Rühle-Gerstel, “Zurück zur guten alten Zeit?” 1933

Categorized as 200-level course, Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Feminist Politics, Gender & Sexuality, Lesson Plan, Women Creators

Frame and Preparation


Zurück zur guten alten Zeit?

Conceptual Frames and Background

  • Feminism
  • Neue Frau
  • Gender roles
  • Politics of the Weimar Republic
  • Neue Frau
  • Media culture (newspapers)
  • Urban culture and the city
  • Labor and gender

Introduction

Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s article chosen here, “Zurück zur guten alten Zeit?”, was published in early 1933, coinciding with the Nazi rise to power and the naming of Hitler as chancellor. It is often read as an elegiac—yet nevertheless still combative—swan song for the Weimar feminist movement. The author reflects on the gains made by the women’s movement during this period, as well as describing what she identifies as a rising conservatism among women, feminist politics, and society in general: a reinvestment in and return to traditional female roles as mother and wife, anticipating Nazi family and social politics.

It is both an Abschied from the hopes and dreams of Weimar and a final call to arms to stop the impending dangers of Nazism.

This is an excellent text to teach in class, as it is both short and stylistically lucid and easy to follow.

Preparation

Students would benefit from an overview of the new rights guaranteed by the Weimar constitution—such as the right to vote—and the major battles, gains, and defeats experienced by the feminist movement during the 1920s and 1930s, such as the battles over abortion, prostitution, and the rights of working women.

A familiarity with the concept of the Neue Frau would help contextualize Rühle-Gerstel’s positions and background.

Materials

You will need a scan of “Zurück zur guten alten Zeit,” which was published on pages 5 and 6 in issue 4 of periodical Die Literarische Welt.

Below is a sample rubric to assess an essay version of the activity outlined below. Instructors may want to adapt it to make it more specific to the topic of the assignment.

Discussion & Activity


Discussion

Here are some questions to begin a discussion of this article:

  1. How does Rühle-Gerstel describe the state of women during the Weimar Republic? What gains have they made in society, and what still stands in their way?
  2. What different kinds of gender roles for women are identified in the article? How does the author ascribe each one a certain political valence?
  3. Rühle-Gerstel has a very prominent temporal politics in this article, in which certain kinds of women and feminine roles are coded as “new” or”modern” and others as “old” and “backward.” Can you work out each examples of women are coded as such?
  4. What does the author fear is the latest development in society’s treatment of women?
  5. Where does she see the feminist movement headed in the 1930s?

Activity

Students will write either a long discussion post (at least one full paragraph) or an essay/op-ed reflecting on the state of contemporary feminism based on this article’s model of analysis. Having read Rühle-Gerstel’s resumé of the past, present, and future of the feminist movement during the Weimar Republic, students should be encouraged to make connections to their own relationship to and view of the contemporary feminist movement in the United States or the West more broadly. In their writing assignments, students could address the following:

1) What achievements have been made over the last decades in American society concerning the rights, roles, and images of women?

2) What is the relationship between the individual and the collective/movement in achieving both legal and sociocultural change?

3) What do you see as the future of the feminist movement? What are the latest developments in the concerns, strategies, and values of American feminism today?

4) How do we enact change: by changing minds or changing laws? Or both? What is their relationship?

5) How are certain gender roles and social positions—autonomous subject, worker, partner, mother, daughter, etc.—coded as progressive or conservative in today’s feminism?

Learning Goals

The learning goals of this assignment are as listed:

1) To foster a deeper engagement and understanding of early 20th-century German feminism through a comparison to student’s lives and lived world.

2) To encourage students to think comparatively across time, place, and culture, identifying similarities, differences, and points of confluence and divergence around key topics, themes, and values in feminist politics.

3) To sharpen students’ critical thinking about gender, sexuality, labor, and politics.

4) To exercise students’ creative and inventive capacities by challenging them to imagine the future of the feminist movement and a feminist utopia.