Abstract
This book provides a helpful survey of writings from the period of the Weimar Republic that contributed in various ways to the reappraisal of inherited assumptions about the role of women in society. Looking beyond the superficial clichés of ‘Girlkultur’ and the ‘new woman’, but also pointing out the ideological limitations apparent in some of the texts she reviews, Katherine E. Calvert shows how writers with diverse political and theoretical orientations helped to produce what, in her closing remarks, she calls the ‘nuanced and largely pragmatic discourse’ in which issues associated with child-rearing and motherhood were discussed at the time.
In her central three chapters, Calvert considers the reforms pursued by political parties and other campaigning groups. Chapter 2, ‘Women’s Rights and Responsibilities as Mothers’, reviews the kinds of approach to the social position of women that appeared in the SPD magazine Frauenwelt, and to a lesser extent in its Communist equivalent, Der Weg der Frau, which appeared only between 1931 and 1933. This chapter argues that the strong focus of Frauenwelt on child-rearing from 1926 onwards may well have contributed to expanding the recruitment of women to the SPD, but also that it tended to reinforce the impression that young mothers should leave political campaigning to their husbands. Chapter 3 explores the campaigns to liberalise the strict anti-abortion legislation embodied in the notorious §218, which dated from 1871. Here Calvert notes the sustained activity of the Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform under the leadership of Helene Stöcker, from its foundation in 1905 until it merged with a broader movement for law reform in 1925, and the work of Elfriede Brüning in demonstrating the injustice of a situation in which access to safe abortion was dependent on social position and adequate financial assets. The central focus for this chapter is the prosecution of two doctors, Elfriede Kienle and Friedrich Wolf, in 1931 for providing illegal abortions, which gave various campaigning organisations the opportunity to unite in a common cause. In Chapter 4, ‘Family and Politics in Communist Didactic Fiction’, Calvert also examines the contribution of writings by Elfriede Brüning, Maria Leitner and Hermynia Zur Mühlen to publicising the issue of social injustice, but concludes that these texts tend to ‘privilege the class struggle over tackling gender inequality’ (p. 125).
The first and fifth chapters are, respectively, devoted to authors whose writings present the issues with a fuller sense of the breadth and depth of personal identity and experience. Chapter 1 presents the work of Alice Rühle-Gerstel, a psychoanalyst whose thinking was orientated towards the ‘individual psychology’ of Alfred Adler, who was also married to the SPD politician Otto Rühle. The main focus of interest here is Rühle-Gerstel’s book Frauenprobleme der Gegenwart (1932), in which she dismisses any notion of a ‘maternal instinct’ and relates the attitudes and behaviour commonly displayed by women to feelings of inferiority and to the compensatory striving that arises from their lack of access to professional activities. Calvert notes that Rühle-Gerstel tends to blur class distinctions by assigning ‘proletarian’ status to all women under capitalism, but also recognises her promotion of the idea of motherhood as ‘socially productive work’ as ‘a more theoretical and progressive approach than that generally found in left-wing journalism or fiction of the Weimar era’ (p. 50). It is the three best-known examples of the relevant fiction that Calvert presents in Chapter 5, ‘Intergenerational Tensions and New Women as Mothers in Popular Fiction’. Here she notes how Vicki Baum’s depiction of a professionally qualified woman in her 1928 novel stud. chem. Helene Willfüer appears detached from the social reality of the time; how Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931) satirises the social tensions that present obstacles for young women seeking to make their way independently in the 1920s; and how the pregnant heroine of Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi – eine von uns (1931) opts to assert her independence with the support of a female friend rather than succumb to the conventional expectations of marriage.
Calvert judiciously distances herself from the critical view of the late twentieth century that saw Keun’s work as merely reflecting the attitudes of her own time, endorsing instead the notion of the story of Gilgi as an illustration of how motherhood might be integrated into the ideal of the ‘New Woman’ (p. 130). All in all, this book provides a rounded account of how the interests of women were represented in the political press and the fiction of the Weimar period which provides a valuable basis for undergraduate teaching and a helpful introduction to the subject for more advanced scholars.