[5][6] The origins of the phrase are normally attributed to either the last German Emperor Wilhelm II, or to his first wife, Empress Augusta Victoria.
[8] He also lists another similar phrase: "A good housewife has to take care of five K: chamber, kids, kitchen, cellar, clothes," which appeared first in the 1810 collection of German proverbs.
[15] Barbara Kosta argues that, to some, the modern woman of the Weimar Republic was viewed as an insult to previous conceptions of Germanic motherhood, and womanhood in general.
[16] When Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, he introduced a Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, which entitled newly married couples to a loan of 1000 marks (around 9 months' average wages at that time).
In a September 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women's Organization, Hitler argued that for the German woman her "world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home",[17] a policy which was reinforced by the stress on "Kinder" and "Küche" in propaganda, and the bestowing of the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies.
Women's educational and professional choices were restricted, with the entire areas of law, civil service, and the upper end of medicine becoming exclusively male domains.
[18] In one of his essays, T. S. Eliot reproduces and then comments upon a column in the Evening Standard of May 10, 1939 headed "'Back to the Kitchen' Creed Denounced": Miss Bower of the Ministry of Transport, who moved that the association should take steps to obtain the removal of the ban (i.e. against married women Civil Servants) said it was wise to abolish an institution which embodied one of the main tenets of the Nazi creed – the relegation of women to the sphere of the kitchen, the children and the church.
[19]During World War II in Germany, women eventually were put back in the factories because of the growing losses in the armed forces and the desperate lack of equipment on the front lines.