Wardens of the Toxic World: German Women's Encounters with the Gas Mask, 1915–1945

This paper examines German women's interactions with the gas mask in order to interrogate the role of a specific technology in the contestations over female social and political participation between the two World Wars. While national air and gas protection was predominantly posited as a male activity in the Weimar Republic, familiarization with the gas mask offered increased formal opportunity and responsibility for women in the Third Reich. Female air wardens' embrace of such technology, in this particular historical instance, was laden with the authoritarian and patriarchal values of the Nazi regime and the violent politics of the gas mask itself.