Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of Female Politicians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP)

Abstract

The DNVP, until 1930 the predominant party of the Weimar Right, attracted a crowd of able women politicians with experience in religious and professional leagues, housewives' associations, and nationalist pressure groups. The article examines to what degree these women partook in right-wing ideology and politics. It first presents statements by party women on the issues that tended to split the party into a moderate and an intransigent wing and concludes that women usually committed themselves to party unity and to a stand on principle that tended to favour the intransigents. An inner view of women's activism in the DNVP then focuses on two programmatic statements, one from 1921 and one from 1933, and argues that the politics of DNVP women shifted emphasis from practical women's rights demands to radical right-wing ideology. The ideological parameters of 1933, however, were always present, whereas the equal rights demands of 1921 were increasingly condensed in the claim of women to make a contribution to the nazi racial state not only as mothers and housewives. The evidence thus shows that women from the DNVP partook in right-wing ideology and politics, mostly by stressing racism and militarism, even though they rejected nazism on the grounds of the nazis' hostility to women's rights.