Winning women's votes: propaganda and politics in Weimar Germany

Abstract

Sneeringer, julia. Winning Women's Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii, 365 pp. $27.50 paperback. julia Sneeringer's excellent book presents a well-organized, richly documented, and absorbing narrative of campaign literature produced by the major political parties toward the aim of winning support from German women after they gained the vote in 1918. It traces continuity and change in political language about women throughout the life of a crisis-ridden republic, while also charting similarity and difference in this discourse across a craggy political landscape. In doing so, it fills a conspicuous hole in the voluminous literature on the Weimar Republic. Women participated in the Weimar electoral system at a high rate. They preferred parties with a religious affiliation and moderate political profile. In contrast, they shied away from parties perceived as radical, whether of the Left or Right. The Social Democrats (SPD) and, especially, Communists (KPD) and National Socialists (NSDAP) had wide gaps. During the Depression, voting patterns shifted-in some ways toward men's, but in others further away. Like men, though later, they abandoned the (Protestant) bourgeois parties, contributing to the virtual collapse of these parties and the rise of the NSDAP By mid-1932, women voted for the NSDAP at about the same rate as men. The SPD too was able to close its gender gap by, Sneeringer hypothesizes, emphasizing its support for social policies. In this case, female voters bucked the SPD's relative and absolute decline (though not collapse). Women remained loyal to the (Catholic) Center party-here too, bucking a (slight) losing trend and making its voting base more lopsideclly female. Sneeringer's book elucidates these voting patterns, though, as she notes, she cannot not fully explain them, given the lack of data on what motivated women to vote. She approaches the problem of what women wanted, obliquely, by examining how the parties adjusted propaganda for women. The tools of political history and of discourse analysis are applied to newspapers, politicians' personal papers, transcripts of party meetings, and campaign materials such as fliers, posters, and pamphlets. Every party, Sneeringer finds, aimed a lot of material at women, almost all of it produced by women. The SPD outdid everyone else in sheer amount of output, while the Center came up last. Certain constant motifs arise in Sneeringer's chronologically arranged chapters: rights and civic roles; economy and employment; and family, morality, community/nation, and religion. Particular chapters discuss specific to one or several elections such as the meaning of suffrage, regulation of abortion, and challenge of the NSDAP Sneeringer discusses these women's themes in the context of the election's general themes, the party's overall program and strategy, and the efforts of women party activists to forge a message that would touch female voters. Women's suffrage, she shows effectively, prompted changes in party platforms, if not ideology. For example, the propaganda and policies of the SPD and Center became more similar after 1918 as the SPD toned down its anti-clericalism, while the Center came to support state-run (as opposed to faith-based) welfare programs. …