Familie, Frau und Gesellschaft: Studien zur Strukturgeschichte der Familie in Westdeutschland 1945-1960 (review)

According to Merith Niehuss, the West German family underwent profound and varied changes in the decade and a half following World War II. For every member of the recently established West German society, the meaning of “family” transformed to accommodate new social norms. In her sweeping volume Familie, Frau und Gesellschaft, Niehuss details how these changes took place. Central to this study is her explication of how the traditional notions of “wife” and “mother” altered to meet the challenges created by war, defeat and reconstruction as well as the ensuing period of peace and prosperity.

While previous research has tended to focus on women’s employment and the state’s promotion of family-friendly policies such as Kindergeld and Mutterschutz, Niehuss moves farther afield and widens the scope of her inquiry to include issues traditionally unexamined by historians. She takes into account a complex of factors, ranging from building programs designed to accommodate “average” families to how women responded to societal rifts, such as the “excess of women” following the fall of the Third Reich. Even profoundly personal decisions such as how women chose their partners and how many children they elected to have are considered during the course of this study.

In the book’s first section, Niehuss investigates population shifts, the refugee crisis and how women grappled to provide for their families. Exacerbated by Germany’s status as a defeated power, life-altering events, including a husband’s death, divorce and the birth of illegitimate children, all contributed to the need for women to redefine their traditional roles in order to create some sense of stability and economic security in the chaotic atmosphere of occupation. Niehuss’ chronicling of living conditions from 1945 through the 1950s proves particularly fascinating in tracing the evolution of the family. How families survived the privations of barracks and temporary housing demonstrates to what lengths mothers would go to create some sort of home environment for their children. Furthermore, construction programs and the design of typical family units in apartment buildings also reveal how the state in particular envisioned the new family and their living needs.

As Germany entered a new era of prosperity ushered in by the “Economic Miracle,” tensions arose between women’s new roles as wage earners and the traditional notions of what constituted a family. For many mothers, staying home to care for their families was not an option, yet they had to contend with society’s disapproval of their decision to work. Moreover, by this time, a new generation of young women had grown accustomed to working outside the home, whether they actually desired to or not. How women- and West German society as a wholehandled this dilemma serves as wider indicator for how social changes in general occur.

Throughout her study, Niehuss makes judicious use of government statistics to explore how families began undergoing such deep changes. By analyzing the ages of employed wives and mothers, she demonstrates how a wide array of circumstances contributed to their desire to continue working outside the home once they had children. Female family members able to care for small children, the number of married women dependent on a second income and the eroding of gender as a delineator in previously male-dominated professions led to the greater visibility of working wives and mothers. Additionally, younger women had better educational opportunities that, combined with technological advances in the workplace, contributed to the increase of employment for women. Although positions of leadership typically remained relegated to men, women’s employment and growing financial independence constituted a key component in how wives and mothers affected the restructuring of what contemporaries understood as the “family.”

At times, Niehuss relies so heavily on the quantitative side, however, that the families undergoing the profound social changes she describes seem to be pushed to the background. While the statistics may demonstrate how families used rooms in new housing developments, these families...