In Germany, women were granted the right to attend university nationwide in 1908. In 1919, the Weimar Constitution declared men and women to have the same fundamental rights. This meant women now enjoyed citizenship rights, voting rights, the right to hold office, achieve certifications, pursue careers, join societies. The years following these decrees saw the rise of a newly liberated class of women. Between 1907 and 1925, the percentage of working women in Germany increased to 35%. During World War I especially, degree-requiring fields saw a particular boost: Between 1913 and 1918, the number of women in engineering went up by 544%.
Psychologist Alice Rühle-Gerstel, a progressive Jewish feminist, was among those colloquially referred to as a “new woman” of the era. In 1933, she expertly described this exciting time in German history:
Women began to cut an entirely new figure. A new economic figure who went out into public economic life as an independent worker or wage-earner entering the free market that had up until then been free only for men. A new political figure who appeared in the parties and parliaments, at demonstrations and gatherings. A new physical figure who not only cut her hair and shortened her skirts but began to emancipate herself altogether from the physical limitations of being female. Finally, a new intellectual-psychological figure who fought her way out of the fog of sentimental ideologies and strove toward a clear, objective knowledge of the world and the self.
However, not everyone was ready to make changes to the social order. “The ‘new woman’ was the target for nationalists who believed that her selfish reluctance to have children endangered the future of the German race,” writes historian Helen Boak in Women in the Weimar Republic. The latter half of the 1920s saw a revival of obsolete ideals of femininity, including the Nazi slogans “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church) and “Die frau gehört ins haus” (women belong in the home), each clearly spelling out to women that they had no business in public life.
Conservative thinkers of the era encouraged women to return to patriarchal traditions. “Since the task of every woman culminates in motherhood and therefore the preservation of the population, any job a woman may have must take a back seat to family life,” German educator and theologian Magdalene von Tiling asserted in 1925. German women were expected to quit their jobs if they got married; schoolteachers were required to. German universities required female faculty members to pledge their celibacy (a rule that wasn’t overturned until 1950).
Calls to return to the regressive ideal of women as homemakers got even louder under Hitler. Nazis reiterated that motherhood was a woman’s highest calling; the domestic sphere was where she could best serve her nation. They condemned intellectual pursuits as unhealthy for women. “The goal of female education must be unswervingly the future mother,” Hitler demanded.
Once in power, the regime quickly translated this rhetoric into decrees to enforce these ideals.
