Die Frauenlobby vom Land: Die Landfrauenbewegung in Deutschland und ihre Funktionarinnen 1898 bis 1948

Abstract

In this exhaustively researched collective biography of twenty-one leading women of the German countrywomen's association, which survived the Reich, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi state and the postwar Federal Republic, Anke Sawahn offers a prosopography that reveals an active, energetic network of women touched by the emancipatory feminist movement of their time while deeply enmeshed in existing class and gender relations that both helped and hurt their cause. In defence of this method, Sawahn places it in the paradigm of cultural history, which she sees as superseding structural analysis in social history. In her search for biographical material, she has left no stone unturned, thoroughly exploiting every possible archive, publication or interview with survivors or descendants. Her list of sources alone comes to forty-eight pages. What emerges is a group portrait of mainly noblewomen, a conservative agrarian elite empowered by the status of their fathers or husbands but inspired by pre-feminist and proto-feminist organizations, who sought recognition and support for women's part in agricultural production in the hope of elevating it to a trained profession. They finally achieved this goal under National Socialism, but at the cost of their independence.