The Return of the New Woman and Other Subjects of Weimar Gender History

Abstract

After a drought of more than a decade, a substantial group of recent works has begun revisiting Weimar gender history. The fields of Weimar and Nazi gender history have been closely linked since the field was defined thirty years ago by the appearance of the anthologyWhen Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Following a flurry of pioneering work in the 1980s and early 1990s, few new monographs were dedicated to investigating the questions posed in that formative moment of gender history. Kathleen Canning, the current main commentator on Weimar gender historiography, in an essay first published shortly before the works under review, found that up to that point the ‘gender scholarship on the high-stakes histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany has not fundamentally challenged categories or temporalities’. Weimar gender, meanwhile, has been intensively analysed in the fields of cultural, film, and literary studies. The six books discussed in this essay reverse these trends, picking up on the central question of how gender contributed to the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of National Socialism. In addition, four of the books concentrate solely on reconstructing the dynamics of gender relations during the Weimar period itself in their discussions of prostitution, abortion and representations of femininity and masculinity. Is emerging gender scholarship now shaping larger questions of German early twentieth-century history? How are new scholars revising our view of the role of gender in this tumultuous time?