The study of European women's history can contribute important insights to the exercise of understanding, and therefore, defining feminism for contemporary readers in other settings. European historians have noted the prominent role of the maternal ethic -- the idea that woman's role as mother extends into society as a whole -- in the theory and practice of German feminism. This body of ideas, however, has seldom been taken seriously. German feminism has been interpreted as a political strategy, not as an intellectual tradition. Historians have portrayed German feminists as conservative, in contrast to their liberal counterparts in other countries who were more likely to campaign for equal rights. In a Sonderweg, or "peculiar path" of their own, German women thought their maternal role led to empowerment and ethical authority. The role gave them the legitimacy to give speeches, to organize reform movements, and to build feminist institutions.
German women campaigned for infant welfare and the expansion of state responsibility for the welfare of mothers and children. German feminists responded to central public issues, including revolution, national unification, and urbanization. They worked to transform both public and private worlds by extending their ethical values, developed in the family, to political and social issues.
This site seeks to examine the lives and work of the women who were important to the history of German feminism. Such women centered their careers on issues relating to motherhood and childcare. Their stories are of a broader theme: the relationship of women's experience, under specific historical conditions, to the development of feminist ideology and practice.
The historical significance of German feminism should be centered in the context of German history and of similar feminist movements in other countries, particularly the U.S. The ideas of German feminists should be considered with reference to the specific, local conditions under which they developed, rather than to essentialist notions of feminism. Some historians have identified equal rights ideologies as progressive and maternalist ones as conservative. But the women themselves did not perceive the antithesis between these two forms of ideology.
The fate of the nation lies more in the hands of women-of mothers- than in those of statesmen....women should accept their role as a priestly office. Friedrich Froebel
The consitution of the Weimar Republic was not only Germany's first democratic constitution, it also offered German women the promise of legal equality for the first time in history. Although that promise was not fulfilled, Weimar society was nevertheless characterised by the emergence of a new woman who excercised unprescedented forms of social and sexual autonomy. We must overcome the notion that we must be regular; it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary, and leads to the mediocre" Uta Hagen There were, however, dangerous consequences for womens' freedom and equality in the antifeminist policies adopted by the Nazis, those which were already in operation to some extent in the Weimar republic. There are dangers explicit in a feminism that celebrates seperate spheres and differences between the sexes, glorifies motherhood and women's bodies, and so easily falls prey to the lure of ideologies detrimental to women's rights and indeed, human rights in general.