A German Women's Movement

Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880-1933

Nancy R. Reagin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807845257, 9780807822104
• eBook ISBN: 9780807864012
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Nancy Reagin analyzes the rhetoric, strategies, and programs of more than eighty bourgeois women’s associations in Hanover, a large provincial capital, from the Imperial period to the Nazi seizure of power. She examines the social and demographic foundations of the Hanoverian women’s movement, interweaving local history with developments on the national level. Using the German experience as a case study, Reagin explores the links between political conservatism and a feminist agenda based on a belief in innate gender differences.

Reagin’s analysis encompasses a wide variety of women’s organizations — feminist, nationalist, religious, philanthropic, political, and professional. It focuses on the ways in which bourgeois women’s class background and political socialization, and their support of the idea of 'spiritual motherhood,' combined within an antidemocratic climate to produce a conservative, maternalist approach to women’s issues and other political matters. According to Reagin, the fact that the women’s movement evolved in this way helps to explain why so many middle-class women found National Socialism appealing.

CHAPTER 1 The Urban Backdrop

The city of Hanover, which provided a fertile field of operations for a bourgeois women’s movement, also presented features that influenced the course of this movement; these features would also impose some constraints on its development. Hanover was not “representative” of other cities in the German Empire, but then neither was any other city. Hanover was typical only in the sense that it shared a number of particular local characteristics with many other cities. The Hanover women’s movement was thus the product of a specific urban environment. Local women’s associations were shaped by the city’s basic, persistent features—the confessional distribution of its population, for example—and also by the constant changes that Hanover was undergoing during this period, including rapid industrial development and an expanding population. In addition, Hanover women’s organizations were influenced by the city’s political environment, which set the parameters within which the local women’s movement would develop. Finally, the goals that the movement would pursue were influenced by the values of bourgeois culture as a whole, and those of bourgeois women’s separate sphere in particular.

The women’s movement in Hanover, and across Germany, was first and foremost a response to the social problems created by industrialization and urbanization; the first women’s groups were charitable associations, and social welfare organizations made up the backbone of the movement throughout the Wilhelmine era. None of these groups would have emerged except for the unparalleled changes taking place within the cities that nurtured the women’s movement. Urban historian Jürgen Reulecke has written that the expanding cities of imperial Germany fell into two categories. The first category consisted of cities that “sprang out of the ground,” small towns or villages hosting industries that grew explosively. These cities had skewed class and occupational distributions: essentially, they were enormous settlements of industrial workers. The second category included cities that were regional centers for commerce, administration, and transport. They attracted industrial development, but the industrial sector was usually diversified; this type of city grew more slowly than the first category of cities, but at a steady pace.¹

Hanover is an example of the second type of metropolis. The city was the administrative hub for the province of Hanover, with about 10 percent of all workers employed by the local or provincial governments. In addition, Hanover’s position in the railroad network guaranteed that it became the regional center for transportation and commerce. Laws passed after 1866 to encourage industrialization contributed to growth in the manufacturing sector; by 1875, Hanover boasted 470 large factories, including heavy industry, chemical production, and textile plants. The city’s demographic profile reflected its economic development. Hanover’s population grew from about 87,000 in 1869 to almost 210,000 in 1891; it would increase to 316,000 before 1914.²

Most of the city’s population was Protestant. The city’s expansion did not affect Protestants’ overwhelming domination of the local urban environment: in 1867, Protestants comprised 90.5 percent of the city’s population, while Catholics made up 7.4 percent, and Jews accounted for 2 percent of Hanover’s inhabitants, a distribution that hardly changed over the next forty-five years.³ Hanover’s elite groups were almost exclusively Protestant; local Catholics were disproportionately working-class immigrants from other regions who had been drawn to the city by its industrial development. As a result of this confessional distribution, Hanover’s women’s movement would be dominated by Protestants: Catholic and Jewish women, surrounded and outnumbered, would form their own, separate confessional women’s associations.

Hanover’s position as a center for administration and commerce meant that the city had a broad middle class: civil servants, white-collar employees, professionals, businessmen, and the traditional Mittelstand groups, including merchants, artisans, well-to-do peasants, and shopkeepers. Collectively, these groups referred to themselves as the Bürgertum. The Bürgertum has been a problematic social group in German historiography; historians differ over the extent to which bürgerliche social groups can be treated as a single class, or if indeed it makes sense to speak of a German “middle class.”⁴

The Bürgertum of the nineteenth century cannot be defined simply by any single criterion. It included a wide range of occupational groups. In terms of income, bourgeois social groups ranged from impoverished academics, eking out a living as Privatdozenten, to prosperous factory owners. The educational background of German burghers was equally varied; those from the traditional Mittelstand were usually apprenticed as soon as they finished the Volksschule (elementary school), whereas professionals, academics, and high-level civil servants completed university degrees. The varied social groups that made up this bourgeoisie often had conflicting economic interests. The German bourgeoisie was also divided by confession. The Protestant majority tended toward disdain and suspicion of Catholics, whom Protestants suspected of being blindly loyal to Rome, and thus insufficiently patriotic. In addition, Jewish Germans were discriminated against by Protestants and Catholics alike, and still faced substantial social and professional barriers.⁵

In spite of these divisions, however, bourgeois society was also united in several important ways. Members of the Bürgertum shared the perception that as a group, they were caught between two other powerful forces: the working class and the aristocracy. Bürgerliche society was also held together by a set of values that included a drive for self-improvement and success. Personal worth was measured by achievements—intellectual goals in the case of the Bildungsbürgertum, and material success for other middle-strata groups. Qualities that furthered personal achievement—diligence, self-discipline, conscientiousness, and thrift—were particularly admired. Gambling, excessive drinking, profligacy, sexual irregularities, and other activities that would tend to interfere with work and success were condemned. These values unified bourgeois social groups that were otherwise disparate and bound them into what Rudy Koshar calls a “moral community.”⁶ Bürgerliche society was thus simultaneously a collection of disparate social groups in the process of consolidation and a community with a shared ideology.

Bourgeois women had their own beliefs, some of which overlapped with the values of men of their class, and some of which were uniquely their own. Generally speaking, bourgeois women tended to be more religiously observant, and more fervent in their celebration of religion than their husbands and fathers. Linked to this stronger religious orientation, bürgerliche women adhered more closely to the code of sexual conduct and morals prescribed by organized religion; they tended to reject the idea of a double sexual standard for men and women, and espoused the idea of a “single morality” of chastity for men and women. In this code, a woman’s physical integrity and chastity were closely tied to her personal honor.⁷

These beliefs were an obvious departure from the behavioral norms observed by most men, but in some ways this was to be expected, since both bourgeois men and women embraced polarized definitions of masculinity and femininity. The two sexes were seen as being both antithetical and complementary. In this schema, men were rational, assertive, strong, and dominant, whereas women were supposed to be more pious, emotional, intuitive, nurturing, and submissive. The sexual division of labor in bourgeois society was grounded in these polarized stereotypes: women’s emotional, nurturing nature assigned them to the private sphere of home and family, whereas men’s rationality and aggressiveness suited them to the masculine public world of work and politics. Women’s domain was separate from, and by no means equal to, the masculine realm.⁸

Bourgeois women also subscribed to many of the values that bound bürgerliche society together, however. Bourgeois women valued such qualities as thrift, diligence, and conscientiousness; but for women, these attributes were supposed to serve a different function than they did for men. These characteristics were admired in men because they furthered personal achievement, and material success; in women, these qualities were valued insofar as they were expressed in domestic life. Bourgeois women shared a specifically feminine subset of values, which stressed domesticity: the management of an orderly household, and the maintenance of an affectionate, strictly moral family life.

Efficient, capable housewifery was an essential component of a family’s claim to bourgeois status and respectability. Respectability was achieved not just through the husband’s educational level or income, but also through the cleanliness, orderliness, and manners displayed by the family in its private life. Indeed, the wives of civil servants had to maintain an orderly and respectable homelife, since this was a requirement for their husbands’ employment and advancement.⁹

The most obvious norm in the constellation of bourgeois feminine values, visible as soon as a visitor crossed a family’s threshold, was an extremely high standard of cleanliness. Middle-class housewives strove to keep their homes spotless, an ideal that impressed one British visitor, who claimed that German housewives of her acquaintance put their curtains through ten separate rinses when washing them. “The extreme tidiness of German rooms is a constant source of surprise,” she commented, “They are as guiltless of ‘litter’ as the showrooms of a furniture emporium. . . . Each chair has its place, each cushion, each ornament. Even where there are children German rooms never look disarranged. . . . [In one flat] I saw everywhere the exquisite order and spotlessness the notable German housewife knows how to maintain.”¹⁰

The bourgeois emphasis on thrift found its domestic expression in housewives’ careful consumption and detailed household accounts. Washing curtains by hand, instead of sending them to the cleaners as our English visitor did, was one of a hundred small ways to conserve money. When the feather stuffing in bolsters, which could not be cleaned at home, had to be sent to the cleaners, the good housewife went along, and watched to make sure that she got her own feathers back.¹¹ The obligatory Sunday dinner, a joint of meat or roasted goose, made repeated appearances later in the week, as every bit of the “leftovers” was used. Thrift, documented through detailed bookkeeping, helped bourgeois families accumulate capital for sons’ tuition fees or daughters’ dowries.¹²

Besides the endless cleaning, baking, washing, sewing, knitting, darning, canning, and shopping, bourgeois housewives had to make time for bearing and rearing their children, which was in fact their primary responsibility. Here, the bourgeois value of conscientiousness found expression in a particular style of child-rearing, which stressed intense involvement and supervision by the mother over her children’s lives. It was during this period that the sentimentalization and glorification of motherhood were reaching new heights, and bourgeois mothers were expected to provide a secure, nurturing, and loving environment for their children.

Mothers organized their children’s days, arranging the children’s walks, meals, lessons, story reading, and games, which were supervised by the housewife herself, or a servant. Mothers taught their children, especially daughters, skills such as piano playing or sewing; older daughters had to be chaperoned when they went out into public. In addition, bourgeois mothers were expected to teach their children appreciation for German culture, even high culture, by exposing them to the classics. This style of child-rearing was intended to produce well-behaved, obedient, polite children, who were trained for upward social mobility, and whose public behavior enhanced the respectability of the family.¹³

Most observers agreed that German bourgeois housewives did all this work with the aid of fewer servants than their French or English counterparts. Unlike English ladies, who were not expected to enter the kitchen or dirty their hands, most German housewives continued to perform all kinds of housework, even after their families had enough wealth to make this unnecessary; this may have been related to the emphasis on extreme thrift. A British observer commented that unlike French or English bourgeois mothers, who almost all employed nurses or nannies, the typical German “mother spends her time with her children, playing with them when she has leisure, cooking and ironing and saving for them and husband. . . . The German mother leaves her children less to servants than the English mother does. . . . [She] will do cooking and ironing when an Englishwoman of the same class would delegate all such work to servants.”¹⁴ The German emphasis on the personal work, involvement, and responsibility of the housewife would be reflected in the movement later created by bourgeois women: it was a style of housewifery and child-rearing that bourgeois women believed could be adopted by every woman, regardless of income level.

Bürgerliche women thus shared the values of the broader bourgeois public sphere, but they expressed these norms in their own way, within a domestic context. Overall, bourgeois women strove to reflect the ideals of thrift, hard work, extreme cleanliness, and orderliness and to produce well-reared, polite children. Realizing these values, they believed, would enhance the family’s happiness; it also bolstered the family’s respectability and the individual housewife’s status among her acquaintances.

These values, nurtured within the bourgeois household, would be expressed in the work undertaken by clubwomen outside the home. Cleanliness, order, and discipline were tantamount to German civilization for bourgeois men: their wives and daughters tended to see domestic cleanliness, order, and discipline as the essence of civilized life, a view that would find expression within women’s associations. Reforming working-class households to reflect these norms would become an important part of the mission civilazatrice of the bourgeois women’s movement.

The movement that bourgeois women would create depended on an organizational form already widespread in bourgeois society, the local voluntary association (Verein). Voluntary associations first began to play a significant role in German public life during the last half of the eighteenth century. Early associations were agricultural societies, reading circles, and musical clubs; philanthropic societies and sociable clubs were soon added to the growing list of voluntary organizations that were being founded across Germany. After 1815, political associations became widespread, along with groups devoted to arts and sciences, professional societies, and humanitarian reform organizations.¹⁵ By the mid-nineteenth century, every German locality had developed a network of voluntary associations, clubs, and societies.

With the exception of professional groups, voluntary associations were not restricted to a single occupational group and were formally democratic. Although most associations were, in fact, exclusive (the degree of exclusivity varied, but bourgeois societies rarely admitted working-class members), they accepted members from differing social backgrounds. Citizens who joined bourgeois organizations left their families, guilds, and neighborhoods to associate with other members from different occupations. This mingling of members with different occupational backgrounds worked to break down barriers between bürgerliche social groups; voluntary associations thus built bridges within the Bürgertum, and contributed to the integration of different middle-strata groups into a unified community.

Within the Bürgertum, voluntary associations helped to fill members’ leisure hours, and became one the chief forums within which bourgeois culture was articulated. The increasing specialization of associations devoted to various arts and sciences led to the creation of an educated public, an audience for new works of art or for scientific debates. Other bourgeois voluntary organizations, devoted to philanthropy or reform, acted as adjuncts to the state in supporting schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Urban Backdrop
• Chapter 2. Running Sewing Circles and Visiting the Poor: Women’s Associations before 1890
• Chapter 3. An Ounce of Prevention: The Tutelage of Girls’ Associations
• Chapter 4. Fighting the Spread of “Social Poisons”: Domestic Science and Social Welfare Work
• Chapter 5. The Gendered Workplace: Women, Education, and the Professions
• Chapter 6. Clubwomen and Club Life
• Chapter 7. The Kasernierung Campaign: Alliances and Rivalries in the Fight against Social Degeneration and Prostitution
• Chapter 8. Feminists and Nationalists
• Chapter 9. The Home Front
• Chapter 10. The Women’s Movement Adrift: Revolution, Inflation, and Collapse, 1919—1923
• Chapter 11. Growth on the Right: Housewives and Nationalists, 1923—1933
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index