Antifeminsm in the Federal Republic of Germany
Principal Investigator: Isabel Heinemann, Research Assistant: Benedikt Breisacher
This PhD project focuses on the events, actors, themes and practices of antifeminist activism in the German Federal Republic from the 1950s to the 1990s. The focus is on the conflicts surrounding the new democratic order in the tense relationship between formal rights and social inequality between the genders. After 1945, many actors from conservative women's organisations, social sciences, churches and political parties understood themselves as democrats and yet insisted on a traditional gender order. Antifeminist activities became visible in public debates about political and legal equality, reproductive decision-making, women's employment and violence against women. By examining the shifts in anti-feminist argumentation and the changes in the actors who draw on it, the project will offer new insights on the changes in Germany’s public discourses on the conditions of the gender order as the basis of democracy.
Part of the joint project “Democracy and Gender: Conflicts over the order of German society in the 20th century”
This joint project uses a gender-historical perspective on German democracy in the 20th century to analyse conflicts over the “good order” in society. The contradictions inherent in democracy between civic equality and cultural and social difference are bundled in the category of “gender”. The project examines the interdependence of gender orders and opportunities for participation and thus creates a gender-centred, diachronic history of conflict in democracy from the Weimar Republic to the 1990s. It interweaves intersectional and transnational levels of analysis and places little-noticed actors, thematic fields and spaces at the centre of the history of democracy. One postdoctoral and two dissertation projects explore gendered appropriations of Weimar's rural democracy (based at the IfZ), antifeminism as an attempt at self-assertion of a traditional gender order in the Federal Republic (based at the University of Bayreuth) and the field of tension between migration, gender and democracy using the example of political exiles since the 1960s (based at the RUB).
Cooperation project of the IfZ Munich/Berlin (Prof. Dr Martina Steber / PD Dr Bernhard Gotto), the Chair of Transnational History at the Ruhr University Bochum (Prof. Dr Sandra Maß) and the Chair of Modern History at the WWU (Prof. Dr Isabel Heinemann) Funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation 2022-2025.