Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany - Hardcover

Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place". He investigates the social, economic and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction. The debate over "woman's place" in the 1950s was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question", West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West. Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics".

"Entirely original. . . . All future texts on modern Germany will have to take on board the findings of this major study."—Volker Berghahn, author of Modern Germany