Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency, and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century

by Lynn Abrams, Elizabeth Harvey

This collection of essays by scholars from England, Germany, and the United States brings together important and innovative work on gender relations in German history from the early modern period to the 1950s. Offering fresh insights and challenging interpretations, the essays demonstrate how the norms of political, social, and sexual behavior for both sexes are the objects of regulation and control, and are matters of conflict, debate, and negotiation. A substantial introduction reviews the historiography relating the major themes of the collection.Topics include childbirth, abortion, and the female body in early modern Germany; the roots of German feminism; gender, class, and medicine during World War I and during the Weimar republic; female homosexuality during the Nazi period; East and West German reconstruction following World War II and the formation of a gendered consumer culture.This book will stimulate readers to think more deeply about the importance of gender in German history, and prove to be an invaluable resource for those interested in women’s studies and in German and European history.Contributors. Lynn Abrams, Elizabeth Harvey, Dagmar Herzog, Kate Lacey, Katherine Pence, Ulinka Rublack, Claudia Schoppman, Regina Schulte, Cornelie Usborne, Heide Wunder

Genres: History, Germany

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 1996

About the author

Lynn Abrams is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow.

Reviews

[Denise Kettering · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting collection of essays that trace issues related to gender in the modern period. The essays cover a wide-range of issues related to women's work, sexuality, consumer habits, and so forth. The essays show the varieties of ways that gender played a role in power dynamics in German history. If you are looking for a collection on a concentrated time period, this is not it, but if you want to have a broad overview of gender and German history from the 1500s through the mid-twentieth century, this collection contains a nice overview of different issues.