Feminism and Female Emancipation in Germany 1870–1945: Sources, Methods, and Problems of Research

Abstract

Until very recently, almost no serious research into the history of feminism and female emancipation in modern Germany has been published. This neglect is indeed far deeper than that from which women's history in Britain, France, or the United States has suffered. In some measure, it is connected with the reasons for the general neglect of social history in modern Germany—the concern of German historians with questions of political power, foreign policy, and intellectual development, the perversion of historical studies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and the dominance in West German historiography of a close professional elite whose intellectual roots went back to the period before 1933. This situation is now changing, and there is growing interest in both West and East Germany in women's role in the German past. Yet, so far at any rate, this interest has not inspired in Germany any major work of research or synthesis. Even more surprising is the fact that the numerous recent American discussions of women and modernization in Europe almost entirely fail to discuss Germany, confining themselves instead to taking examples from Britain and France. In view of the centrality of the German model to more general discussions such as that in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, it seems astonishing that so little has been done to investigate the German dimension of women's history.