Women changes in culture

• Nazi policies towards women

  • Marriage and children
  • Work
  • Women's appearance
• The Nazis did not force their ideal appearance on women but used a mixture of propaganda and menace to convince women to look a certain way
• Posters showed women wearing modest clothing with long skirts, no makeup, and their hair tied up in either plaits or a bun
• Many women did conform to this and those who did not came under suspicion of being anti-Nazi
• The birth rate in Germany had fallen to 1 million by 1933
• The Nazis were concerned that there would not be enough soldiers and workers for Germany
• Measures taken by the Nazis to encourage marriage and childbirth


  1. Introduced the law for the encouragement of marriage

  2. Loans of up to 1,000 marks for newly married couples if the wife stopped working

  3. 25% of the loan written off for each child born

  4. Introduced the Mother's Cross to reward women for having children
• From 1936, a woman could get 10 marks a month from the government for their third and fourth child, and 20 marks a month for each subsequent child
• The policy of Lebensborn was started in 1935 by Himmler to breed genetically pure children
• The Nazis banned women from holding professional jobs such as teachers and doctors in 1933, and from working as lawyers or judges, or sitting on a jury in 1936
• The education of girls focused on making them strong and healthy for childbearing, and teaching them domestic skills
• By 1939, the number of girls attending university had fallen from 17,000 to 6,000
• The birth rate increased from 1.77 births per woman in 1935 to 2.24 in 1940
• Male unemployment fell as jobs vacated by women became available
• By the end of the 1930s, there were actually 3 million more women in work than in 1933
• This was because German industry was expanding rapidly at the same time as the army was recruiting millions of German men, leaving only women available to fill the jobs