Weimar

• Weimar Constitution:


  Enshrined sexual equality:

  • equal voting rights
  • equal access to education
  • equal opportunity in civil service
  • equal pay in professions
• Change

  • formal equality
  • Reichstag: 32 women deputies
  • Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine: 1929 - 900,000
• Continuity:

  Essential differences between men and women:

  • The Good Pal: books for 10-14 year old boys - exploring and hunting
  • The Friendship Circle: the same thing but for girls
• Continuity:

  BDF: only campaigned for women within 'nurturing' professions

  e.g. nursing, teaching etc
• Continuity

  KDK: against cultural decadence, conservative backlash to 'New Woman'
• Continuity

  SPD/KPD: improve rights but still within domesticism

  Further the rights of 'domestic servants'

  e.g. maternity benefits, revolution or fighting still seen as a 'mans' job

  • did some things like equalising rights of married and unmarried mothers
• The New Woman

  Still depicted critically in film

  e.g. Pandora's Box: Lulu - seductress whose unnatural behaviour ruins her life and those around her

  • behaved with traditionally masculine behaviours, androgynous blurred the liens between distinct gender roles
• Prostitution

  Regulated by government but many chose to work illegaly outside of the official systems they saw as limiting their freedom
• Prostitution (2)Social Work

  Special Moral Police slowly replaced by Care Officers

  • still operated on the assumption women had 'innate instinct' for social work
• Fundamental Changes

  Conservative backlash indicative of some more fundamental change

  worried about cultural decay:

  • Americanisation
  • female emancipation
  • female sexuality
  • birth control
• Prostitution (3):

  following women's suffrage large feminist movement to end state licensed prostitution (supported by women outside the movement)

  e.g. Hamburg - 114 brothels closed by 1920
• Prostitution (4): Bremen Morality Scandal

  • diary of teenage prostitute published: Killed By Life
  • reports of Special Moral Police - violence
  • 1923: prostitution decriminalised