Social Policy
In their article, “Mothers and Citizens: Gender and Social Policy in Germany after the First World War”, Susanne Rouette and Pamela Selwyn convincingly demonstrate that the social policy in the early Weimar Republic was aimed at restoring the gender order to its prewar conditions. The article focuses on the effect to which this was implemented in both the postwar social policies and institutions, and the welfare state. The key premises of the article sets out to establish that the women faced “simultaneously for an expansion of their political and social rights and for discrimination against them in state social policy” and also notes how this social policy exposes “an impressive example of the contradictory nature of their status as citizens”
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This can be seen through the examples of the demobilization decrees, the government’s goal of reducing female employment is shown with the reintroduction of protective labor legislation, and the job placement services; in a discussion of the later, one author notes that it was “not a women’s competence for the work but her sex that mattered in placement decisions.” In addition to the workplace, women also faced challenges to their equality within the welfare state, as “women’s and men’s rights and claims to welfare benefits underwent a clear expansion, but at the same time these rights were once again established hierarchically so as destabilize the gender order.” Roulette and Selwyn successfully argue that this is the lens through which social policy in this period must be viewed and the inherent contradictions it exposes. Women received less money and had a lower value placed on their work abilities. While women were given the right to vote they had less equality as citizens. In this light, the article fits into the wider discussion of the ‘new woman’ as it highlights gender tensions following the First World War. The emergence of this new woman contrasted with a desire by some of “a return to the imagined normality of peacetime society after the social turmoil of
This can be seen through the examples of the demobilization decrees, the government’s goal of reducing female employment is shown with the reintroduction of protective labor legislation, and the job placement services; in a discussion of the later, one author notes that it was “not a women’s competence for the work but her sex that mattered in placement decisions.” In addition to the workplace, women also faced challenges to their equality within the welfare state, as “women’s and men’s rights and claims to welfare benefits underwent a clear expansion, but at the same time these rights were once again established hierarchically so as destabilize the gender order.” Roulette and Selwyn successfully argue that this is the lens through which social policy in this period must be viewed and the inherent contradictions it exposes. Women received less money and had a lower value placed on their work abilities. While women were given the right to vote they had less equality as citizens. In this light, the article fits into the wider discussion of the ‘new woman’ as it highlights gender tensions following the First World War. The emergence of this new woman contrasted with a desire by some of “a return to the imagined normality of peacetime society after the social turmoil of