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Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany

University of California Press

Writing in 1946, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack observed:

Hardly any other question will be so important for the future shape of German domestic life, for German culture and morals, and for [Germany's] reintegration into world culture as the question of the relation of the sexes to each other. [This question] will be raised in the arena of politics as well as economics, and in the specifically sexual arena as well. Every war and postwar period brings serious devastation and crisis, but defeated peoples are doubly endangered. They must fear the internal dissolution of many bonds that the victor can more easily maintain. The defeated party runs the risk of self-hate that allows it to throw away even what might be maintained.1

Zahn-Harnack's credentials qualified her as a keen observer of sexual politics. Cofounder of the German Association of Women Academics, author of a major history of the German women's movement, and the last president of the League of German Women's Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine), the national umbrella organization that had brought together various strands of the bourgeois women's movement before its dissolution in 1933, she was also active in the political organization of middle-class women in Berlin in the late forties.2 But no such qualifications were required to realize that a reassessment of gender relations would be a crucial part of rebuilding Germany after 1945.

Indeed, in many respects Zahn-Harnack expressed the obvious. Wars throw into disarray the domestic social order of the countries they involve. Particularly in the twentieth century, wars have been fought with

the massive mobilization of society by the state; the war at the front finds its counterpart in the war at home. While some men put on uniforms and try to kill those identified as the enemy, other men and even more women take on expanded responsibilities as workers, as single parents, and as sustainers of the domestic social and political order. Consequently, wars rupture boundaries that do not appear on maps—the boundaries between women and men. Unlike the boundaries between nations, these borders are never fixed; they are constantly challenged, questioned, and negotiated, though most people remain largely unaware of that process and live it without consciously participating in it. During wartime, however, state intervention into virtually all aspects of social and economic life alters the relations between women and men; the process is explicitly political, and its effects are immediately apparent. From the start, wartime changes are seen as temporary, extraordinary responses to extraordinary circumstances. At war's end, the social and political process of renegotiating boundaries commences, and again, the state's direct involvement makes explicit efforts to reestablish normalcy, to rebuild what has been destroyed, and to determine where the past can no longer provide direction. The politics of the family and women's status is essential to this general passage from war to peace.3

After 1945, the "political reconstruction of the family"4 took place in all countries that participated in the Second World War, but the salience of gender as a political category in postwar West Germany was particularly striking. On the most basic, immediately recognizable level, relations between the sexes commanded attention because postwar Germany was a society in which women far outnumbered men. As the journalist and political activist Gabriele Strecker observed, in purely visual terms the high rate of male casualties in the war and the large number of soldiers detained in prisoner-of-war camps meant that in 1945 Germany was a "country of women."5 This lasting demographic legacy of the Nazis' war of aggression combined in the late forties with the social dislocation and economic instability of the immediate postwar period to prompt widespread fears of a "crisis of the family." In a society where adult men were in short supply, this was a crisis of the status of women and gender relations.

Unlike the situation in Britain, France, and the United States, the problem for German women was not how to adjust to their postwar demobilization from nontraditional occupations; they faced challenges of a very different sort. Until the late forties under Allied controls, shortages of all necessities became worse than they had been before the war's

end, and the gradual release of men from prisoner-of-war camps, which continued into the fifties, delayed family reunions. War deaths meant that many families remained "incomplete" (unvollständig )—without adult males—and many marriages collapsed under the strains of long separations. The end of the war meant no end to the war at home.

Women's hardships and the perceived disequilibrium of gender relations caused by women's altered status in the war and postwar years became central concerns of politicians and public policy-makers. For women and men, from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the conservative Christian-Democratic/Christian-Social (CDU/CSU) coalition, there was a broad political consensus that the war had placed particularly great strains on the family, and that "more than any other societal institution, the family had fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse." This made the family "the central problem of the postwar era."6 Everyone could agree that after the hard times of the war and its aftermath, the needs of women and the family deserved special attention.

This book explores how postwar West Germans approached these issues in the first decade of the Federal Republic's history. It focuses on public-policy debates over the definition of gender equality in the new West German constitution, family allowances, protective legislation and women's participation in the wage labor force, and family-law reform. Here, West Germans outlined blueprints for reconstructing gender in reconstruction Germany. Debates over these policies provide an exceptionally rich source for examining postwar Germans' attitudes toward gender relations because they engaged such a wide-ranging variety of witnesses and experts; employers, trade unionists, party politicians, ministers of religion, organized women's groups, lawyers and judges, medical practitioners, sociologists, and civil servants were all brought onto the stage, into newspapers and journals and before parliamentary commissions. In remarkably explicit terms, they voiced their opinions on women's work, family life, and motherhood. By exploring the extensive discussions and the implementation of specific measures, this book seeks to illuminate how established conceptions of gender difference influenced public policy and how state policy in turn shaped the conditions of women's social and economic status during West Germany's "economic miracle" (Wirtschaftswunder ).

It would be possible to pursue other thematic paths to the same end. The process of redefining "woman's place" in postwar West Germany occurred not only in social policies that expressed how families should be but in the lived experiences of families as they were; not only in the

sometimes arid debates of policy-makers but in novels, movies, and popular magazines;7 not only in the halls of parliament but...