Mothers in the fatherland : women, the family, and Nazi politics / monograph

From extensive research, including a remarkable interview with the unrepentant chief of Hitler’s Women’s Bureau, this book traces the roles played by women – as followers, victims and resisters – in the rise of Nazism. Originally publishing in 1987, it is an important contribution to the understanding of women’s status, culpability, resistance and victimisation at all levels of German society, and a record of astonishing ironies and paradoxical morality, of compromise and courage, of submission and survival. In the Nazi state, women had received the opportunity to create the largest women's organization in history, with the blessings of the blatantly male-chauvinist Nazi Party. Here was the nineteenth-century feminists' vision of the future in nightmare form. In this book I would bring to light the contribution to evil made by Scholtz-Klink and other women leaders, find out what they had done, what they believed they were doing, and why. I would ask how "normal" people (women, in this case) brought Nazi beliefs home in everyday thought and action. Above all, I would record the history of average people without normalizing life in Nazi society. Women's history during the Third Reich lacks the extravagant insanity of Hitler's megalomania; often it is ordinary. But there, at the grassroots of daily life, in a social world populated by women, we begin to discover how war and genocide happened by asking who made it happen. - Preface. Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE 1. INTRODUCTION: LOVE AND ORDER IN THE THIRD REICH 2. WEIMAR EMANCIPATION 3. NAZI WOMEN AND THEIR "FREEDOM MOVEMENT" 4. LIBERATION AND DEPRESSION 5. "OLD-TIMERS" IN THE NEW STATE 6. THE SECOND SEX IN THE THIRD REICH 7. PROTESTANT WOMEN FOR FATHERLAND AND FÜHRER 8. CATHOLIC WOMEN BETWEEN POPE AND FÜHRER 9. COURAGE AND CHOICE: WOMEN WHO SAID NO 10. JEWISH WOMEN BETWEEN SURVIVAL AND DEATH 11. CONSEQUENCES: WOMEN, NAZIS, AND MORAL CHOICE EPILOGUE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX From extensive research, including a remarkable interview with the unrepentant chief of Hitler's Women's Bureau, this book traces the roles played by women -- as followers, victims and resisters -- in the rise of Nazism. Originally publishing in 1987, it is an important contribution to the understanding of women's status, culpability, resistance and victimization at all levels of German society, and a record of astonishing ironies and paradoxical morality, of compromise and courage, of submission and survival