Interpreting Marital Status as a Political and Cultural Marker in Mid-Twentieth-Century Germany

Elizabeth D. Heineman. What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xviii + 374 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-520-21425-0 (cl).

The first World War generated an extensive destabilization of marital status throughout Europe. However, social and political circumstances made the transformation in the significance of marital status and large number of single women particularly apparent in Germany. According to the first postwar census in occupied Germany, seven million more women lived there than men. Beyond the devastating consequences of the Second World War, mid-twentieth-century German history was shaped by the experience of Nazi, liberal democratic, and communist political systems within a short period of time. These factors, as Elizabeth D. Heineman underscores, "made the mid-twentieth century and extraordinary period for women standing alone and a crucial juncture in the history of marital status."(4).

In What Difference Does a Husband Make? Heineman provides a persuasive and innovative analysis of the factors that shaped single women's experiences and the meanings of marital status in Germany from 1933-1961. While previous studies focus either solely on the social impact of the first World War or on the state's role in formulating marital status, Heineman considers both aspects in her methodological approach. She argues that "while the war made the experience of women standing alone a dramatic one and caused much public discussion about the changing significance of marital status, state activity played at least as great a role in formulating the meanings of various marital states" (4). In Nazi Germany, for example, the conditions and meanings of marital status were transformed before the outbreak of war. Furthermore, although changes in marital status were experienced similarly in all regions of Germany, Heineman reveals how marital status took on different meanings in East and West Germany. In her analysis, she examines how certain aspects of national policy—women's participation in the labor force; the role of marriage, divorce, and illegitimacy law; and welfare and pension policy—influenced and changed the significance of marital status.

Heineman first considers the stance of Nazi policy regarding marital status. The First World War significantly weakened the firmly constructed legal, economic, and social divisions between married and single women. While the defeat of the first World War and economic instability instigated fears of a national decline, upheavals in the experience of maidenhood, wife-hood, and widowhood led to anxieties of social disintegration. Heineman shows how the National Socialists attempted to reverse this trend. The propaganda and pro-marriage policies in Nazi Germany elevated the meaning of marriage and motherhood for those women who fulfilled the standards of the "acceptable" eugenic, racial, and social criteria of Nazi policy. Marriage rates increased and discussions about single women practically disappeared from public debate. Nevertheless, Heineman demonstrates that Nazi policy proved to be ambiguous. Despite the idealization of the family, the National Socialists tolerated extramarital children among the racial elite and loosened divorce laws. While official policy promoted marriage and motherhood, participation in political, economic, and military realms for single women who met the "desirable" Aryan standards was encouraged. Indeed, single women fulfilled vital roles in these spheres. Heineman reflects upon the ambiguities of Nazi policy as follows: The "simultaneous 'restoration' of traditional housewifery (however illusory) and 'emancipation' to fuller participation in public life (however compromised) reflected a larger tension between nostalgia and modernization in Nazi Germany"(8). Of course, for those women considered racially, eugenically, and socially "unacceptable," single women's marginalization was transformed into endangerment during Nazi Germany. Following her analysis of marital status in Nazi Germany, Heineman turns to the "crisis years" of military collapse and occupation.

She reveals how the Soviet zone aimed to spur on a radical transformation of women's work. Women received equal pay for equal work...