The subject of gender history

Elsewhere Canning has identified histories of experiences and mentalities of the broad range of Germans as a major gap in Weimar scholarship.Footnote ⁵ Weimar historiography has focused on the political failures and cultural contradictions of the era. Yet Weimar, with its rapid modernisation, ought to be a fertile field for studying the development of new categories of personal identification and relations. One outstanding common thread in this research is the effort scholars make toward remedying that failing. Michelle Mouton, Cornelie Usborne, and Victoria Harris take inspiration from the methods of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), in order to restore voice and agency to the women and some men who are their historical subjects. Citing an explicit debt to the work of Alf Lüdtke, each uses microhistories to make their analyses of policies and practices come alive for readers.Footnote ⁶ They show how people took the initiative in managing their own lives within the larger fields of state regulation, elite social norms, and cultural production.

Mouton's book on family works at the level of local administration, including both state functionaries and citizens whose lives were shaped by interaction with government. Mouton's analysis recognises that at the ‘crux of many family policy disagreements lay the question of proper gender roles’ (Mouton, 7). Each chapter traces developments in one aspect of family regulation – marriage, divorce, adoption, maternal welfare, pronatalism – chronologically through the Weimar Republic and then the Nazi period. In addition to extensive research in Westphalian local archives, including individual case files compiled by the courts and by social work agencies, Mouton also conducted oral history interviews to add richness and depth to her reconstruction of the strategies and attitudes of the people regulated. Mouton finds that individuals often manipulated or duped ‘the system’ to their own advantage. Then again, the same person could eagerly assist state agents in the persecuting of others. Although men generally had more power, Mouton demonstrates that they were not automatically more closely aligned with the interests of the central state.

Mouton's work is an important corrective to the focus on official policy, national advocacy organisations, and high-ranking doctors found in such influential works as Burleigh and Wippermann's The Racial State and Weindling's Health, Race, and German Politics.Footnote ⁷ She makes a strong argument that the Nazi regime was never able to actualise its premise that the state should monopolise setting and enforcing family and reproductive standards. Mouton's sections on marriage, divorce, and adoption bring together aspects of family important for Weimar history. On divorce, for example, Mouton analyses why women seeking divorce often reconciled with husbands they accused of abuse. She finds that ‘women who had accepted more modern expectations of companionate marriage used the court meetings to get outside intervention to help reform their abusive spouses’ (Mouton, 73). Judges, on the other hand, ‘resisted all legislation that they believed eroded patriarchal authority or undermined women's roles as wives and mothers’ (Mouton, 79). Mouton's chapters on welfare and reproduction enter an already crowded field.Footnote ⁸ Despite a drift toward eugenic solutions during Weimar, Mouton finds that deep conflicts between and within social groups and advocacy organisations prevented coercive measures from becoming standard (Mouton, 273).

Usborne conducted similar research using local court records to reconstruct the cultural and social worlds of women seeking and undergoing abortions. Usborne too focused on the relationship between state policy, local administration and the women subjected to this regulation. She adds to this triad abortion practitioners and ‘helpers’, men and women in the pregnant woman's circle who facilitated a termination. Cultures of Abortion provides a rich portrait of the social networks, languages and cultural values that surrounded pregnant women and shaped their everyday lives. Usborne's interpretations provide a stunning basis for a deeper history of gendered life in the Weimar period than we have previously had. She demonstrates that the conditions of industrial capitalism meant that older patterns of agrarian gender relations could no longer function. In the transition, reproductive issues, no longer ‘women's business’, were openly discussed in both single-sex and mixed environments (Usborne, 174, 186–7). Usborne is unfailingly fascinating in teasing out the dynamics of messy sex lives, revealed when the female partner in an unmarried couple became pregnant. These stories add texture to our understanding of sexual beliefs and practices in the past among people who did not often write memoirs or novels.

Usborne discovered a common set of cultural beliefs about pregnancy that underlay women's confident agency in making termination decisions. Working-class culture included a hybrid understanding of female anatomy and reproduction that facilitated control of fertility. Women knew about modern biology, but also trusted in the evidence of their bodily experience as interpreted through local cultural norms. They saw a missed period as a condition that might be remedied without yet thinking of it as a pregnancy. Although her data cannot be comprehensive due to the secrecy surrounding the vast majority of abortions, Usborne's large case studies suggest that most of these early-term lay-practitioner-assisted abortions were safe and effective (Usborne, 119–120). Both Catholic and Protestant women expressed relief, gratitude and satisfaction following the restoration of their menses.

Similarly, Victoria Harris reads court and social service agency records, against the grain, to reconstruct prostitutes’ lives, agency, and feelings. For example, Harris highlights the life of Cornelie Bauer, whose criminal arrest record spans the years 1907–1940. Bauer petitioned to leave the regulatory system, got married, was incarcerated, and defended herself against a charge of insulting the Führer. Analysing case documentation, Harris depicts the everyday struggles of poorer women. Although women's interaction with the state is fundamental, Harris also examines the urban milieu, social relationships, and anxious discourses focused on the figure of the prostitute as part of a continuous web giving meaning to women's life courses. Here she strongly contradicts the prostitute stereotype circulated in educated discourses of the period and often subsequently adopted uncritically by scholars. Women who practiced prostitution were not viewed as outcasts or fallen women in their own social circles (Harris, 186). They interacted with neighbours and local businesses, had various relationships with men other than their customers, and continued to be part of relations of obligation with families and friends. Harris demonstrates that prostitution fell on a continuum of options considered by women supporting themselves. Like Mouton, Harris finds that many women were adept at navigating the regulatory system, suffering from limitation and incarceration when they were caught up in bureaucratic controls, yet at times making their own demands for regulations to ameliorate working conditions.

Harris's prostitute-at-the-centre approach is refreshing and stimulating; she clears away the fog of bourgeois morality and disgust in relation to sex work (Harris, 14–17, 193). Harris strikingly finds that statistical analysis of the social situations of women regulated for prostitution almost exactly mirrors a similar profile (class background, marriage rate) of German women in general. In addition, by sketching in layers of social interaction, Harris contributes to our understanding of Weimar society beyond the educated strata. Her empirical research illuminates terrain previously known through fiction by Döblin, Fallada and Keun.

Sutton and Jensen draw on a different set of theoretical tools to investigate gender change. They conceive of Weimar subjects as media consumers who actively incorporated narratives and images into self-constructions suited to Weimar structural conditions. These authors draw on the rich array of Weimar media – commentary, journalism, popular magazines, literature, film and advertising images – in analyses of both the threat and the possibility of gender change.

Sutton's unusual book takes a broad view of a single trope: the masculine woman. Masculinity was variously attributed to New Women, sportswomen, homosexual women and independent women. Sutton situates masculinisation discourses firmly within the conditions of post-war economic change and the accompanying crisis of masculinity. As consumerism and rationality challenged both male and female gender roles and norms, the masculine woman became a potent symbol of perceived gender convergences. Sutton considers the varied symbolic content that images of the masculine woman could contain in different discursive contexts. She also strives for a queer approach that opens the figure from a flat threatening presence to one equally open to fantasy and desire.

Sutton finds that most mainstream media portrayed a degree of masculine performance by women as a pleasurable, often humorous, way of working through unsettling gender transformation. One common narrative strategy involved returning the deviant figure to softer femininities and heterosexual regimes of desire (Sutton, 40–1). Yet despite these reassuring moves, Sutton emphasises that media consumers could clearly recognise the female potency inherent in a figure wearing short hair and sporty clothing or the reversal of the gaze represented by the monocle fad. In her view these potentials were not demonised for all readers, but available for the construction of new subjectivities.

Jensen likewise argues that sports provided a fertile site for exploring the potentials of masculinity and femininity in the era after the First World War – a time when the national body was in particular need of healing and strengthening. Among the titles reviewed here, and historical gender studies generally, Jensen's work is the all too rare example of work investigating simultaneous and interactive change in both male and female gender models.

Jensen focuses on tennis, boxing and athletics – sports that captured diverse elements of modernisation on politics, economics and society. Jensen is especially insightful in capturing the multiple meanings embedded in images and messages of media sports coverage. Male boxers, for example, could simultaneously be symbols of national strengthening and aggression, a coarsening of the male ideal and male objectification subject to female gazes and desires. Women track stars were seen both as tightly focused on a selfish quest for personal efficiency and as ideal modern healthy mothers.

Jensen shows how individual sports stars like the tennis player Paula Reznicek or the boxer Max Schmeling managed their media presence to become role models of the aggressive, independent and sexually active New Woman and self-made, wealthy male celebrity respectively. Jensen argues that the discourses, images and celebrity role models taken together offered imaginative space for reconfiguring gender ideals that had influence far beyond athletes themselves. The exchange of the corset for self-initiated exercise regimes symbolises new, active modes of femininity (Jensen, 36, 102). Jensen connects the regimes of training to the efficiency, dependence on scientific expertise, self-discipline and routine demanded of workers in the rationalised capitalist economy. Jensen traces how both conservative and modernising commentators drew these comparisons, arguing over the past and the future in opposing pessimistic and optimistic terms.

Ambiguities of feminism and reform

Earlier histories of Weimar women often concentrated on women's movement figures who left extensive records in feminist archives. This approach shapes Roos's examination of prostitution, Weimar Through the Lens of Gender, which focuses closely on the 1927 Law for Combatting Venereal Disease. Roos interprets the law as proof of the organised feminists’ success in influencing the state. Along with the Reich youth welfare law (1922) and the Schund und Schmutz law (Law for the Protection of Youth from Rubbish and Filth, 1927), it expressed feminists’ aim of motherly and moral official influence on society through the creation of new state bureaucracies. Here Roos strongly revises an earlier historiography that posited the ‘failure of feminism’ by focusing on formal politics (Roos, 7–8). She concludes, ‘Prostitution reform suggests that Weimar feminists were more successful at challenging established gender hierarchies and advancing women's rights than historians have often claimed’ (Roos, 133).

Roos's second major argument is that, following its implementation, groups who perceived the law as a failure in controlling prostitution (including leaders of Catholic morality organisations and religious feminists) migrated into a closer alliance with the nationalist right-wing and accepted Nazi rule in 1933 as a means of re-establishing sexual and gender order. Roos makes excellent use of moments such as the ‘Black Horror’ panic about colonial occupation troops, the Bremen morality scandal and the Kundt report alleging widespread Jewish sex trafficking in Silesia to establish the centrality of sex and gender fears to political and cultural developments in the Weimar period.

While Harris takes the prostitute as a historical subject, refuting views of prostitutes as victims, Roos focuses on revaluing the importance of women's emancipation to the innovations and decline of the Republic, refuting a previous view of feminists as authoritarian and anti-individualist. These different strong points produce conflicting arguments. Although Roos recognises the class bias of feminists and acknowledges that their attitudes may have limited the effects of their successes, she ultimately claims that they were motivated by belief in all women's rights as individuals. Due to feminist lobbying, ‘prostitutes enjoyed a range of legal and civil rights they had previously lacked’ (Roos, 132–4). When read in conjunction with Harris, Mouton and Usborne though, Roos's rosy view of feminist reformers is problematic. Roos underplays the women's movement's basic allegiance to bourgeois ideas of sexual morality. Although the women she studies emphasised the individual rights of women in their rhetoric, they had in mind primarily the ‘endangered’ innocent non-prostitute. In their thought, vulnerable women and girls, given rights, would choose to reform themselves along the motherly feminist model. Women who purposefully made a living through prostitution, referred to as ‘habitual prostitutes’, gave up their rights. Harris's work reveals that the ‘rights’ won through feminist advocacy had little practical meaning since prostitution was still equated with the spread of venereal disease; suspected prostitutes were incarcerated more often under the new health-based system of regulation.

The stakes of the difference between Harris's and Roos's interpretations are deeper than simply how scholars represent feminists and prostitutes. The clash invokes the question of who counts in gender history. Harris's introduction makes expansive claims about the challenge her work poses to ‘a century of assumptions’ and myths (Harris, 9). Unfortunately the book begins with a laboured introduction in an unnecessarily defensive tone attacking previous feminist approaches to prostitution. Yet her complaint that over-emphasis on emancipation contributes to an assumption of passive victimisation of lower-class and less-represented women is a valid intervention. Harris calls for a ‘gendered history’ which is not ‘just a women’s, feminist, or gender history’ (Harris, 30). Partially this is just a way of saying that gender is most visible when looking at specific topics that cut through society. Women's movements and formal rights are important, but, by themselves, a misleading index of the actual impact of gender on politics, society and culture.

In the previous literature on abortion, Usborne also found a similar failure to represent the agency of lower-class women in favour of attention to well-archived reformers. Her chapters on reform discourse and popular media articulate a brilliant critique of the Weimar liberal and socialist establishment's promulgation of demeaning tropes of passive victimisation. Usborne suggests that scholars have taken this narrative of rescue by middle-class reformers at face value, perhaps because of the sensitivity of the topic. Reformers depicted their efforts as saving abject poor pregnant women from unscrupulous abortionists and returning them to normative love, marriage and motherhood.

These works highlight the limits of feminist-inspired histories in which criticism of first-wave feminists seems taboo. Harris (and to a lesser extent, Mouton) makes a strong argument for antagonism between women of different classes (Harris, 167–9). Harris and Mouton reconstruct the careers of feminist bureaucrats who enforced strict punishments on the women under their ‘care’. Their evidence complicates the reformers’ view of themselves (and historians’ of them) as heroes of women's emancipation. Harris, Usborne and Mouton all turn from a programmatic narrative of gender conflict and feminist activism and instead work to restore agency and voice to women who were not organised in a political way.

This is part of a larger turn in gender history toward the use of multiple source types in order to get at the construction of subjectivity and identity. These concepts also enable cultural histories like Jensen's and Sutton's to make historical claims that go beyond simple reading of representations as pure discourse. One benefit of this more multi-faceted approach is to reposition women in relationship with men. Significant co-operation between the sexes is especially evident in Harris's and Usborne's books. Jensen takes this one step further and considers men and women, masculinity and femininity, in relationship with one another in a more narrowly defined topic.

Gender and the Nazi transition

Each of these books uses its research to answer the urgent question of When Biology Became Destiny: how was gender implicated in the transition between a freewheeling and progressive Weimar period and the onset of a repressive Nazi regime? Understanding the continuities and ruptures of 1933 remains an important task in the historiography of twentieth-century Germany. Bringing together the various arguments made here demonstrates the complex interaction of gender and politics in this transition. Roos makes a carefully formulated argument tracing the turning point in the late 1920s to a backlash against the success of prostitution reform. The Catholic Volkswart Bund, a morality organisation, sponsored public protests and petitions to re-criminalise prostitution with harsher penalties. Roos connects mobilisations like this to the Papen coup in 1932, when the chancellor replaced moderate socialists in the Prussian state with right-wing administrators. These administrators soon issued decrees against public indecency and increased police harassment of prostitutes. Roos argues that these measures ‘greatly strengthened support of the emergency presidential regime among religious conservatives’, allowing ‘National Socialists [to reap] the fruits of the early 1930s moral agenda’ (205). Roos not only emphasises a stark rupture between the two eras, but also makes a convincing case explaining how the morals of certain women became a factor in winning support for the Hitler government.

Harris, in contrast, contradicts the notion of a meaningful rupture in 1933. She uses the story of Käthe Petersen to illustrate continuities in regulation. Petersen, one of the new Weimar professional women and a left liberal, worked as a lawyer for the Hamburg youth protection bureau. After 1933, she eagerly grasped the stronger interventionist tools offered by the Nazi state to incarcerate 250 women she classified as ‘asocial’. Harris tends to see continuities in the hostility between agents of state regulation and prostitutes across government types. ‘Both regimes involved a mix of permissiveness and repression; both struggled to balance progressive and conservative views toward sexuality specifically, and social structure more generally . . . prostitution policy presents a picture of successive, increasingly secular, scientific and omnipotent governments that wanted to extend their control to sexuality’ (Harris, 190).

Mouton's and Usborne's studies provide more mixed views of the continuity question. Mouton makes a strong explicit argument for a ‘radical departure’ after 1933 (Mouton, 15). The debates and experiments of the Weimar period were suppressed in favour of monolithic racialised party dogma. Usborne, of course, recognises the radically racial and eugenic Nazi interpretation of abortion and its use as a tool of the state as a major break with Weimar. She also characterises Weimar as a state that fostered tolerance among a growing public sympathetic to the plight of poor women. However, Mouton's and Usborne's research on specific local cases reveals some continuities as well. Mouton demonstrates how welfare clients and court petitioners used the system to their own advantage and resisted intrusion into their lives across both regimes. She finds that local administrators were very uneven in following national policy – some radicalised it, some diluted it. Mouton and Usborne agree that chronic lack of resources frustrated Nazi ability to carry out the sweeping changes called for by the Party leadership. Both point to significant failures in implementing ideology at the local level. Anti-Jewish policies were the significant and striking exception.

The two cultural histories agree that changes in official representation and ideology could not turn back the changes in gendered subjectivity that had occurred during Weimar. Sutton argues persuasively that although toward the end of Weimar female masculinity was no longer in fashion and evoked the stigma of homosexuality, the engagement with the figure during the Weimar period permanently expanded the range of options for female identity. Slim practical styles of body culture continued to be standard during the Nazi era. The common propaganda image of the fertile farm wife signals a new rigidity in gender ideology, but must be balanced by recognition that even the Nazis could not force women to abandon new lifestyles they had become accustomed to. Jensen traces the continuing critique of the rationalised, specialised and individualistic athlete by the National Socialist press, which favoured ‘glorification of the holistic and ostensibly organic physical form’. Yet, like Sutton, he finds, ‘National Socialist rhetoric did not necessarily conform to practice’ (Jensen, 133). German athletes trained for the 1936 Olympics using modern international methods and the Nazi state continued to promote women's competitive athletics and the model of the physically fit mother. In neither sports nor personal style could the Nazis roll back changes in gender and body. As Jensen puts it, ‘The Weimar body. . . outlived the Weimar Republic’ (Jensen, 138).

This scholarship points to a growing consensus. At the level of politics and rhetoric, the Nazi state promoted itself as, and was, radically different from Weimar. Historians are right to draw clear ruptures in particular areas that the Party claimed as indispensable to its mission. But it is also clear from these studies of culture and everyday life that a more complicated negotiation between state and society was occurring.

Gendering Weimar history

Have we reached a point where gender is indispensable to a convincing and coherent understanding of Weimar? Jensen's observation that ‘Weimar media arguably concentrated greater attention on the issue of changing male and female roles than any other contemporary issue’ nicely sums up the argument for the centrality of gender shared by the works under review (Jensen, 10). These monographs share a clear basic understanding of why this was so. The First World War, and especially the defeat, created a palpable ‘shattering’ of the old that was simultaneously freeing and frightening. Gender debates were shaped by the contrasting perceptions that, on the one hand, the family and the gender order needed to be secured for healing and rebuilding and, on the other, that young women were resisting the necessary sacrifice and deference to authority. Germans ‘feared that the German family, the only institution they deemed capable of stabilizing and restoring German society, might not be equal to the task without substantial help. . . Paternal authority. . . needed to be shored up’, while some women ‘resisted the reestablishment of paternal authority’ (Mouton, 5).

Weimar people shared a sense that past forms of courting, family and division of labour were no longer adequate to the conditions of the present and future. As a result, writes Mouton, ‘Weimar policy makers struggled to create state policy that would at once respect traditional values and recognize and adapt to social change’ (Mouton, 273). On the cultural side, images of the masculine woman were so ubiquitous, as Sutton observes, because they ‘provided readers of both sexes with a vent for cultural anxieties about female emancipation, women's work or changing gender roles within the family’ (Sutton, 8). Uncertainty about gender roles was an integral part of most of Weimar's cultural and political struggles with stabilisation and innovation.

This research confirms that the extension of citizenship rights in the Weimar constitution, as Kathleen Canning has argued, whatever its political effect, had a powerful role in shaping individual subjectivity. Although most historians accept that the gender system had altered due to the war and defeat, many were sceptical of connections between the excesses of cultural representation and the everyday lives and consciousness of the German masses. At most, older historiography gave gender upheaval a negative role, consolidating forces working toward normality and sexual conservatism. Canning calls for attention to citizenship as an irreversible process of opening imaginative space for the construction of new selves.Footnote ⁹ By attending more thoroughly to everyday life and self-fashioning, all these works turn on the creation of Weimar subjectivities formed by seizing the notion that now people could, indeed, had the right and duty to, shape their own futures. Women's previous categorical exclusion made this development particularly striking in their case. Usborne argues that ‘awareness of their economic, political, and social power’ encouraged women's ‘becoming more assertive in controlling their fertility’ (Usborne, 208–9). From mass rallies for reproductive freedom to the development of homosexual subjectivities, these authors depict individual people in the past with a new sense of self-confidence vis-à-vis the state and respectable society. The emergence of new methodological and conceptual tools appears to have been a pre-condition for the current historical re-engagement with gender during the Weimar period.

Yet, hopeful as the appearance of the new work is, these books, with the exception of Jensen’s, still closely cluster around the traditional topics of women's history: family, sexuality and reproduction. The authors reviewed here admirably connect their topics to the broad themes of politics, economics and society. But can we envision gendered histories of other topics not usually viewed ‘through the lens of gender’? The focus on particular topics also leaves open the potential for a new synthesis of Weimar women's or gender history. Is such a development possible or desirable? Will a promising opening toward studying gender as a system that includes men and masculinities be expanded? These are the significant questions for the future of Weimar gender history.