Raffael Scheck. Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004. 288 S. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-85973-712-5.

Reviewed by Mary Jo Maynes (Department of History, University of Minnesota)
Published on H-German (January, 2006)

Antifeminist Women and Their Discontents

Raffael Scheck's study of women in the German People's Party (DVP) and the German Nationalist People's Party (DNVP) during the Weimar era amplifies and adds subtlety to understandings about the gendering of nationalism, and the contradictions of female antifeminism. His general argument is that, despite predictable hostility in right-wing political circles to the granting of female suffrage in the Weimar constitution, it did not take long for sectors within the major right-wing parties of Weimar Germany to realize that they needed a strategy for garnering female support, and that women activists were critical to this aim. Women leaders tended to eschew appeals to women's interest as such and instead tended to use antifeminist rhetoric and arguments to lure conservative women to vote--emphasizing that women's votes were essential to the preservation of the nation and that women had a special moral mission as "mothers of the nation." Scheck's study complements research such as Johanna Gehmacher's book on a similar theme in post-World War I Austria, Julia Sneeringer's work on electoral appeals to new women voters, Claudia Koonz's work on Nazi women, and Jean Quataert's analysis of conservative women's nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany, as well as a growing comparative literature on right-wing and nationalist women.

Particularly significant in Scheck's analysis is the role played by the vision of Volksgemeinschaft as an alternative to fractious capitalism and class struggle and purportedly more consistent with a woman's view. Gehmacher found that for Austria's right-wing parties, antifeminism provided a kind of liaison between respectable conservatism and fascism. Scheck suggests that a similar transfer of loyalties probably operated among Germany's right-wing women. For his analysis, too, the appeal to Volksgemeinschaft plays a key role. However, he insists that the appeal to motherhood as a justification for women's participation in public life was quite broad, encompassing a range from the moderate left to the extreme right. His interest, and the particular value of his contribution, lies more in addressing specific and more nuanced differences within this general appeal.

Scheck's argument is based on women who were active in the DVP and the DNVP, both of which "recruited the bulk of their supporters from a predominantly bourgeois, nationalist, and Protestant milieu" (p. 8). Leaders of both parties either opposed or resisted female suffrage, but made limited moves to accommodate female members and voters beginning in 1918. Female leadership of both parties was drawn from "the Wilhelmine generation" born in the 1860s and 1870s--also, ironically, the generation of the "first-wave" feminists. But the models that inspired conservative women were likely to be royal women who "stressed national heroism in combination with motherly character" (p. 12) or, even more likely, "great men" such as Bismarck or Frederick the Great.

These women were motivated to enter party politics by the new challenge of Weimar: would enough conservative women turn out to counter-balance the already organized left-wing women's vote? For example, the DNVP's Margarethe Behm lifted the spirits of male party leaders because of her "burning will to mobilize conservative women" (p. 24). She led the National Women's Committee (RFA) of the DNVP beginning in December, 1918, appealing to bourgeois women's organizations and Protestant ministers' wives all over Germany. Already in the first National Assembly elections, a pattern of relative success was set that was reconfirmed at every major national parliamentary election: women voters did vote disproportionately for the DNVP (and to a lesser extent for the DVP).

Scheck's analysis is structured around the process of organizing women's electoral participation to the benefit of the right, the hostility encountered by right-wing women activists, and the key organizing issues and constituencies of their organizing efforts: issues affecting housewives, family and morality, and the problems of rentier women who were especially vulnerable economically during the Weimar era. But he also attends to broader appeals to nation building and foreign policy as gendered components of right-wing ideology.

In terms of the effectiveness of creating specific women's organizations within the parties, Scheck finds that organizing women in this fashion did bring in women's votes, but it also led to treating women as a special interest group within the party, much to the annoyance of party women who preferred to argue that women represented the whole nation rather than specific interests. This treatment also exacerbated the distance and suspicion with which politically active women were regarded. Scheck points, for example, to the domination of male party leadership over public speech in and out of parliament, the relegation of women party leaders to limited arenas (for example, in a 1924 DNVP initiative to exclude women from foreign policy jobs because of "their inborn inability to keep secrets"), and even the hostility of conservative women who remained opposed to female suffrage (although they used means like a petition in 1919 to express their opposition!) (pp. 53-54). As a result of these constraints and suspicions, women activists in these parties had to downplay their interest as women and exhibit party loyalty rather than criticism even when they were treated unfairly.

All of these factors limited DVP and DNVP women's political power. In addition, insofar as women party activists were drawn from specific professional milieus, they were regarded with suspicion by conservative women's organizations in which their women constituents were organized largely as housewives or in terms of other than professional identities. The party women were thus unable to work in cross-party alliances that might otherwise have been defined by their own shared professional interests with women in other parties. Although there were some interesting examples of cases where right-wing party women took stands in support of women's political rights--e.g., on juries, as lawyers, and as judges--that did not meet with the approval of male colleagues, the tensions persisted. For the most part the DVP and DNVP women actively supported the programs of the housewives organizations (such as "buy German" campaigns, proposals for compulsory household service years, opposition to organizing domestic employees) and saw their defense of women as focusing primarily on those women who were fulfilling their ideologically idealized roles in the domestic arena.

This emphasis also justified their focus on programs for families and youth, considered by all Weimar parties to be the most appropriate terrain for women in politics. After World War I, the Volksgemeinschaft as a national family was seemingly threatened by dissolution, even as, according to conservative views, the literal family was rent apart by the war and postwar hedonism and individualism. In that regard the DVP women were more ambivalent than their DNVP counterparts. DVP women were torn between family policy conservatism and a more liberal preference for individual autonomy. If on the right there tended to be an equation between a healthy family policy and one that encouraged large families, DVP women would draw the line when it came to supporting programs that interfered with individual rights or involved state subsidies. In contrast, according to Scheck, the DNVP family campaigns were more "simplified, paranoid, and racist" than the campaigns of the DVP and their views fed neatly into Nazi family programs and later policies (p. 89).

The DNVP women, like the men in their party, were also more explicitly pro-Christian and anti-Semitic than were DVP women, which became especially clear in debates over the role of religion in the schools, and over censorship. Women in the two parties also parted company when it came to foreign policy. Views of women of both parties contrasted with the tone of reconciliation and pacifism that dominated discussions of women from socialist and moderate circles, views often justified through essentialist maternalist discourses. Right-wing women were fiercely nationalist in their pronouncements and they were anti-pacifist (which they in turn had no trouble reconciling with their maternalist positions, arguing, for example, that as mothers they rejected the Versailles treaty that had condemned the young to grow up in slavery and humiliation). However, DVP women followed Stresemann's moderating views, even as DNVP women grew more strongly nationalist as the decade wore on, to the point of attempting to reconcile Christianity with racist views of the nation. On these and other issues, Scheck is careful to point to important areas of distinction in the ideas and activities of women activists in the two right-wing parties, however, especially arguing that racialist thinking held sway in the DNVP to an extent not characteristic of the DVP women.

Women in the two parties also differed in the face of the Nazi challenge after 1930. Women in both parties were effectively excluded from any parliamentary work, hence any engagement in discussions with members of other parties such that had been normal when the parliamentary system was still working. The militarization of politics also marginalized women of all parties. In the DVP, women did articulate a critique of Nazi antifeminism, carefully but clearly, despite the efforts of their own party's right wing to court the Nazis. Although they continued to deploy the rhetoric of Volksgemeinschaft, they tried to distance themselves from Nazi adoption of this concept, and were especially critical of the Nazi appeal to mass resentments, and the statist and "socialist" elements in the Nazi program. In this struggle, they found themselves politically isolated when they parted with men in their party and with DNVP women over cooperation with the Nazis (p. 163). And, in the final analysis, there were many common points between their program and that of the Nazis. The points of resonance, the racialized state, were even stronger for DNVP women than among DNVP men precisely because of the links with "women's sphere" issues, policies, and previous campaigns in which they had been involved.

The question of whether or not right-wing women led German women into Nazism is complicated, but, according to Scheck, "the efforts of DVP and DNVP women to mobilize conservative women for the nation and, in particular, the DNVP women's demonstrations that racial hygienic thought and Christianity were compatible may well have eased many women's decisions to vote for the Nazis and to support the Nazi regime ... That right-wing women were to some extent mobilized before 1930 cannot have hurt the Nazis during their rapid rise to power in the early 1930s--it might even have helped to accelerate this process" (pp. 184-185). By the early 1930s, women in these parties had lost their ability to articulate an alternative to Nazism for conservative women.

Scheck's study is concise and focused and at the same time lucid, provocative, and convincing. He centers his analysis on biographical information about leading women activists, their organizational roles, and limited documentation about local as well as national activities. There is a full and useful bibliography. The discussion of ideology as such is abbreviated; it is therefore less clear here than in the case of Gehmacher's study of Austria how the ideological terrain was structured and transformed by the political mobilization of women in the 1920s. But overall this is a very important contribution not only to the political history of Weimar, but also to our understanding of the broader history of antifeminism, and the phenomenon of right-wing women and their political strategies.

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Citation: Mary Jo Maynes. Review of Scheck, Raffael, Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11347

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