Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Maternalism, Eugenics, and Professional Identity
Description
Examining how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who worked under both regimes. Melissa Kravetz explains how and why women occupied particular fields within the medical profession, how they presented themselves in their professional writing, and how they reconciled their medical perspectives with their views of the Weimar and later the Nazi state.
Focusing primarily on those women who were members of the Bund Deutscher Ärztinnen (League of German Female Physicians or BDÄ), this study shows that female physicians used maternalist and, to a lesser extent, eugenic arguments to make a case for their presence in particular medical spaces. They emphasized gender difference to claim that they were better suited than male practitioners to care for women and children in a range of new medical spaces. During the Weimar Republic, they laid claim to marriage counselling centres, school health reform, and the movements against alcoholism, venereal disease, and prostitution. In the Nazi period, they emphasized their importance to the Bund Deutscher Mädels (League of German Girls), the Reichsmütterdienst (Reich Mothers’ Service), and breast milk collection efforts. Women doctors also tried to instil middle-class values into their working-class patients while fashioning themselves as advocates for lower-class women.
Reviews
“Kravetz has created a well-researched narrative of female medical practitioners in Weimar and Nazi Germany, which is sure to spark more interest in the gendered experience of National Socialism in medicine. This text provides vivid and rich examples of female physicians’ roles in Weimar and Nazi Germany, while also contributing to the broader debate about medicine from democracy to autocracy. It is sure to inspire more historians to weigh in on this issue, on both sides of the change and continuity debate.”
- Samantha L. Clarke
"Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany is an original and thoughtful study that analyses the experience of women doctors to ask fundamental questions about the opportunities and limits of women’s careers and agency in two very different political systems. In doing so, she looks at the ways in which the activities of women doctors both were shaped by and transformed important aspects of German biopolitics, which Kravetz understands as the processes of controlling both individual bodies and the collective body for the purposes of the state."
- Michael Hau, Monash University
“Kravetz’s book marks a very significant, fresh intervention into scholarly debates over continuity and realignment in public health discourse from Weimar to National Socialism and over women’s complicity in the Nazi dictatorship, respectively. It is highly relevant to the comparative study of feminism, medicine, and the welfare state, and it deserves a wide readership. Kravetz’s clear and engaging style and her thoughtful presentation of intriguing archival materials make the book eminently suitable for the purposes of undergraduate and graduate instruction.”
- Julia Roos, Indiana University Bloomington
"Inspires the reader to consider what these women were willing to compromise in order to continue doing what they loved, felt called to do, and thought necessary for their patients and themselves. This volume deserves to be widely read and cited; it could be assigned to both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students."
- Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
“Tracing an important story of middle-class women’s agency, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany serves to further complicate our historical narratives about gender, class, and the relationships between public health and eugenics.”
- Joanne Woiak
“Although women came late to the study of medicine in Germany in the early twentieth century, there followed a massive influx of women into the medical profession in the inter-war period. Melissa Kravetz considers this wider process by focusing on women in paediatrics and infant welfare, one of the specialisms which was more open to women.”
- Paul Weindling
"Apart from bringing to light the history of women doctors in Germany in this period through the vivid portrayal of a number of key individuals, the book’s main strength is Kravetz’s exhaustive use of archival sources, making German-language material accessible for English-speaking readers. This book will be of interest to those working at the university level in the history of medicine, and especially in connection with women physicians and their role in the field of public health, as well as in the history of gender, women, the family and education in early twentieth century Germany."
- C. Elizabeth Koester, University of Toronto