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Abstract
The Weimar Republic has an important place in the history of Germany democracy, but a recognition of the strength of German women’s political cultures and their role in shaping the post-war political landscape has been elusive. Women’s experiences in the First World War and Weimar Republic have been extensively discussed, but often in ways that threaten to erase women’s political agency. Moreover, the seismic shift signalled by women’s suffrage has not been foregrounded in accounts of democratic history, and women’s roles in the revolution of 1918 have been largely overlooked. Taking a gender historical approach, this article makes women’s political cultures visible in two arenas important for an understanding of the post-war era: women’s suffrage and women’s revolutionary activism. While the focus is on the German national context, it is important to note that German women’s organisations were embedded in international and transnational network organisations campaigning for women’s social, professional and civic rights, and that their political cultures developed in dialogue with and awareness of what was happening elsewhere in the world.
Notes on Contributor
Ingrid Sharp is Professor of German Cultural and Gender History in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds and is currently researching German opposition to the First World War and women’s role in the Revolutions of 1918. Her volumes Women Activists between War and Peace. Europe 1918–1923 (co-edited with Matthew Stibbe) and A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Empire (1815–1920) were published by Bloomsbury in 2017 and 2020.
Notes
1 ‘Claiming Citizenship: Suffrage and Subjectivity in Weimar after the First World War’, in Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, ed. by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Brandt and Kristin McGuire (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 116–37 (p. 117). It is beyond the scope of this article to address the considerable scholarly interest in the Weimar New Woman, with its emphasis on representations of women’s patterns of consumption, sexuality and fashion.
2 ‘Zur Einführung des Frauenwahlrechts vor 90 Jahren am 12. November 1918’, Feministische Studien, 27 (2009), 97–110; Frauenwahlrecht: Demokratisierung der Demokratie in Deutschland und Europa, ed. by Hedwig Richter and Kerstin Wolff (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2018).
3 Catalogues for these exhibitions are Damenwahl: 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht, ed. by Historisches Museum Frankfurt (Frankfurt a.M.: Societätsverlag, 2018) and ‘Sie meinen es politisch!’: 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht in Österreich. Geschlechterdemokratie als gesellschaftspolitische Herausforderung, ed. by Blaustrumpf ahoi! (Vienna: Löcker, 2019). The Frankfurt exhibition was curated by Dorothee Lindemann in cooperation with Kerstin Wolff, while the Vienna exhibition was led by historians Birgitta Baader Zaar and Gabriella Hauch.
4 Sylvia Schraut and Laura Schibbe, ‘Editorial’, Ariadne, 73/74 (2018), 1–3 (p. 1).
5 Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 1.
6 As well as many articles in Die Frau, Die Frauenbewegung, Die Frau im Staat and other women’s journals, memoirs by several leading feminists and revolutionary women were published, for example in Schwetschke & Sohn’s series Weibliches Schaffen und Wirken.
7 More complex understandings of Weimar’s political cultures are explored by scholars in Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, ed. by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex and Geoff Wilkes (Munich: iudicium, 2012).
8 There is extensive literature on post-war German suffering, for example: Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Erika Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender, and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany, ed. by Karen Hagemann and Stephanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (London: Granta, 2003).
9 Figures from Renate Wurms, ‘“Krieg dem Kriege”—“Dienst am Vaterland”: Frauenbewegung im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, ed. by Florence Hervé (Cologne: Pappy-Rossa, 1998), pp. 84–114 (p. 88); Bessel, Germany after the First World War, p. 39; and Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
10 Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Gangolf Hübinger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), xiv: Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe (1919–1922).
11 Heinrich Mann, ‘Gedenkrede für Kurt Eisner’, 16 March 1919, reproduced on Literaturportal Bayern, ‘Dichtung ist Revolution (6): Ermordung und Beerdigung Kurt Eisners’, <https://www.literaturportal-bayern.de/journal?task=lpbblog.default&id=1834> [accessed 30 October 2019].
12 Volker Weidermann, Träumer: Als die Dichter die Macht übernahmen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2017). This male focus is also reflected in the exhibition ‘Dichtung ist Revolution’ in the Hildebrandhaus in Munich that ran from 9 November 2018 to 30 June 2019. See <https://muenchen-ausstellungen.de/monacensia-im-hildebrandhaus-dichtung-ist-revolution/> [accessed April 2020].
13 Hedwig Richter, ‘Ende Erster Weltkrieg 1918: Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17 October 2018 <https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/erster-weltkrieg-ende-deutschland-1.4155828> [accessed 30 October 2019].
14 As well as in Canning’s worked cited above, this tendency is being countered in recent scholarship. See, for example, Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19, ed. by Alexander Gallus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).
15 Marie Stritt ‘Victory for Woman Suffrage: German Women have got the Vote’, Jus Suffragii, 13 (1919), 44–46 (p. 44).
16 This was certainly the case in much of the press coverage in November 2018 and in two major exhibitions at the Kiel Maritime Museum and Hamburg History Museum in 2018. Catalogues for these exhibitions are Die Stunde der Matrosen: Kiel und die deutsche Revolution 1918, ed. by Sonja Kinzler and Doris Tillmann (Darmstadt: Theiss, 2018) and Revolution! Revolution? Hamburg 1918/19, ed. by Hans-Jörg Czech, Olaf Matthes and Ortwin Pelc (Kiel: Wachholtz, 2018).
17 Kerstin Wolff, ‘Auch unsere Stimme zählt: Der Kampf der Frauenbewegung um das Wahlrecht in Deutschland’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 42 (2018) <https://www.bpb.de/apuz/277331/auch-unsere-stimme-zaehlt-der-kampf-der-frauenbewegung-um-das-wahlrecht-in-deutschland> [accessed 22 October 2019].
18 Reported in ‘Die erste Parlamentsrede einer Frau in Deutschland’, Die Gleichheit, 14 March 1919, 89–93.
19 Stritt, ‘Victory for Woman Suffrage’, p. 44. I discuss the context in which German women were operating in ‘Overcoming Inner Division: Post Suffrage Strategies in the Organised German Women’s Movement’, Women’s History Review, 23 (2014), 347–54, although this article does fall into some of the German Sonderweg stereotypes noted by Schaser in 2009.
20 Kerstin Wolff, ‘Wir wollen die Wahl haben: Wie die Frauen im deutschen Kaiserreich für das politische Wahlrecht stritten’, Ariadne (2018), 22–31 (p. 30).
21 See Kerstin Wolff, ‘Noch einmal von vorn und neu erzählt: Die Geschichte des Kampfes um das Frauenwahlrecht in Deutschland’, in Richter and Wolff, Frauenwahlrecht, pp. 35–56.
22 See Werner Thönnessen, Frauenemanzipation: Politik und Literatur der deutschen Sozialdemokratie zur Frauenbewegung 1863–1933 (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969).
23 See Schaser 2009; Gisela Bock, ‘Das politische Denken des Suffragismus: Deutschland um 1900 im internationalen Vergleich’, in Gisela Bock, Geschlechtergeschichte der Neuzeit: Ideen, Politik, Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), pp. 168–203.
24 Paula Baker, ‘The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920’, American Historical Review, 3 (1984), 620–47.
25 Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Politische Rechte für Frauen vor der parlamentarischen Demokratisierung: Das kommunale und regionale Wahlrecht in Deutschland und Österreich im langen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Richter and Wolff, Frauenwahlrecht, pp. 77–98.
26 Claudia Koonz, ‘Conflicting Allegiances: Political Ideology and Women Legislators in Weimar Germany’, Signs, 1 (1976), 663–83 (p. 682).
27 Elizabeth Harvey, ‘Failure of Feminism? Young Women and the Bourgeois Feminist Movement in Weimar Germany 1918–1933’, Journal of Central European History, 28 (1995), 1–28 (p. 6).
28 Helene Lange, ‘Frauenstimmrecht und politischer Fraueneinfluss’, Die Frau, March 1920, 177–80 (p. 177).
29 Lange, ‘Frauenstimmrecht und politischer Fraueneinfluss’, p. 177.
30 Lange, ‘Frauenstimmrecht und politischer Fraueneinfluss’, p. 177.
31 This organisation was founded by Anita Augspurg, who, along with Stöcker and Heymann, went beyond the goal of a limited suffrage for women on the same basis as men, campaigning instead for universal suffrage without class or property qualifications. The organisation, led by Marie Stritt from 1911, belonged to the BDF as well as the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance. For more detail, see Kerstin Wolff, ‘Noch einmal von vorn und neu erzählt: Die Geschichte des Kampfes um das Frauenwahlrecht in Deutschland’, in Richter and Wolff, Frauenwahlrecht, pp. 35–56, especially pp. 47–53.
32 Kristin McGuire, ‘Feminist Politics beyond the Reichstag: Helene Stöcker and Visions of Reform’, in Canning, Brandt and McGuire, Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects, pp. 141–42. See also Helene Stöcker, Lebenserinnerungen: Die unvollendete Autobiografie einer frauenbewegten Pazifistin, ed. by Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin and Kerstin Wolff (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015).
33 McGuire, ‘Feminist Politics beyond the Reichstag’, pp. 138–52. McGuire rightly warns against categorising Stöcker as a maternalist, but underestimates the extent of Lange’s critical self-awareness (p. 139).
34 Ideas expressed here were developed in collaboration with Matthew Stibbe and Corinne Painter at network workshops with Kathleen Canning, Clotilde Faas, Anna Hammerin, Veronika Helfert, Katharina Hermann, Tiina Litunen, Mary McAuliffe, Ali Ronan, Manca Renco, Judith Szapor and Jude Wright.
35 Volker Stalmann, ‘Die Wiederentdeckung der Revolution von 1918/19: Forschungsstand und Forschungsperspektiven’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 64 (2016), 521–41.
36 For studies of women’s revolutionary participation see Helga Grebing, Frauen in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19 (Heidelberg: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1994); Anja Weberling, Zwischen Räten und Parteien: Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1918/19 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1994); Christiane Sternsdorf-Hauck, Brotmarken und rote Fahnen: Frauen in der bayerischen Revolution und Räterepublik 1918/19 (Cologne: ISP, 1989).
37 See, for example, Die vergessene Revolution, ed. by Gallus, and Zusammenbruch, Aufbruch, Abbruch? Die Novemberrevolution als Ereignis und Erinnerungsort, ed. by Andreas Braune and Michael Dreyer (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 2019).
38 Wolfgang Niess, Die Revolution von 1918/19: Der wahre Beginn unserer Demokratie (Berlin: Europa, 2017); Joachim Käppner, 1918 — Aufstand für die Freiheit: Die Revolution der Besonnenen (Munich: Piper, 2017), pp. 357–77.
39 See, for example, Heide Beutin, ‘Novemberrevolution und Frauenbefreiung: Frauen und die Novemberrevolution’, in Das waren Wintermonate voller Arbeit, Hoffen und Glück: Die Novemberrevolution 1918 in Grundzügen, ed. by Heidi Beutin, Wolfgang Beutin and Ralph Müller-Beck (Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 119–37; Die Frau greift in die Politik: Schriftstellerinnen in Opposition, Revolution und Widerstand, ed. by Heidi Beutin and others (Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang, 2010).
40 Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Germany 1914–1918: Total War as a Catalyst of Change’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. by Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 378–98 (p. 378). Ziemann reinforced this position in his keynote for the conference Living the German Revolution: Expectations, Experiences, Responses, German Historical Institute London, 18–20 October 2018.
41 Hedwig Richter, ‘Demokratiegeschichte ohne Frauen? Ein Problemaufriss’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 42 (2018), p. 4 <https://www.bpb.de/apuz/277329/demokratiegeschichte-ohne-frauen-ein-problemaufriss> [accessed 13 July 2020].
42 Moritz Föllmer ‘The Unscripted Revolution: Male Subjectivities in Germany, 1918–1919’, Past and Present, 240 (2018), 161–92.
43 This approach is in line with the theoretical framework set out by Canning for uncovering the realities of women’s participation in the revolution using a longer time period and focusing on the revolutionary imaginary. Kathleen Canning, ‘Gender and the Imaginary of Revolution in Germany’, in In Search of Revolution: Germany and its European Context, 1916–1923, ed. by Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 103–26; Kathleen Canning, ‘Das Geschlecht der Revolution: Stimmrecht und Staatsbürgertum 1918/19’, in Gallus, Die vergessene Revolution, pp. 84–116.
44 See Toni Sender, Autobiographie einer deutschen Rebellin, ed. by Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Frankfurt a.M: Fischer, 1981), p. 289.
45 AHRC-Funded research by Ingrid Sharp and Corinne Painter has identified 256 women in formal revolutionary roles. The figure of 4–5% is confirmed by Axel Weipert, ‘“Frauen für die Räte, Frauen in die Räte”: Konzepte und Praxen von Frauen in der Rätebewegung 1918–1920’, Ariadne, 73/74 (2018), 39–46.
46 Weipert, ‘“Frauen für die Räte, Frauen in die Räte”’, p. 43.
47 For a discussion of food strikes as political events, see Matthew Stibbe with Olga Shnyrova and Veronika Helfert, ‘Women and Socialist Revolution: 1917–23’ in Women Activists between War and Peace Europe: 1918–1923, ed. by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 123–72.
48 Hilde Kramer, Rebellin in München, Moskau und Berlin 1900–1924, ed. by Egon Günther and Thies Marsen (Berlin: BasisDruck, 2011), p. 134.
49 Reproduced in Kramer, Rebellin, p. 155.
50 Kramer, Rebellin, pp. 213–22.
51 Gertrud Völcker, Erinnerungen: 50 Jahre Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (Kiel: [n. pub], 1974), p. 21.
52 ‘Interview mit Martha Riedl, November 2005’ <http://kurkuhl.de/docs/riedl.pdf> [accessed 20.10.20]. The interview with local historian Klaus Kuhl itself took place on 10 March 1990.
53 ‘Gertrud Völcker im Gespräch mit Karl-Reinhard Titzek und Tilmann Weiherich’, 19.3.1975 <http://www.kurkuhl.de/docs/interview_voelcker.pdf> [accessed 13 July 2020]. The interviewers were more interested in Völcker as a witness to the revolution rather than as a participant.
54 Gertrud Völcker, Frauen als Mitkämpfer für eine bessere Welt (Kiel: [n. pub], 1978]).
55 Documented in Kramer, Rebellin and Sternsdorf-Hauck, Brotmarken und rote Fahnen.
56 In his prison memoir Eine Jugend in Deutschland (Amsterdam: Querido, 1933), Ernst Toller does not name any of the women who supported him in his work or hid him from the authorities after the military defeat of May 1919, although he was closely linked to Kramer, who lived for a while with Erich Mühsam and his wife, Zensi (Kramer, p. 55), and to fellow revolutionaries Nelly Auerbach, Thekla Egl, Nanette Katzenstein and Marie Bertls (Sternsdorf-Hauck, Brotmarken und rote Fahnen, pp. 20–21).
57 For a discussion of anti-war women, see Heike Lischewski, Morgenröte einer besseren Zeit: Die Frauenfriedensbewegung von 1892 bis 1932 (Münster: Agenda, 1995).
58 Lida Gustava Heymann, ‘Weiblicher Pazifismus’ (orig. 1917/22), in Frauen gegen den Krieg, ed. by Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1980), pp. 65–70 (p. 65).
59 These can be seen in The Hague resolutions of 1915, which identify women’s enfranchisement as ‘one of the strongest forces for the prevention of war’ (Article 9). Available from: <https://wilpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/WILPF_triennial_congress_1915.pdf> [accessed 13 July 2020]. See also the Zurich resolutions of 1919, which include a demand for fair food distribution and international efforts to combat disease, as well as openness, democracy and self-determination of populations, fair and equal access to trade, and the protection of the rights of minorities within nations. Available from: <https://wilpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/WILPF_triennial_congress_1919.pdf> [accessed 13 July 2020]. For further discussion of the resolutions see Ingrid Sharp, ‘Feminist Peace Activism 1915–2010: Are We Nearly There Yet?’, Peace and Change, 38 (2013), 155–80.
60 Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg, Erlebtes — Erschautes: Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für ihre Freiheit, Recht und Frieden 1850–1940, ed. by Margit Twellmann (Meisenheim am Glan: Helmer, 1972), pp. 178–79.
61 Heymann and Augspurg, Erlebtes — Erschautes, p. 189.
62 Sternsdorf-Hauck, Brotmarken und rote Fahnen, pp. 19–24.
63 Heymann, January 1919, quoted in Sternsdorf-Hauck, Brotmarken und rote Fahnen, p. 20.
64 See also the introduction to Richter and Wolff, Frauenwahlrecht, pp. 7–32.
65 A great deal has been written about these congresses, for example: Annika Wilmers, Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914–1920): Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext, 2008); Jo Vellacott, ‘Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929’, Contemporary European History, 10 (2001), 375–94; Catia Confortini, Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
66 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 11–44.
67 Adele Schreiber and Margaret Mathieson, International Alliance of Women: Journey Towards Freedom (Copenhagen: International Alliance of Women, 1955), p. 30.
68 Vellacott, ‘Feminism as if All People Mattered’, p. 384.
69 WILPF, Congress of Zurich 1919: Report (Geneva: WILPF, 1919), p. 243.
70 James McSpadden, ‘Inventing Interwar Diplomacy: Why the Weimar Republic was represented by Socialists, Conservatives, and Women at the League of Nations’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 65 (2019), 89–110, (p. 108).
71 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, p. 19.
72 On women and the League of Nations see Carol Miller, ‘Geneva — the Key to Equality: Inter-War Feminism and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), 219–45; Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay’, American History Review, 112 (2007), 1091–117; Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 210–22.
73 Richter, ‘Demokratiegeschichte’, p. 7.
74 See the WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2018 [online]. Available from: <http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf> [accessed 29 October 2019].
75 See the UN Women Report into Gender Based Violence [online]. Available from: <https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures> [accessed 29 October 2019]. For present day conflicts see The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, ed. by Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay and Meredeth Turshen (London: Zed Books, 2001). Figures given on the UNWOMEN site ‘Women and Armed Conflict’ [online]. Available from: <https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/end-violence-against-women/2014/conflict> [accessed 29 October 2019].
76 See Lijun Li, ‘Picture This: Gap at a Glance’, Finance and Development, 56 (2019) <https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/03/global-gender-gap-report-infographic-wef-picture.htm> [accessed 29 October 2019].