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general determination to
subordinate women to
institutionalized male power, the
Nazi system identified a place for
women at work as well as in the
family. What was peculiar to
National Socialism was its intention
to rationalize the process of
deciding which women should
perform which functions.
After 1933, women were expelled
from positions of influence in the
state administration. In the Third
Reich, women were either barred
altogether from state employment
or else permitted only a very
limited access. But even in the
public sector, Nazi efforts at
of contradictions (Gemengelage)
where subordination and
oppression were often mixed
together with new possibilities and
hopes. In her study of the League
of German Girls (BdM), for
example, Dagmar Reese has
discovered that the Nazi regimes
invasion of the most intimate
reaches of private family space
supported young womens own
desires for escape from parental
and familial controls.
the BdM as a time of personal
growth and achievement over
which Nazi sexism seems to have
cast hardly a shadow. In the
actively, if unconsciously,
participating in the construction of
Nazi domination by fulfilling their
own personal needs. The most
recent work in womens history has
thus begun to produce a
differentiated description of
womens complicated and
contradictory relationships with
Nazism, which will no longer allow
us to speak of women as if they
possessed a homogeneous
collective identity. However,
womens history has not yet
managed to negotiate the difficult
passage to gender history.
Certainly, references to Nazism as
a particularly sexist gender
unconsciously, willingly or
unwillingly became part of the
nationalist project of the third
reich.