Frame and Preparation
So ist die neue Frau
Conceptual Frames and Background
- Neue Frau
- Gender and law
- Gender roles/women’s roles in society
- History of femininity
- Time and gender
- Motherhood
Introduction
Else Herrmann (1893-1957) was a German feminist activist, novelist, and lawyer. The daughter of a prosperous Jewish family, she earned her Ph.D. in law at the University of Leipzig in 1919 and she worked on behalf of refugees and the stateless. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, she fled to Czechoslovakia before immigrating to Britain in 1940, publishing and working on behalf of Jewish refugees and to raise awareness about the Holocaust, during which her family was murdered.
As an author, she is most famous for her second book, So ist die neue Frau, published in 1929 and the topic of this module.
Preparation
A full-length book, this module is focuses on a 10-page excerpt that is self-explanatory and does not require much background knowledge about the German feminist movement or history. At most, a familiarity with the changes in law and social mores during the Weimar Republic may be helpful for students to contextualize Herrmann’s discussion of the women’s roles in society.
Text and Discussion
Find a 10-page PDF excerpt of the text (pgs. 32-43) below:
- Herrmann classifies different kinds of women as belong to the past, the present, and the future. What characters do each of these classes have? How does Herrmann define them?
- What roles do women have in each of these three temporal classes, especially regarding being a wife and motherhood?
- How is “newness” tied to and read from the woman of the present? What makes her “new”?
- What politics and levels of social value are attached to each category of woman based on their temporal classification? Is one temporality more highly valued than others in the Herrmann’s interpretation of the 1920s?
- How does Herrmann see the situation of women in German society developing in the future?
- Does contemporary American society also attribute specific temporalities to different kinds of women or femininity? And to what effect?