Traditional Roles In Nazi Germany

Before World War Two and the division of country into East Germany and West Germany, traditional family values were the norm for German families. A traditional family would consist of a husband, who was the breadwinner and protector of the family, and a wife, who’s role was to fulfill household chores and raise the children. The wife was to stay home while the husband worked to provide for the whole family. The society in Germany was a heavily male dominated with a patriarchal rule. Women did not work outside the home, and if they did, they were usually unmarried and only until they got married. If a wife did work outside the home, she was not the breadwinner and her work was usually part-time and not in leadership positions. However, World
The Nazi reign of course heavily influenced the change as well as the stress over the war. At the beginning of Nazi rule, Hitler always insisted that women should, “…remain at home and be full-time wives and mothers; Nazi women were to guarantee the survival of the Aryan race in the labor room, not on the battlefield,” (Campbell, 313). This not a great shift in the traditional role of women, however, the task of continuing the “Aryan Race” is a new requirement over just taking care of the household. Mattson agrees that, “…Nazi society valorized women as mothers in a particularly pernicious way given that their focus was almost exclusively on women bearing racially pure future soldiers for the Reich,” (Mattson, 105). The original task for women changed as the war continued. Men were gone fighting the war and women were needed in the labor force to make up for the absence of men. According to Campbell (1993), women in 1941 were accepting industrial jobs and serving in female auxiliary unit, and doing clerical work for the men out fighting. The overall stress from the war and the lack of men present at needed jobs, caused women to abandon Hitler’s vision of the ideal Nazi woman. For the time, women were still not
However, that momentum ended when the men came home from war and expected their traditional patriarchal roles to be honored. In both the GDR and the FRG, women were expected to fulfill traditional roles assigned before the war. This general idea of traditional gender roles did not differ between the two counties. . As Adler and Brayfield (1996) highlight, “…German attitudes toward women’s labor force participation and women’s responsibility for family work are embedded intricately in distinctive state ideologies, policies, and political economies,” (246). While the GDR and FRG had different approaches to their government style, both had the similar idea of women being responsible for the home and children. Both Germanies, “…encouraged women to combine paid work and the family in very different ways,” (Bauernschuster et al., 8). The different manner of government between the countries, caused women to approach their allotted gender roles inversely form one