"The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world. This is not at all as.........unmodern as it sounds. The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches eggs for him. In exchange, the male takes care of gathering food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy."

Joseph Goebbels, writing in 1929.

How successfully did the Nazis impose their ideology on

German women?

“ Take hold of kettle, broom and pan,Then you’ll surely get your man!

Shop and office leave alone,Your true life’s work lies at home”

Women in Nazi Germany

• Kinder, Kuche, Kirche : children, kitchen, church

• Contrast to women’s emancipation in Weimar Germany

What the Nazis did to influence women...

• National Socialist Womanhood and German Women’s Enterprise, these groups ad a membership of several million

• The NS-Frauenschaft (NSF: National Socialist Women's League) was the women's organization of the Nazi party.

• Government laws: restrict number of hours women could work in factories and stop them from undertaking heavy work in certain industries

• Propaganda campaign aimed at raising the status of mothers and housewives within the Peoples Community

• Award women with the Mother Cross. Eight or more children got gold award, six got silver and four got bronze

• Government laws: restrict number of hours women could work in factories and stop them from undertaking heavy work in certain industries

• Women in higher ranks of the civil service and in medicine were dismissed, senior positions in the legal profession were barred to women

• Excluded from politics• Discouraged from going to university• 1937 banned grammar education for girls and banned

them from learning Latin, which was compulsory for university

Why did the Nazis have these policies?

• Ideological: Hitler’s belief in a peasant based volksgemeinschaft that rejected the modern and Bolshevik ideas of female emancipation

• Pragmatic: Germany had a declining birth rate post WWI, an increased birth rate was required to conqueror Eastern Europe

1938: divorce is made easier, grounds for a divorce are adultery, refusal to have children, venereal disease, a three year separation, mental illness, racial incompatability and eugenic weakness

Why?

Removing Women from the workplace

• Removed from higher ranks of the civil service and in medicine

• senior positions in the legal profession were barred to women

• Excluded from politics• 1937 banned grammar education for girls and

banned them from learning Latin, which was compulsory for university

To improve the ‘quality of births’

• The priority of the Nazis was not so much the family as the birth of healthy ‘Aryan’ children.

• Abortion banned• Aryans offered interest free marriage loan, amount

reduced by each child born. But could only get the loan if women stayed out of work

• Birth Control for Aryans restricted• Lebensborn (well of life) homes set up for unmarried

mothers whose partners were ‘racially valuable’. Good facilities at cheap rates

To improve the ‘quality of births’

• 1936 SS men required to have at least 4 children in or out of wedlock

• SS men ordered to fertilise young single women so that they could ‘donate a baby to the Fuhrer’

• 1933 Sterilisation Law passed against those with a hereditary disease/mental illness

• 350,000 people sterilised 1933-1945

How successful were Nazi polices?

• 1937 labour shortages meant that more women joined the work force.

• By 1939 12.7 million women in employment, 37 % of the workforce.

• Increasing numbers of doctors and teachers• Outbreak of WWII changed policy• WWII increased women in the workforce to

52% in 1942.