New view of the crucial role of fashion discourse and practice in Weimar Germany and its significance for women.

Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.

Throughout the Weimar period the so-called “masculinization of woman” was much more than merely an outsider or subcultural phenomenon; it was central to representations of the changing female ideal, and fed into wider debates concerning the health and fertility of the German “race” following the rupture of war. Drawing on recent developments within the history of sexuality, this book sheds new light on representations and discussions of the masculine woman within the Weimar print media from 1918–1933. It traces the connotations and controversies surrounding this figure from her rise to media prominence in the early 1920s until the beginning of the Nazi period, considering questions of race, class, sexuality, and geography. By focusing on styles, bodies and identities that did not conform to societal norms of binary gender or heterosexuality, this book contributes to our understanding of gendered lives and experiences at this pivotal juncture in German history.

Sneeringer examines how the major German political parties sought to win the votes of newly enfranchised women during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. Analyzing propaganda aimed at women across the political spectrum, from the Socialists to the Nazis, she shows how parties struggled to reconcile their assumptions about women's interests with women's changing roles.

This book is the first comprehensive survey of women in the Weimar Republic, exploring the diversity and multiplicity of women’s experiences in the economy, politics and society. Taking the First World War as a starting point, this book explores the great changes in the lives, expectations, and perceptions of German women, with new opportunities in employment, education and political life and greater freedoms in their private and social life, all played out in the media spotlight. Engaging with the most recent research and debates, this book portrays the Weimar Republic as a period of progressive change for young, urban women, to be stalled in 1933. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of German women in the early twentieth century, and will also appeal to anyone interested in the Weimar Republic and women’s history.

Examination of the role of women as producers and patrons of art in Germany after the First world war, while also considering the problematic area of women as subject and object in representation. Art forms discussed are the visual arts, photography, dance and film.

Examining how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who worked under both regimes. Melissa Kravetz explains how and why women occupied particular fields within the medical profession, how they presented themselves in their professional writing, and how they reconciled their medical perspectives with their views of the Weimar and later the Nazi state. Focusing primarily on those women who were members of the Bund Deutscher Ärztinnen (League of German Female Physicians or BDÄ), this study shows that female physicians used maternalist and, to a lesser extent, eugenic arguments to make a case for their presence in particular medical spaces. They emphasized gender difference to claim that they were better suited than male practitioners to care for women and children in a range of new medical spaces. During the Weimar Republic, they laid claim to marriage counselling centres, school health reform, and the movements against alcoholism, venereal disease, and prostitution. In the Nazi period, they emphasized their importance to the Bund Deutscher Mädels (League of German Girls), the Reichsmütterdienst (Reich Mothers' Service), and breast milk collection efforts. Women doctors also tried to instil middle-class values into their working-class patients while fashioning themselves as advocates for lower-class women.