The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

by Richard J. Evans

also gave increasing numbers of young, unmarried women a financial and social independence they had not enjoyed before. This became even more marked after 1918, when there were 11.5 million women at work, making up 36 per cent of the working population. Although this was by no means a dramatic change from the situation before the war, many of them were now in publicly conspicuous jobs such as tram-conducting, serving in department stores, or, even if it was only a handful, in the legal, university and medical professions.135 Increased female competition for male jobs, and a more general fear among nationalists that Germany’s strength was being sapped by the birth rate decline that set in around the turn of the century, merged with wider cultural anxieties to produce a backlash that was already becoming evident before 1914.136 There was a discernible crisis of masculinity in Germany before the war, as nationalists and Pan-Germans began to clamour for women’s return to home and family in order to fulfil their destiny of producing and educating more children for the nation.