Authors: Julia Sneeringer
ISBN-13: 9780807826744, ISBN-10: 080782674X
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, The
Date Published: March 2002
Edition: (Non-applicable)
In November 1918, German women gained the right to vote, and female suffrage would forever change the landscape of German political life. Women now constituted the majority of voters, and political parties were forced to address them as political actors for the first time.
Analyzing written and visual propaganda aimed at, and frequently produced by, women across the political spectrum--including the Communists and Social Democrats; liberal, Catholic, and conservative parties; and the Nazis--Julia Sneeringer shows how various groups struggled to reconcile traditional assumptions about women's interests with the changing face of the family and female economic activity. Through propaganda, political parties addressed themes such as motherhood, fashion, religion, and abortion. But as Sneeringer demonstrates, their efforts to win women's votes by emphasizing "women's issues" had only limited success.
The debates about women in propaganda were symptomatic of larger anxieties that gripped Germany during this era of unrest, Sneeringer says. Though Weimar political culture was ahead of its time in forcing even the enemies of women's rights to concede a public role for women, this horizon of possibility narrowed sharply in the face of political instability, economic crises, and the growing specter of fascism.
Sneeringer not only offers a much-needed corrective to the gender-neutral bias of the existing literature on Weimar electoral politics but also shows how the analysis of language and linguistic discourse can be used to augment more traditional approaches to the study of voter behavior.
Acknowledgments | ||
Abbreviations | ||
Introduction: The Political Mobilization of Women | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | Onward, My Sisters!: Winning Women for Politics, 1918-1920 | 19 |
Ch. 2 | Stabilization and Stability: Women and the 1924 Elections | 69 |
Ch. 3 | Culture versus Butter: Women in the Campaigns of the Golden Twenties, 1925-1928 | 119 |
Ch. 4 | Saviors or Traitors?: Women in the Campaigns of the Early Depression Years | 169 |
Ch. 5 | Baby Machine or Herrin im Hause?: Women in the 1932 Campaigns | 219 |
Conclusion: Women and the Language of Weimar Politics | 269 | |
Notes | 283 | |
Bibliography | 343 | |
Index | 357 |