Nazi attitudes towards women and the need for care

Where women were concerned, Nazi thinking was encapsulated in the phrase: ‘Kinder, Kirche und Kuche’ or Children, Church and Kitchen. Hitler talked of ‘two spheres of influence’. Man’s was in the public “sphere”, the world of business, politics and war. Women, on the other hand, operated in the private “sphere”, i.e. the family home as wives and mothers. If they worked, it should be in occupations that complemented their ‘natural’ talents, jobs like nursing or social work. But by far the most important role for women was to improve the birth rate and the ‘racial quality’ of the population.

The Nazis even went so far as to try and dictate how women should be seen and how they should behave. They should stay healthy, they shouldn’t smoke and they shouldn’t diet either (all seen as bad for childbearing). Ideally they should wear their hair in a bun, they shouldn’t dye or style their hair, nor should they wear make-up. They were also discouraged from wearing trousers and high heels. Yes, the Nazis were sexist as well as racist!

But we have to take care in making any historical judgment on Nazi attitudes towards women. In the 1930s, other countries were just as worried about their falling birth rate. None more so than France who saw the gap in population between themselves and Germany steadily growing. France had rewarded mothers of large families long before the Nazis did and had made contraception and abortion illegal. But the pressure on women in Germany was intense.

We must also be aware of the different culture in western civilization in the 1930s. It was much more normal for a woman’s “natural” role to be seen as that of wife and mother, with a majority of women agreeing. The man was the “wage earner”, the “provider” (and Nazis also saw him as the soldier), the woman was the “home-maker”. That’s how it should be, or so people thought. In the Great Depression of the early 1930s there was resentment all across the western world towards working women as they were seen to be taking jobs away from men.

That said, things were beginning to change, and Germany had been leading the way. Women had earned the right to vote in Weimar Germany and by 1933 one-tenth of Reichstag members were women. In 1933 women working in the civil service received the same wage as men, there were 100,000 female teachers and 3,000 female doctors. But still there was a long way to go (we can argue there still is today). So we can see that a 360 degree perspective is required.

What is more, as is often the case when looking at the policies of authoritarian regimes, we have to consider that some of their policies are not so far removed from those of liberal democracies today. All countries value the role of the family and the importance of maintaining, if not increasing population levels (with exceptions like China and India where the emphasis has been to reduce unsustainable population growth). In Britain, we can point to the tax breaks given to married couples and couples with children, and to child benefit as examples family-friendly legislation.

The key point, then, is that we have to be careful to put Nazi policies in the right perspective. We must not look at it from a twenty-first century perspective, not if we are to make the right historical judgment. We must also consider the wider 1930s perspective: how far out of kilter were the Nazis to say Britain, France or America?