Martyrs or matriarchs? working-class women's experience of marriage in Germany before the first world war

Abstract

Abstract The German family before 1914 has commonly been portrayed as patriarchal and authoritarian. Paternal authority was sustained by ideological conservatism, a discriminatory civil law code and an economic framework which treated husbands as breadwinners and wives as dependants. Such a model, it has been suggested, may have legitimised male violence within the home. It is easy to depict working-class women as martyrs at the hands of their violent husbands, yet domestic power relations were complex. Marital disputes occurred in a context of poverty and contested resources and male violence against women reflected conflict over resource allocation and shifting gender roles within marriage. The image of female dependency ignores women's ability to establish relative power within the household based on control of consumption. Escape from such situations was difficult for women owing to restrictive divorce laws and the precarious female employment market but female support networks provided temporary refuge and women's resilience allowed them to resist incursions into their territory. These women were not matriarchs but neither were they martyrs to a patriarchal, authoritarian model of marriage.