Feminism in Germany
[1][2] Feminism in Germany has its earliest roots in the lives of women who challenged conventional gender roles as early as the Medieval period.
Hildegard of Bingen, Gertrude the Great, Elisabeth of Bavaria (1478–1504), and Argula von Grumbach are among the women who pursued independent accomplishments in fields as diverse as medicine, music composition, religious writing, and government and military politics.
[4] Legal recognition of women's rights in Germany came more slowly than in some other countries, such as England, France,[3]: 406–7 the United States, or Canada.
Many reasons have been considered as having a bearing upon this dilemma, from fractured regions, to the lack of a capital city, to the slow spread of novels and other literary forms in German-speaking areas.
[3]: 406 Women with literary talent were more likely to work in relative isolation, yet they left a legacy of letters and memoirs that gained a new popularity as the nostalgic Kulturgeschichte (culture history) trend in the first decades of the 20th century.
[3]: 407 Feminism as a movement began to gain ground toward the end of the 19th century, although it did not yet include a strong push to extend suffrage to German women.
[3]: 407 Germany's unification process after 1871 was heavily dominated by men and gave priority to the "Fatherland" theme and related male issues, such as military prowess.
Middle class women enrolled in the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, the Union of German Feminist Organizations (BDF).
From the beginning the BDF was a bourgeois organization, its members working toward equality with men in such areas as education, financial opportunities, and political life.
[8] Stritt met the radical feminists Anita Augspurg (Germany's first woman university graduate) and Minna Cauer, and became a supporter of the Women's Legal Aid Society.
More frequently and sometimes additionally, they included charges that a change in women's position in society would be morally wrong, against tradition, and would trigger a decline of the importance of the family.
[11]Writer Hedwig Dohm gave some impetus to the feminist movement in Germany with her writings during the late 19th century, with her argument that women's roles were created by society rather than being a biological imperative.
[13]Young middle class and upper-class women began to pressure their families and the universities to allow them access to higher education.
These changes put Germany in the group of advanced countries in terms of women's legal rights (Czechoslovakia, Iceland, Lithuania and the Soviet Union also had no distinction between the sexes in the professions, while countries such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Norway held onto restrictions to the professions for women throughout the inter-war period).
[19] Historians have paid special attention to Nazi Germany's efforts to reverse the gains that women made before 1933, especially during the liberal Weimar Republic.
As Germany prepared for war, large numbers were incorporated into the public sector and with the need for full mobilization of factories by 1943, all women were required to register with the employment office.
About the same number served in civil aerial defense, 400,000 volunteered as nurses, and many more replaced drafted men in the wartime economy.
During the post-War period political life in the Federal Republic of Germany was conservative in character: Political elites were dominated firstly by the CDU, a party focusing on economic growth and drawing on the support of established business interests and diverse local elites, and also latterly by the SDP with its traditional base in the male-dominated workers' organizations.
A disillusionment with conventional political parties, and even with standard Marxist activism, led to the growth of the radical left during the 1970s, including militant groups.
[29] The first established party in Germany to include equal rights for women in its program was the classic liberal FDP.
Marxist writers such as Frederick Engels, August Bebel, and Clara Zetkin had written of the role of gender exploitation in capitalism.
In the GDR, there was little public consciousness of conflict between the sexes, although women's rights were discussed by certain activist groups, drawing Stasi attention.
In addition to a longer formal workweek for GDR workers, women performed three-quarters of the housework and childcare[citation needed].
Few people owned cars, and product shortages and long lines made errands such as grocery shopping more time-consuming.
After decades of pushing for greater legal recognition as full citizens, Gastarbeiter (guest workers) and their children (often born and raised in Germany) won some reforms at the national level in the late 1990s.
[38] Before 1997, the definition of rape in Germany was: "Whoever compels a woman to have extramarital intercourse with him, or with a third person, by force or the threat of present danger to life or limb, shall be punished by not less than two years’ imprisonment".
[43]Networked feminism, where women's rights activists communicate and organize using social media, is a growing trend among younger feminists in Germany.
Using a hashtag called #aufschrei (outcry), more than 100,000 tweets (messages) were sent to protest personal experiences of harassment, raising awareness of the issue and generating national and international press coverage.
Merkel's time in office has not been without controversy related to women's rights legislation; in 2013, she opposed an EU proposal to introduce 40-percent female quota on executive boards in all publicly listed companies with more than 250 employees by 2020, on the basis that this was a violation of member states' affairs.
