Anti Feminism In Germany 1912 1920

"The German League for the Prevention of Women's Emancipation: Antifeminism in Germany, 1912-1920 presents a detailed account of the activities of the German League for the Prevention of Women's Emancipation from its beginnings in 1912 to its dissolution in 1920. It underscores the impact of this conservative, keenly nationalist, and increasingly anti-socialist, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic organization as it targeted primarily the moderate bourgeois Federation of German Women's Associations and the conservative German-Evangelical Women's League. This book also documents motives for membership, the League's philosophy, and the political and social activism used by the League to achieve its aims. Based on a membership list reconstructed by the author, it offers a demographic analysis of League members and officers including an evaluation of the League's geographic distribution and the extent of women's participation in it." --Book Jacket.

Addressing the relationship among social critique, violence, and domination, Violence and Reflexivity: The Place of Critique in the Reality of Domination examines a critique of violent and unjust social arrangements that transcends the Enlightenment/postmodern opposition. This critique surpasses the “reflexive violence” of classical enlightenment universalism without committing the “violence of reflexivity” by negating any possibility of collective radical social engagement. The unifying thread of the collection, edited by Marjan Ivković, Adriana Zaharijević, and Gazela Pudar-Draško, is a sensitivity to the field of tension created by these extremes, especially for the issue of how to articulate a non-violent critique that is nevertheless “militant,” in the sense that it creates a rupture in an institutionalized order of violence. In Part One, the contributors examine the theoretical resources that help us move beyond the reflexive violence of the classical Enlightenment social critique in our quest for justice and non-domination. Part Two brings together nuanced attempts to reconsider the dominant modern understandings of violence, subjectivity, and society without succumbing to the violence of reflexivity that characterizes radically anti-Enlightenment standpoints.

This ambitious book explores challenges to male hegemony throughout continental Europe over the past 250 years. For general readers and those interested primarily in the historical record, it provides a comprehensive, comparative account of feminist developments in European societies, as well as a rereading of European history from a feminist perspective. By placing gender, or relations between women and men, at the center of European politics, it aims to reconfigure our understanding of the European past and to make visible a long but neglected tradition of feminist thought and politics. On another level the book seeks to disentangle some misperceptions and to demystify some confusing contemporary debates about the Enlightenment, reason, nature, and public vs. private, equality vs. difference. In the process, the author aims to show that gender is not merely 'a useful category of analysis', but that sexual difference lies at the heart of human thought and politics.

Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France, and Germany examines an understudied corpus of memoirs in English, French, and German stemming from the unprecedented involvement of women in the war effort. Jerry Palmer considers the memoirs in relationship to public opinion, collective memory and other women’s writing about the war. Through close-readings of the memoirs and their contexts, the book identifies themes present in the texts and considers the nurse memoir as rhetoric—examining to what extent the texts are promoting or countering arguments in the public sphere about their involvement or more widely about women’s position in society. Palmer explores the multiple contexts related to the nurse memoirs, including public response to volunteer wartime nursing, the organisation of the military health services of the three nations and their conduct in the war, and changes in the post-war organization of public health services and the professionalization of nursing.

Although largely forgotten now, the 1885 trial of German artist Gustav Graef was a seminal event for those who observed it. Graef, a celebrated sixty-four-year-old portraitist, was accused of perjury and sexual impropriety with underage models. On trial alongside him was one of his former models, the twenty-one-year-old Bertha Rother, who quickly became a central figure in the affair. As the case was being heard, images of Rother, including photographic reproductions of Graef's nude paintings of her, began to flood the art shops and bookstores of Berlin and spread across Europe. Spurred by this trade in images and by sensational coverage in the press, this former prostitute was transformed into an international sex symbol and a target of both public lust and scorn. Passionate discussions of the case echoed in the press for months, and the episode lasted in public memory for far longer. The Graef trial, however, was much more than a salacious story that served as public entertainment. The case inspired fierce political debates long after a verdict was delivered, including disputes about obscenity laws, the moral degeneracy of modern art and artists, the alleged pernicious effects of Jewish influence, legal restrictions on prostitution, the causes of urban criminality, the impact of sensationalized press coverage, and the requirements of bourgeois masculine honor. Above all, the case unleashed withering public criticism of a criminal justice system that many Germans agreed had become entirely dysfunctional. The story of the Graef trial offers a unique perspective on a German Empire that was at the height of its power, yet riven with deep political, social, and cultural divisions. This compelling study will appeal to historians and students of modern German and European history, as well as those interested in obscenity law and class and gender relations in nineteenth-century Europe.

Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925) was one of the most important Jewish artists of modern times. As a successful illustrator, photographer, painter and printer, he became the first major Zionist artist. Surprisingly there has been little in-depth scholarly research and analysis of Lilien's work available in English, making this book an important contribution to historical and art-historical scholarship. Concentrating mainly on his illustrations for journals and books, Lynne Swarts acknowledges the importance of Lilien's groundbreaking male iconography in Zionist art, but is the first to examine Lilien's complex and nuanced depiction of women, which comprised a major dimension of his work. Lilien's female images offer a compelling glimpse of an alternate, independent and often sexually liberated modern Jewish woman, a portrayal that often eluded the Zionist imagination. Using an interdisciplinary approach to integrate intellectual and cultural history with issues of gender, Jewish history and visual culture, Swarts also explores the important fin de siècle tensions between European and Oriental expressions of Jewish femininity. The work demonstrates that Lilien was not a minor figure in the European art scene, but a major figure whose work needs re-reading in light of his cosmopolitan and national artistic genius.