader, 9, 59, 127, 165,

166

venerated by DNVP women, 13,

166–7, 175n4

women’s response to his new

course, 158, 175n4

illegitimate children, 69–70, 87, 89,

160

Independent Socialists (USPD), 23,

24, 26–7, 122, 143

inflation, 13, 35, 108–10

impact on women’s activism, 31,

33, 35, 137, 139, 147

International Alliance of Women for

Suffrage and Equal Citizenship,
127, 129

International Council of Women, 28,

96, 130

Italy, 76, 170

Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 96
Jecker, Maria, 75
Jews, 27, 90, 92, 94, 124, 126, 162,

167, 168, 169, 184

Volksgemeinschaft and, 6–7
see also anti-Semitism

jury duty, see legal professions

– 228 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 228

Kahl, Wilhelm, 67, 70–1, 99
Kaiser, see Wilhelm II
Kalähne, Anni, 49–50, 111, 141, 142
Kapp, Wolfgang, 31
Kardorff, Siegfried von, 34–5
Kardorff-Oheimb, Katharina von, x,

91, 120

biography, 34–35
longing for a male leader, 12
political training courses for

women, 34–5, 119

Katholischer deutscher Frauenbund,

xi, 39

Kaufmann, Doris, 2
Kershaw, Ian, 157
Keudell, Walter von, 92
Kindergarten, 87, 89
Klingspor, Anni, 150
Klotz, Klara, 55, 91, 95, 99
Königin-Luise-Bund, see Bund

Königin Luise

Koonz, Claudia, 85
KPD, see Communists
Kreuzzeitung, 54–5
Kühn, Lenore, 54–5, 58, 74, 172

biography, 32–3

Kulesza, Anny von, 3, 69, 98, 161,

164, 171

Lange, Else, 49, 50, 57
Lange, Helene, 3, 27, 50, 57–8, 151
League of German Women

Physicians, 171

League of Nations, 50, 94, 124, 126
legal professions, 70–1
Lehmann, Annagrete, 56, 92, 139,

150, 172

anti-Slavic rhetoric, 90
committee on war guilt, 37
critique of women’s solidarity, 59
encouraging racism, 91, 168

on foreign policy, 120, 127, 128,

129

on Nazi takeover, 169–70
on school issues, 93–4
on small rentiers, 108–9, 110
on the connection between

declining birthrate and atheism,
89

on the dissolution of the family in

the Soviet Union, 89

on women’s committees, 32, 145,

159

Lindequist, Elsa von, 167
Löbe, Paul, 112
Locarno, Treaty of, 12, 126, 129
Löwenstein, Kurt, 94
Ludendorff, Erich, 121
Luise, queen of Prussia, 11–12, 13,

140, 149

see also Bund Königin Luise

Lürßen, Elisabeth, 161
Luther, Hans, 129
Luther, Martin, 92

Magnus-von Hausen, Frances, 53
Marelle, Luise, 51
Margis, Hilde, 57, 75–6
marriage, 66, 67, 68–70, 87–9, 90,

147, 168, 173

threat to, 26, 86

maternalism, 3, 107, 117–18, 130,

185

Matz, Elsa, 53, 57, 67, 97, 150, 157–8

and Nazism, 164, 170–1
biography, 37
on anti-Semitism, 162
on birthrate, 86
on black horror, 122
on foreign policy, 119, 129
on physical education and sports,

– 229 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 229

on small rentiers, 111–13
on schools, 92–3, 94
on women in the civil service,

role in film censorship, 98

Mayer, Anna, 59, 66, 71, 147
Mende, Clara, 53, 58, 66, 146, 150

and Nazism, 171
biography, 33–4
committee on war guilt, 37
critique of female egoism, 60
on Black Horror, 122
on demobilization, 67
on foreign policy, 118–19, 119–21,

125, 127, 130

on housewives, 74–6
on National School Bill, 93
on prohibition in the United States,

on women in the civil service, 69

Meyer, Else, 166, 168
midwives, 28, 30, 71–3, 141
Mießner, Otto, 138–9
Moldenhauer, Paul, 34
Mueller-Otfried, Paula, x, 54, 56, 97,

125, 139, 168, 169, 172

and Black Horror, 123–4
biography, 36–7
critique of Hitler cult, 166–7
joining DNVP, 36
on alcohol abuse, 95
on married women in the civil

service, 69–70

on representation of women in the

parties, 30, 58

on small rentiers, 107, 109–11
rejection of women’s party, 58
voting for women’s access to legal

professions, 70

Mühsam-Werther, Charlotte, 75
Müller(-Franken), Hermann, 127

Mütterhilfe Wanderkorb, 149, 150,

151, 171, 173–4

Mumm, Reinhard, 99
Mussolini, Benito, 76, 171

naked dances, 93, 94
Napoleon I, 11–12, 96
National Economic Council, 34, 75
National Liberal Party, 8, 33
National Rural League, 55
National Völkisch Committee of the

DNVP, 7, 91, 168

Nationalliberale Correspondenz, 34,

86, 112, 122

critique of Nazis, 160, 161, 162–3,

164

Navy League of German Women, 37
Neumann, Ilse, 165, 169
Noack, Ilse-Charlotte, 88, 98–9, 140
NSDAP

criticized for its anti-feminism,

160–1, 164, 165–6, 172–3, 183,
185

small rentiers voting for, 107, 113
violence of, 137, 157, 158, 159,

164, 166, 169, 174, 185

Volksgemeinschaft idea of, 90,

161–2, 167, 185

voting for dismissal of married

women in the civil service,
69

NS-Frauenschaft, 170, 171
NS-Volkswohlfahrt, 170
Nürnberg Laws, 169

Olberg, 30–1
Oheimb, Katharina von, see Kardorff-

Oheimb, Katharina von

Pan-Germans, Pan-German League,

50, 166, 167, 168

– 230 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 230

Papen, Franz von, 94, 158
Papendieck, Clara, 142
Peukert, Detlev, 10
physical education, see sports
Plath, Lotte, 140
Pleimes, Henny, 164
Poehlmann, Margarethe, 51, 57, 73,

94, 95, 98–9

building up women’s committees in

East Prussia, 147–8

Poland, 7, 76, 118, 126, 130

birthrate in, 89–90, 130
threat to East German border, 50,

89, 123, 129, 130, 141

police force, female, 71
Politische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der

Frauen von Groß-Berlin, 59,

148

Pomerania, 9, 37, 94, 111

local women’s committees, 31–2,

140, 145, 183

Porembsky, Alexa von, 166, 167, 169,

184

postal workers, 68–70
Prilipp, Beda, 55
prostitution, 71, 98, 122
Prussia

female police in, 71
government of, 8, 88, 94, 158,

162–3

Landtag elections of 1919, 24, 28
Landtag elections of 1921, 52
Landtag elections of 1924, 53,

55–6

Landtag elections of 1928, 56

racial hygiene, 102n36, 117, 165, 167,

169, 173, 181n83

see also eugenics

racism, 76, 118, 122, 124, 130, 162,

185

DNVP and, 6–7, 10, 28, 88, 89,

90–1, 99, 117, 124, 165–9, 174,
183

see also National Völkisch

Committee and völkisch
women’s activists

Rahmlow, Käthe, 53
Reagin, Nancy, xii, 151
Rechenberg, Freda von, 75
Reichsbund der Kinderreichen, see

children-rich families

Reichslandbund, see National Rural

League

RFA, see women’s committees
Richter, Johanna, 7, 169
Ripke-Kühn, Lenore, see Kühn,

Lenore

Rötger, Asta, 36, 145
Rogge-Börner, Pia-Sophie, 172
Rosenberg, Alfred, 160
Ruhr Occupation, 95, 123, 124, 142

Saxony, 71, 73, 75, 119, 159
Schäfer, Dietrich, 50
Scheidel, Ulrike, 92, 97, 98, 126
Schiele, Martin, 97
Schirmacher, Käthe, x, 50, 142

anti-Semitism, 7
biography, 27–8
conflict with Traub, 57
losing her parliamentary seat, 57
in National Assembly, 27
on housewives, 73
on Queen Luise, 12
racism, 28, 90–1, 124, 165, 172, 184
struggle against Versailles, 123,

124, 127, 128

Schleker, Klara, 28
Schleswig-Holstein, 111, 137

and DVP women’s committees,

35–6, 111, 145–7, 148, 150, 183

– 231 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 231

Schmeling, Max, 96
Schmitt, Carl, 181–2n92
Scholz-Klink, Gertrud, 171
schools, 11, 37, 91–5, 141, 167, 170,

171

girls’ schools, 94–5, 171
National School Bill, 92–3, 110

Schott, Maria, 75, 77, 125
Schreiber, Adele, 59, 184
Schumann, Robert, 148
Schwarz, Martha, 35, 129, 162–3

critique of anti-feminism, 53, 159,

164

Schwarze Schmach, see Black Horror

on the Rhine

Siegert, Marie, 53
Silesia, 35, 73, 75

DNVP women in Lauban district,

138–9, 140

see also Upper Silesia

Soviet Union, 26, 89–90
SPD, 23, 26–7, 52, 89, 127, 163, 173,

184

and women’s suffrage, 24
in Prussian government, 8, 88, 94,

158

on abortion, 87
on domestic employees, 72
on eugenics, 88
on midwives, 72–3
on small rentiers, 110, 112
voting for dismissal of married

women in the civil service,
69

Sperber, Else von, 66, 75, 76, 125,

140–2

spiritual motherhood, 3, 11, 130, 161,

165

Spohr, Elisabeth, 28, 66, 73, 88, 98–9,

139

against abortion, 89

defending women’s professional

rights, 67

editor of Frauenkorrespondenz, 33
on alcohol abuse, 95
on foreign policy, 123, 125, 128
on small rentiers, 108, 109
on women in the police, 71
welcoming the Nazi takeover, 169

sports, 11, 37, 96–7
Stahlhelm, 12, 162–3
Stahlhelm referendum for the

dissolution of the Prussian Landtag,
140, 162–3

Stalin, Joseph, 90
Stoecker, Adolf, 25
Storost, Martha, 88
Strasser, Gregor, 161
Stresemann, Gustav, 12, 171

as foreign minister , 8, 123, 125,

126, 127, 129

as party leader, 9, 38
responding to anti-feminism, 50–1,

52, 53, 57–8, 60

venerated by DVP women, 13, 161,

167

Stropp, Emma, 2, 59, 91

critique of anti-feminism, 51–2,

on foreign policy, 119–20, 121,

122, 124, 125

Süchting-Hänger, Andrea, ix, xii, 12
Szagunn, Ilse, 148–9, 171, 184

on abortion, 87, 88
on anti-feminism in the DVP, 50

teachers, 37, 92, 98, 161, 167

teaching as women’s profession, 5,

10, 68, 91, 94–5, 143, 149

Tiling, Magdalene von, x, 65, 92,

124–5, 166, 168, 169, 172

as chair of the VEFD, 37, 172

– 232 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 232

on girls’ schools, 94–5
on National School Bill, 92–3
warning against a decline of the

German population, 90

trash and dirt, 97–8, 183
Traub, Gottfried, 57

Ulbrich, Else, 145, 175n4
United States, 96, 97, 122
Unsere Partei, 169
Upper Silesia, 123, 141
Usborne, Cornelie, 5, 97
USPD, see Independent Socialists

Vaterländischer Frauenverein, 23
VEFD, 26, 36–7, 172
Verdun, 126
Verein für das Deutschtum im

Ausland, 37

Versailles, Treaty of

disarmament clauses, 126, 129
fight of right-wing women against,

117–30, 183

see also war guilt charge

Vietinghoff-Scheel, Leopold von,
168
Voigt, Jane, 111–12, 118, 145–6
Voigtländer, Emmy, 118, 120
völkisch women’s activists (or

völkisch feminists), 90–1, 165, 172,
173, 183

Völkischer Reichsausschuss, see

National Völkisch Committee of the
DNVP

Volksgemeinschaft, ix, 2–7, 9, 141,

148, 161–2, 164, 183, 184–5

and women’s rights, 65
family as cornerstone of, 85
racial and non-racial definition of,

17n31, 17n32, 90, 99, 162, 167,
185

small rentiers issue and, 113
women’s party as representation of,

Voß, Hanny, 75
Voß-Zietz, Martha, 75–6
VRPT, see postal workers

war criminals, suspected, 117, 121
war guilt charge, 94, 117, 118, 123,

127, 129

Dawes Plan and, 125
women’s efforts to refute, 37, 120,

126, 127, 130, 141

Young Plan and, 128

Watter, Helene von, 89–90, 97
Weimar Constitution, 8, 68, 69, 92

clause on equality of women, 39,

51, 58, 66, 183

Weltbühne, 170
Westarp, Emma von, 25
Westarp, Kuno von, 25, 54, 55
Westphalia, 53, 137, 142, 148, 150–1
Wilhelm II, German emperor and

king of Prussia, 4, 11, 13, 117, 138,
140

Wolf, Gertraud, 67, 94, 95–6, 129
Wolff, Margarethe, 25, 175n4
women’s committees, 9, 37, 51

in DNVP, 56, 138–45, 150–1

build-up, 23, 25–6, 28–30, 32
function, 29–31, 38–9

in DVP, 146–51

build-up, 33–6
function, 33–4, 38–9

Women’s League of the German

Colonial Society, 37, 170

women’s party, 57–9, 159
women’s suffrage, 49, 54, 65

introduction of, 1, 24, 60, 163

World War I

demographic impact, 3, 97

– 233 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 233

impact on women, 1, 73, 117, 151,

185

see also Verdun and war guilt

Wrede, Irmgard, 167, 171–2, 184
Württemberg, 55, 91, 95, 145

Young Plan, 127–8, 163

Zahn-von Harnack, Agnes, 38
Zentrumspartei, see Center Party
Zietz, Luise, 122

– 234 –

Index

03 Mothers of Nation 20/11/03 1:42 pm Page 234

Document Outline

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Women’s Entry into Party Politics
3. Hostility to Women in Politics
4. Women’s Rights and Housewives Power
5. Family Youth and Morality
6. Small Rentiers
7. Foreign Policy
8. Women’s Local Politics
9. The Nazi Challenge
Conclusion
Reference Sources
Bibliography
Index

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