Feminist Movements in the United States and Germany A Comparative Perspective, 1848—1933

ann taylor allen

The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier stated that the progress of any civilization could be measured by the emancipation of its women.¹ In both the United States and Germany, the status of women was and is a measure of democratization, not only of its progress but also of its deficits.

A systematic comparison of German and American feminism is overdue, for the discussion hitherto has been dominated by stereotypes. Among these, the most common is that German feminists’ notions of ^[526] gender were inherently conservative or reactionary because they empha­sized essential differences between men and women. Such ideas of gender difference have sometimes been interpreted as symptoms of protofascist, even National Socialist sympathies.^[527] The comparison, implied or explicit, is with the feminists of the English-speaking world, who are assumed to have emphasized a more gender-neutral and thus more liberal concep­tion of gender equality.

Among the most important factors affecting the development of feminist movements was the uninterrupted development of democracy in the United States, in contrast to its interrupted development in Germany. Both the American and German movements had their formal beginnings in the revolutionary year 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the Seneca Falls Convention, proclaimed the self-evident truth that “all men and women are created equal,” and Louise Otto, in her periodical the Frauen-Zeitung, called on all women to become “citizens of the land of freedom.”^[529] In 1848 both feminist movements used arguments based on equality and difference. Both challenged public and private barriers to urge that women’s vocations for conflict resolution and nurturance must expand beyond the walls of the household to transform public life. Both also saw women’s rights within the context of universal human rights: in America, the rights of slaves, and in Germany, those of workers.

Whereas the development of the American movement continued in the 1850s, that of feminist movements in the various German states was almost entirely quashed by the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and the reimposition of monarchical authority, enacted through the Association Law (Vereinsgesetz) of 1850, which forbade women membership in politi­cal parties or engagement in political activities.

But the development of representative government in the two states also showed some similarities, most importantly in the granting of uni­versal manhood suffrage after the wars of unification (the American Civil War of 1861-5 and the Prussian-Austrian and Franco-Prussian Wars, cul­minating in the unification of Germany in 1871). In the United States suffrage was extended to the newly liberated male but not female slaves in 1870; in the newly united Germany it was extended (at least on the federal level) to all males. In 1866 national organizations advocating women’s rights had formed in both countries: in Germany, the General Association of German Women (Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein or AdF) and in the United States, the American Equal Rights Association, an organization composed of both feminists and male abolitionists. After 1870 feminists in both countries concluded that human rights doctrines that had linked the emancipation of women to that of other groups were ineffective in a political climate that was increasingly dominated by interest groups. Though by no means abandoning the earlier democratic idealism, German and American feminist organizations in both countries reformulated their approach to represent women as one of many groups deserving of rights because of its supposedly distinctive characteristics and its contributions to the general welfare. The American Equal Rights Association dissolved in 1869 and was replaced by two organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. Whereas the former group favored the pursuit of woman’s suffrage through national strategies, the latter advocated a more gradual approach through campaigns in the individual states. Thus, suffrage con­tinued to be a high priority for the Americans, whereas the Germans, still subject to the Association Law, concentrated on such seemingly non­political activities as educational and charitable work.

An aspect of “rights culture” that decisively influenced feminist move­ments in the two countries was the church-state relationship. In this area, as in its political structure, Germany was both authoritarian and con­servative in comparison to the United States. Feminist movements since their beginnings had been inspired in large measure by Protestant reli­gious ethics and activism. For example, many of the German women activists in 1848 had belonged to dissenting Protestant sects (the Free Congregations). In Germany these unorthodox movements had lar­gely been crushed after the 1848 revolution. The mainstream German Protestant church, organized by the state, was a massive, centralized, and hierarchical structure in which women could have little real power or independence.^[530]

American churches were not more feminist on average, but they were much less centralized and were supported not by the state but by their congregations. Radical sects, such as the Quakers, continued to produce feminist activists like Susan B. Anthony and many others. Although women were not allowed to serve on the governing boards of most Protestant churches, they exercised considerable influence through all­female groups, such as mission societies. These groups provided the first leaders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874 and dedicated to the prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcohol. The WCTU, which was ecumenical but distinctly Christian and Protestant, appealed to Christian women as housewives, mothers, and church members to oppose the social evils caused by alcohol.

The program of the WCTU was based on a specifically female con­ception of rights that applied to both the public and private spheres and placed the welfare of the family above individual rights that benefited chiefly males (in this case, the right to consume alcohol). Temperance advocates proclaimed the right of women and children to be free of the abuses conventionally attributed to male drunkenness: spousal and child abuse, marital rape, and poverty.

Another aspect of “rights culture” that shaped feminist programs was the difference in German and American conceptions of the function and extent of government, especially regarding its responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. The most prominent aspect of the difference between women and men for many American and German feminists was their dedication to a specifically female mission in the area of social reform. This mission, as variously interpreted and carried out by a host of wom­en’s groups, emphasized the right of individuals to social dependence as well as to individual independence. Feminist activism in both countries during the latter part of the nineteenth century was concentrated in private organizations working in the fields of education and social work.

Germany in the area of social legislation was relatively advanced in comparison not only with the United States but also with most other Western societies. In the German Empire social problems were addressed by a professional civil service of academically educated men under the leadership of the elite Social Policy Association (Verein fur Sozialpolitik), founded in 1872. Pressure for social reform came from a militant labor movement organized within the Social Democratic Party. On the federal and local levels - starting with Bismarck’s social insurance laws in the 1880s - governments actively engaged in the planning and provision of social services. In this area the relative advancement and modernity of the German system proved a serious obstacle to the growth of the feminist movement.

By contrast, the relative weakness and backwardness of state social welfare structures in the United States provided a very favorable envi­ronment for the development of women’s activism. In the 1870s the attempts to expand and reform civil services were defeated; cities and states continued to be governed chiefly by politicians. Pressure for social reform by an organized working class or socialist party hardly existed. The labor movement of this period had little political power and was ethni­cally and racially divided.^{[533] [534] Social problems resulting from urbanization and industrialization, especially from the influx of immigrants, were overwhelming. This was the need to which private organizations of middle-class women responded. Women’s clubs in every city, eventually consolidated in 1890 as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, took an interest in a wide variety of social issues.[535] [536]}

American women gained far more public visibility and power than their German counterparts; Julia Lathrop, a colleague of Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago, was appointed head of the first federal agency devoted to the welfare of children, the Children’s Bureau, in 1912. By then private women’s organizations were so ubiquitous and energetic that they formed a “shadow welfare state.”¹¹

Still another right that was important to feminists was the right to education, particularly to higher education. In this area, too, feminists benefited from American backwardness and were hindered by German modernity. Until the mid-nineteenth century, American states had few public institutions of higher education or accreditation systems. This gap was filled by private institutions that operated with complete autonomy. American feminists had founded women’s colleges as early as the 1830s, and by 1900 a substantial number of college-educated women set the agenda for many aspects of American feminism, including both the suf­frage and the social-reform movements. Women’s colleges also provided a setting for women’s participation in intellectual life.^[537]

By contrast, Germany had a long-standing tradition of state support for, and regulation of, universities. The feminists’ campaign for the admis­sion of women to universities faced the far more difficult task of chang­ing entrenched state structures. As a preparation for secure and lucrative civil-service careers, moreover, higher education in Germany had acquired much greater prestige than in the United States and thus was more staunchly defended as a bastion of male privilege. For these reasons, the admission of women to universities in Germany came much later than in America - the first state system to admit them was Baden in 1900; in Prussia, the largest state system, they were not admitted until 1908.^[538]

Still another reason for the much greater impact and following gained by feminist movements in the United States was the differing impact of class and racial conflicts on feminist ideology and tactics. By the 1890s the many different groups had fused into large umbrella organizations: In the United States, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was founded in 1891, and in Germany the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) was founded (partly in response to the American model) in 1894. But the expansion of women’s movements also caused conflict. Not all women accepted the leadership of the mainstream organizations, and women’s movements split along the countries’ social cleavages.

In Germany class was the major social cleavage, and class issues had an impact on both the female suffrage movement and the development of women’s reform programs. Even after the grant of universal male suffrage in the Reichstag elections in 1871, suffrage remained a class issue for many states, especially Prussia (the state in which the Social Democratic Party had the greatest electoral support), which still had class-based suffrage (the so-called three-class voting system). Socialist women’s groups, still not allowed formal party membership, organized in the 1890s. The chiefly middle-class BDF, which cited the Association Law that banned political work but was also motivated by class antagonism, excluded socialist women’s groups from membership. Socialist women, under the leadership of Clara Zetkin, refused all contact with bourgeois feminists, urging working-class women to strive for the overthrow of the capitalist system rather than for reforms that would benefit only the ruling class.¹⁴

The first suffrage organization founded by German bourgeois feminists was the German Woman Suffrage League (Deutscher Verein fur Frauen- stimmrecht), which opened its headquarters in Hamburg in 1902, one of the few German states that had no association law prohibiting female political participation. After the revision of the Prussian Association Law in 1908 to permit such participation the suffrage movement increased in influence, although it still had limited support. Nonetheless, socialist and bourgeois groups still refused to cooperate with each other, and the bour­geois movement was further split on the issue of the Prussian three-class voting system. Some bourgeois feminists joined the socialists in opposing this system; others upheld it by advocating the vote for women on the same terms as men. Class conflicts divided and weakened the movement to broaden German suffrage. Socialism, an important force for the improvement of the status of working men and women, nonetheless created an obstacle to feminist unity across class lines.¹⁵

The story of the American suffrage movement of this era is quite dif­ferent: Although class tensions were in fact very deep, they were not generally understood through socialist theories of class conflict. Not only was the influence of socialism incomparably weaker than in Germany, but suffrage, because it was free of class or property qualifications, was an issue on which working-class and middle-class women, who might disagree on other issues, could unite and work together.¹⁶ A much harder dividing line was race. The national leadership of the NAWSA respected the white supremacist views of many of its southern member organizations and often refused to condemn discrimination against black women. In some­what the same way as socialist women in Germany, black American women created their own, separate organizations and often rejected the white women’s movement’s separation of women’s rights from those of

14 Gerhard, Unerhort, 280—91; Evans, Feminist Movement in Germany, 145—76. On socialist feminism, see Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists: Women in German Social Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 1978); and Anna-E. Freier, Dem Reich der Freiheit sollst Du Kinder gebaren: Der Antifeminismus der prole- tarischen Frauenbewegung im Spiegel der Gleichheit 1891-1917 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981).

15 Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die burgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894-1933 (Gottingen, 1981), 90—118; Barbel Clemens, Menschenrechte haben kein Geschlecht! Zum Politikverstandnis der burgerlichen Frauenbewegung (Pfaffenweiler, 1988), 79—102.

16 Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism (Urbana, Ill., 1981); Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 11—83. all people suffering disadvantage.^[539] Because American blacks were a much smaller and less powerful group than German socialists, however, black women’s protests against the exclusionary tactics of white women could not seriously disrupt the increasingly triumphal conviction of unity and sisterhood that pervaded American feminist rhetoric in the early twentieth century.

Among the rights proclaimed by feminists at the turn of the century in both countries were the rights of mothers, which usually entailed some form of state support for child rearing. This was another attempt to broaden the existing rights culture to include specifically female rights that applied to both the public and private spheres. On these issues the position of the German feminists was arguably more “modern” than that of their American counterparts, a difference reflecting the broader differ­ences between the German expansive and the American limited state.

Since the 1890s some German feminists, both socialist and bourgeois, arguing that motherhood was an important service that deserved state support, had developed the concept of Mutterschutz (protection of mothers), which included state-sponsored maternity insurance, paid maternity leave, and medical services to mothers and children. The most vocal advocates of such programs belonged to a radical organization, the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund fur Mutterschutz or BfM). But the mainstream BDF also included the demand for a “comprehen­sive maternity insurance” in its programs, starting in 1907.^[540] With the support of the Social Democratic Party, existing national maternity leave and insurance provisions were expanded in 1914 and formed the basis for the welfare-state provisions introduced in the 1920s.^[541]

In the United States, however, the minority of women who admired and urged the adoption of this German model could not persuade the majority of feminists. Adhering to American beliefs in limited govern­ment and self-reliance, most feminists feared that such governmental measures would weaken the commitment of men to their families. They therefore pushed for state-sponsored “mothers’ pensions,” intended only for widows or families with absent breadwinners who could meet strict standards of respectability and domestic hygiene. Such programs were enacted on the state level starting in the pre-World War I period and on the federal level in 1935 (as Aid to Families with Dependent Children). This outcome reflected not only the weakness of socialist influence among American feminists and in American society as a whole but also the strength of racial prejudice. “Deserving” was often a code word for “white,” and in fact few black mothers qualified for AFDC until the 1960s.^[542]

Among a small but growing minority of feminists the rights of mothers included the right to what they called “voluntary motherhood” through access to birth control technology and sometimes to abortion. The great­est difference between the German and American feminist movements at the turn of the century was the far greater and more visible atten­tion given to these issues by the Germans than by the Americans.^[543] The BfM - a small but conspicuous group - supported not only birth control and abortion rights but other forms of sex radicalism. The main­stream BDF staged an extensive and very thoughtful debate at its 1908 convention on a proposal recommending the total abolition of all laws against abortion (the proposal was voted down). American mainstream organizations, by contrast, shied away from such issues for fear of offend­ing the public.^[544] One of many possible reasons for this difference was the smaller growth and narrower base of support for the German feminist organizations. In the repressive atmosphere created by the Association Law these organizations remained much more elite and therefore (at least at their upper levels) more receptive to radical ideas, than the massive American movements that by this time included large groups of religious women. As soon as such a contingent, the German League of Protestant Women (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund), entered the BDF in 1908, the organization’s tolerance for sexual radicalism (though not for the reform of laws on marriage and family) came to an end.²³

Despite the very different wartime experiences of the two nations, German and American feminist organizations developed similarly in some respects during World War I. The war, which in both countries brought an expanded role for women’s organizations, nonetheless had a divisive and chilling impact on feminist movements: The pressure on women to support the war effort created bitter factional divisions between the patriotic majority and a pacifist minority that refused cooperation and tried to continue the international contacts among feminists that had flourished before the war through such organizations as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.^{[545] [546]}

In the United States the National Women’s Party (NWP), founded in 1916, dissented from the NAWSA’s nonpartisan approach to party politics by actively opposing politicians who refused to support women’s suffrage. When the NWP insisted on aggressively continuing the suffrage struggle even after the United States had entered the war, it was bitterly criticized by the leadership of the NAWSA for offending patriotic public opinion. The granting of suffrage to women after the war - in Germany in 1919 and in the United States in 1920 - was in both cases as much a reward for their support of their nations’ war effort as for their suffrage activism. Their war experiences encouraged feminists in both countries to emphasize their respectability and patriotism, to mistrust radical social criticism, and to avoid connections to other controversial movements or 25

causes.

In the prewar period the strength of feminism in both Germany and the United States arose from a successful combination of arguments and strategies in asserting women’s rights to both equality and difference. By constrast, in both countries the 1920s were a period of decline for feminist movements, in which the winning of suffrage precipitated a crisis of indecision and disunity. One major cause of this disunity was a new distinction between ideologies stressing equality and difference, which now became the focus of factional dispute.

In America the debate hinged on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), introduced into Congress by the NWP in December of 1923. It read “men and women shall have equal rights in the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction.”^[547] The ensuing discussion pitted the advocates of legal equality, chiefly the members of the National Women’s Party, against the proponents of protective legislation who feared that, in the absence of economic and social equality, “equal rights” in law could only increase the disadvantages suffered by women. The Amend­ment was defeated in Congress. In Germany an article providing for equal rights was introduced into the new Weimar constitution in 1919, and a similar debate concerned its wording. The paragraph read, “Men and women basically (grundsatzlich) have the same rights and duties”; the word grundsatzlich was inserted to allow for a military draft. Socialist women who were Reichstag deputies argued for the elimination of grundsatzlich, but were opposed by their colleagues in the Center (Catholic) and right-wing parties. The American constitution therefore acquired no equal-rights amendment, and the German constitution contained one so ambiguously worded that it had almost no practical value. Most forms of disadvantage and discrimination suffered by women in the prewar period continued into the 1920s.^[548]

In the 1920s the “equality or difference” issue was fought out on the level of political strategy. Some feminists argued, chiefly from the “equal­ity” position, that the winning of political rights had made separate women’s organizations obsolete and that the struggle for equality should now be waged through the political parties, in which women now had full rights of membership. This strategy was unproductive in both countries for basically the same reason: In the male-dominated parties (whether the American Republicans and Democrats, or the multiple German parties), women’s issues had very low priority, particularly because politicians discovered that women did not vote as a bloc and that as many or more of their votes went to parties that opposed than to those that supported women’s rights.^[549] Thus, not only did female office­holders and members of political parties fail to protect the rights of women - for example, the right of German female civil servants to tenure in their positions - but they also lacked the power to protect programs benefiting mothers and children. In Germany the public agencies set up to oversee child welfare by the Youth Welfare Law (Jugendwohlfahrtsgesetz) of 1922 were devastated by economic crises; in America the Sheppard- Towner Act of 1921, which allotted federal funds to infant and mater­nity care, was repealed by Congress in 1928 as a symptom of creeping socialism.^[550]

During this decade many women’s organizations in both countries argued from the “difference” position that women should rise above male- dominated political struggles to create a distinctively female, feminist agenda. In Germany the BDF continued to exist; in the United States the NAWSA dissolved itself and was succeeded by the League of Women Voters, which had its German counterpart in the German League of Woman Citizens (Deutscher Staatsburgerinnen-Verband, the former ADF).^[551] In addition, many other women’s groups pursued their own con­ceptions of a nonpartisan feminist mission. There were two problems with this course: The first was that nonpartisanship often meant political impotence, and the second was that, as the women’s spheres of activity widened, they agreed even less than in the past on the proper content and scope of the feminist agenda. In both Germany and America, women’s professional organizations turned the energies of many elite women from the cause of women as a group to the defense of their own, narrowly conceived professional rights and interests. German socialist and Ameri­can black women still worked in separate organizations, preferring the interests of their class or race to those of a group called “women” in which they still did not feel fully included. For example, the members of an American black women’s organization, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, were disappointed and angered by the refusal of the NWP to regard the disfranchisement of southern black women as a “women’s issue” (because black women and men were equally affected, the NWP termed this a “racial issue”). Organized black women turned their attention away from feminist to racial issues.^[552]

In addition, in both countries the 1920s saw an intensification of nationalism and racism, which poisoned the political atmosphere in which women’s movements operated. Women’s organizations and leaders who sought to renew and strengthen international contacts came under attack from large, right-wing women’s organizations: in America the Daughters of the American Revolution, and in Germany the National Union of German Housewives’ Associations (Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine). These groups attacked such leaders as the Americans Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams, and the Germans Gertrud Baumer and Agnes von Zahn Harnack as agents of subversion and godless Bolshevism. And in both countries the results were quite similar: Fearful of losing the support of the right-wing groups, feminist leaders moved their own programs to the right. The League of Women Voters disavowed the very notion of a women’s agenda and supported only neutral “good government,” and the NWP, increasingly dominated by Republican women, endorsed the Republican ticket headed by Herbert Hoover in 1928, even though the Republicans did not support the NWP’s chief issue, the ERA.^[553]

The most fateful result of the German middle-class feminists’ turn to the right during these years was their failure to organize a vigorous protest against the rise of National Socialism, which emerged as a major politi­cal force in 1930. On this issue, the ineffectiveness of both “equality” and “difference” strategies became apparent. The women in the political parties were deprived of what little influence they had by the disruption of parliamentary government after 1930, and the BDF was constrained by its commitment to nonpartisan neutrality, which prevented it from explic­itly opposing any political party.^[554] The necessity of appeasing the right­wing housewives’ associations (until they finally left the organization in 1931) also shaped the policy of the BDF Individuals within the BDF and its member organization, the League of German Woman Citizens, put up a belated but courageous protest against the misogyny and anti-Semitism of the National Socialists in 1932. After the Nazi “seizure of power” in January 1933 the BDF was ordered to change its policies in order to enter a new party-led women’s organization, the Women’s Front (Frauenfront); the majority of its members voted to refuse the new guidelines, which included the so-called Aryan Paragraph requiring the expulsion of Jewish members, and to disband. The League of German Woman Citizens also rejected such guidelines and was forcibly disbanded.^[555] Other member organizations of the BDF, however, adapted their policies to the new rules and were able to continue, at least for a time. (Most of the remaining groups were abolished or incorporated into party organizations by 1938.)

Many historical works have accused the BDF and its member organi­zations of passive capitulation to National Socialism and have included feminism in a general indictment of the anti-socialist and racist proclivities of the German bourgeoisie.^[556] Without in the least denying the involve­ment of individual feminists in the collective responsibility of German society (however this responsibility is understood) for the rise and success of the Nazis, one can question the attribution of the weaknesses and failures of feminism to any specifically German pathology. Tendencies to right-wing political agendas and to weakness and disunity were shared by similar movements in other Western countries and reflected a crisis that was international in scope.

Another argument against the causal connection of feminism and National Socialism is that, in the United States, very similar tendencies had a very different outcome. American feminists had been just as sus­ceptible to conservatism, nationalism, and racism as their German counter­parts. But with the coming of the New Deal the progressive energies of the women’s organizations were revived by the elevation of several promi­nent women reformers to national office, including Frances Perkins, the secretary of labor from 1934 to 1945; Nellie Tayloe Ross, director of the mint from 1933 to 1952; Molly Dewson, chair of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee and a member of the Social Security Board; and Marion Glass Bannister, assistant treasurer of the United States from 1933 to 1951.^[557]

Some historians have argued that the German feminists’ continued adherence to ideologies stressing gender difference and “social mother­hood” predisposed them to National Socialism. “The middle-class women’s rights organizations,” writes Claudia Koonz, “subscribed to an ideal of motherhood shared by Hitler and his followers, and their nation­alism made women susceptible to a dictatorship that promised a restora­tion of order and a revival of patriotism.”^[558] Koonz’s thesis has been vigorously disputed by the German historian Gisela Bock, whose ground­breaking study of Nazi sterilization policies argues that Nazi policies in fact rejected rather than affirmed feminist ideas of gender difference. The truly innovative aspect of Nazi reproductive policies, Bock argues, was not the pronatalist measures that encouraged childbearing among “racially qualified” women - which in many respects resembled those enacted by other contemporary Western societies - but the antinatalist measures that denied motherhood to substantial groups of “inferior” women. Such policies certainly contradicted any conception, whether feminist or nonfeminist, of a universal female vocation for motherhood or domesticity. ³⁸

Moreover, the Third Reich actually had little use for feminist concep­tions of social motherhood, which affirmed philanthropic care and com­passion for the weak and unfortunate as central values. Bock shows that Nazi policy makers excluded women jurors from the tribunals established to determine the fate of candidates for sterilization, citing women’s motherly concern for all children, even the handicapped, as the disquali­fying factor.³⁹ Bock also points out that Nazi pronatalist policies aimed to restore patriarchal dominance in the family (for example, through mar­riage loans contingent on a “woman quitting her jobs and payable to the husband”).⁴⁰ Many other Nazi policies demonstrate the regime’s hostility to feminist ideas of gender difference. Not only did the Nazis remove leading Weimar-era feminists from governmental positions - most con­spicuously Gertrud Baumer, who was forced to resign from her position in the Ministry of the Interior — but they reorganized the female- dominated professional organizations that had been among the foremost exponents of social motherhood under male leadership. For example, the new male leaders of the German Froebel Union (Deutscher Froebelverein), an organization of kindergarten teachers, denounced existing kindergarten pedagogy, which had emphasized motherly concern for the individual child, as dangerously sentimental and proclaimed new norms of masculine toughness.⁴¹ The German Christians, the National Socialist faction within the Protestant churches, proclaimed a new, “manly” Christian faith that denigrated both the leadership of women in the church and Christian values such as humility, compassion, and love transcending national and racial differences, which they stereotyped as feminine.⁴² The national cult of motherhood, exemplified by such ceremonies as pinning the Mothers’ Cross on mothers of large families and the elaborate annual Mothers’ Day celebrations, conferred no material advantage on women and trumpeted the masculine values of military preparedness and female subordination.⁴³

38 Gisela Bock,“Gleichheit und Differenz in der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993): 277—310.

39 Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986), 196.

40 Gisela Bock, “Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem Buch von Claudia Koonz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 563—79.

41 E.g., R. Benzing, Grundlagen der kδrperlichen und geistigen Erziehung des Kleinkindes im national­sozialistischen Kindergarten (Berlin, 1941).

42 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross:The German Christians in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

43 Irmgard Weyrather, Muttertag und Mutterkreuz: Der Kult um die “deutsche Mutter” im National- sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1993); see also the opinion of Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, 118—28, 207.

Koonz gives feminists some responsibility for the tendency of German women to retreat into a sentimentally idealized private sphere of home and family, which furnished a convenient refuge where male perpetrators could find the emotional support that enabled them to continue their grisly work. Thus Koonz establishes a direct connection between theories of gender difference and the Holocaust: “Mothers and wives,” she argues, “made a vital contribution to Nazi power by preserving the illusion of love in an atmosphere of hatred.”^[559] But, however the familial role of women during the National Socialist era is understood (a question too complex to discuss here), such a narrowly domestic definition of women’s responsibility cannot be attributed to feminist movements, which, al­though often praising and supporting the work of mothers in the home, always connected the home and the broader society. A comparison with the American New Deal, which by contrast to the Third Reich placed proponents of “social motherhood” in very responsible positions, shows that this form of feminism could provide a rationale for highly visible and effective public work.

This brief discussion of German and American feminist movements suggests the corrective influence that comparison can exert on the still prevalent tendency to interpret all historical phenomena within the framework of national histories. German national histories still tend to portray all aspects of bourgeois culture, including feminism, as tainted by the pattern of conservatism, authoritarianism, and racism that culminated in National Socialism. In fact, comparisons of German feminism to its counterparts in other countries, although it does reveal some differences of emphasis, shows little that is uniquely German. Feminist movements were less massive, active, and visible in Germany than in America, but this difference was attributable not only to the relatively authoritarian or conservative, but also to the relatively advanced and modern aspects - particularly the early involvement of the state in such areas as social welfare and higher education - of the German state. The welcome decline of theories of German exceptionalism will open the way to a more balanced view of the complex history of women’s movements.^[560]

12