Kinder, Küche, Kirche

3 Key excerpts on "Kinder, Küche, Kirche"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850–1930

  (No)Home Away from Home

  • Erin Eckhold Sassin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Visual Arts

    (Publisher)

  Die Architektur des XX. Jahrhunderts 9, no. 3 (1909): 42–4.

  The teaching kitchen (Lehrküche ), attached to the rear of the scullery of the professional kitchen serving the dining hall, was a marker of both gender and class (see Figure 4.8a). Such spaces were never included in Ledigenheime for professional women, and certainly never in Ledigenheime for men. Highly rationalized and organized spaces, teaching kitchens have often been associated with the rise of home economics classes that reached their zenith under the auspices of the state and the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine ) in the Weimar Republic.

  68

  Such courses and model kitchens were geared toward instructing the working-class housewife (or future housewife) on how best to save labor and resources in what was usually a technologically up-to-date space, and have been read as a means to women’s re-domestication by scholars like Susan Henderson and Sophie Hochhäusl.

  69

  Like these later teaching kitchens (and the noted Frankfurt kitchen designed by Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky), the teaching kitchen of Alt Moabit was organized and managed by others, and should be read as a guarantee that the Ledigenheim was a transitional space, rather than a permanent home. The emphasis teaching kitchens placed on properly and economically preparing food means that the residents were being trained either for domestic service or for their future lives as housewives. The former is unlikely, considering that service was both more demanding and more poorly paid than the position a typical resident would already have held. The latter, despite having no parlor to properly entertain a suitor in, is more certain, although the Alt Moabit kitchen was far better appointed than any kitchen they would use as married women, at least until the 1920s.

  Despite the inclusion of certain markers of domesticity, there was some parity in the treatment of female residents of Ledigenheime and their male counterparts. Like the Dankelmannstrasse Ledigenheim for men built several years earlier in neighboring Berlin-Charlottenburg, the Alt Moabit building provided “all modern conveniences in light, air circulation, and cleanliness,”

  70

  including central heat, as well as bathing and toilet facilities in close proximity to the bedrooms.

  71

  The majority of the bedrooms were single rooms (the ideal for any Ledigenheim according to housing reformers), with these thirty-seven (of forty-seven total) bedrooms measuring on average 8 square meters—each appointed with a window seat, roomy wardrobe, and large good bed.72

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Gender Relations In German History

  Power, Agency And Experience From The Sixteenth To The Twentieth Century

  • Lynn Abrams, Elizabeth Harvey(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 , enforcing such norms was not a simple matter of indoctrinating a passive population, and the degree of repetition and elaboration of models of proper behaviour for men and for women in the prescriptive literature alerts us to the possible extent to which these models were being ignored. Nevertheless, the Protestant belief that woman’s ideal role was as mother and the man’s was as father and worker had long-term repercussions for women’s legal position and their access to education, the skilled trades and professions. If we are to begin to rethink the traditional historical narrative in German history, this emphasis on the continuity in ways of speaking about gender roles may point the way forward.

  The Reformation can also be read as a paradigm of a process of crisis, upheaval and restabilization in gender relations that is echoed at other moments in German history. In Germany, as in other countries, during periods of disruption – social, economic, religious or political – reordering gender relations has been one symbolic means of restoring cultural and social stability.30 In the nineteenth century, during the upheaval of rapid industrialization, a reordering of gender relations was carried out within the “private” sphere as illicit unions were policed and single women subjected to intense scrutiny, culminating in the 1900 Civil Code.31 In the economic sphere, distinctions between men’s and women’s work were reinforced and a discourse of danger emerged related to the supposed effects of women’s work on the social fabric.32 In the aftermath of the First World War and revolution, a major plank of Weimar government policies to restore order and social stability was the restoration of traditional gender roles in the home and workplace.33 And as Katherine Pence illustrates in her contribution to this volume, the post-Second World War decade in East and West Germany was characterized by an attempted return to “traditional” discourses on gender relations and gendered power structures. As Lyndal Roper suggests, “concepts of gender may display extraordinary volatility at certain moments … yet little may actually change in the relations between the sexes”.34

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood

  New perspectives in Childhood Studies

  • Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland, Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Kinderläden would, as the reasoning went, “blast open” the restrictive Oedipal structure of the middle-class nuclear family.

  The Kinderläden educational programme was based on Wilhelm Reich’s concept of child self-regulation. Children were to be jointly responsible for deciding when they would play, eat or sleep, and were to be actively involved in decorating the Kinderläden space (Breiteneicher, 1971 ; Baader & Sager, 2010 ). They were also supposed to become better acquainted with their emotions and needs, and to develop a “cultivated” sense of their bodies (Seifert, 1970 ). The aim was to raise a liberated, happy child and, on this basis, an adult subject “capable of pleasure and love” (Seifert, 1970 ; Baader & Sager, 2010 , p. 264; Baader, 2012 ). This also involved the “liberation of child sexuality”, which played a significant role in some conceptions of the Kinderläden. These perspectives on child sexuality drew on Reich’s sexual theories (Sager, 2015 ) and ranged from the necessary lifting of taboos to a problematic blurring of boundaries. In general, the Kinderläden were characterised by the de-hierarchisation of the generational difference; children were addressed as actors, and adults renounced their authority while also reflecting on their educational practice, for the “teacher must herself be taught” (Breiteneicher, 1971 , p. 7). The concept of self-regulation (which children were to be made capable of by the age of three) and the call for children to exercise their agency were closely connected and occupied a central place in the Kinderläden educational programme (Seifert, 1970

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book