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ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN’S EQUALITYin the mid-nineteenth century
SOCIOLOGICAL: That all progress of civilization depends on a strict division of labor between the sexes and devotion by women to child-rearingNEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL: That only the male brain is suited for quantitative and abstract reasoningMEDICAL: That adolescent girls would become barren if asked to study as hard at school as boysPSYCHOLOGICAL: That women are especially prone to mental illness (“hysteria”)
Experts began to challenge all these arguments in the 1880s and ‘90s….
Rural family scene (1839)
The (bourgeois) Children’s Nursery (1823)
“The Sewing Room” (1823)
The tyranny of French fashion (Iris, 1852)
“The Female University Student”
(cartoon from 1847)
“In the Women’s Club” (1848):
“We demand that skirts be abolished and that men take
over the housework!”
BEYOND Kinder, Küche, Kirche: The Women’s Rights Movement in Imperial Germany
1865Foundation of the “German Women’s Association” (ADF) by Luise Otto-Peters: 12,000 members in 1877; 14,000 in 1914
1894Formation of the League of German Women’s Associations (BDF), with 300,000 members in 1914
1900 German Civil Code takes effect
1904Foundation of the “League for Sexual Reform” by Helene Stöcker, which disintegrated in 1908
1908Women gain the right to enroll for degrees in Prussian universities and to join political clubs
1918German women gain the vote after war’s end
A female bicyclist (ca. 1900)
Berlin exhibit of women’s “Reform Dress” (around 1903)
Gymnastics class for girls, around 1912
German parents did give daughters some freedom to choose a suitor (courting in a Berlin park, around
1907)
A bourgeois family, photographed in the studio around 1895:
The ideal of “companionate
marriage” pervaded the middle
classes by the 1890s.
THE SPREAD OF FAMILY PLANNING IN GERMANYTotal number of children born by women married in the
years--
Pre-1905
1905-09 1910-14 1915-19
In cities with over 100,000 people
Self-employed
3.30 2.40 1.98 1.61
White-collar 3.01 2.40 2.04 1.74
Blue-collar 4.03 3.16 2.64 2.18
Among the peasantry (villages with under 2,000)
Self-employed
5.42 4.64 4.10 3.52
Farmworker 6.18 5.38 4.87 4.26
Luise Otto-Peters
(1819-1895): The founder of the “German
Women’s Association”
(ADF)
Helene Lange (1848-1930) and Lily Braun (1865-1916)
Girls’ High School in Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1896:Most of these students soon became housewives
Berlin medical students (all male) attend a lecture in 1905
Young women practice good posture at a dancing school, 1899
University students in 1908:Baden admitted women in 1900; Prussia in 1908
Delegates to the Women’s Suffrage Congress in Munich, 1912
“Women’s Dreams about the Marriage of the Future” (1908)
Emmeline Pankhurst arrested outside Buckingham Palace
Picture of her prison cell, 1911
“Give Us Women’s Suffrage,” poster for the
International Women’s Congress of March 1914,
organized by Clara Zetkin:“Until now, prejudice and reactionary attitudes have denied full civic rights to women, who as workers,
mothers, and citizens wholly fulfill their duty, who must pay their taxes to the state as well as the municipality.
Fighting for this natural human right must be the
firm, unwavering intention of every woman, every female
worker.”