Contributions in Women's Studies

Annotation

"Based on official government documents and extensive secondary literature, this book revises several old assumptions on the periods of peace and war. For the 1930s, Pauwels demonstrates that declining female university enrollments were caused neither by Nazi rhetoric nor antifeminist campaigns but by the drastic drop in university-age population and the Depression. Despite their alleged egalitarianism, Nazi social and economic policies favored the access of middle- and upper-class women to higher education. The Third Reich was unsuccessful in creating an auxiliary female vanguard to serve in its leadership or welfare programs and failed to stop women from flocking into law, medicine, and engineering. It was WWII, not Nazism, that gave German women a dramatic improvement in higher education; increased numbers of women for a short time achieved unprecedented freedom and professional advancement though at war's end, these dramatic gains were lost"--Choice.

A collection of extracts from 26 autobiographies by German-Jewish women on the Nazi period in Germany and the problems of emigration. The introduction (pp. 1-8) notes that Nazi brutality operated in a special way against Jewish married women, who "were singled out and targeted as mediators of Nazi policies"; for example, after "Kristallnacht" they were forced to secure emigration papers in order to obtain the release of their husbands from concentration camps. Mentions that in 1939 there remained in Germany 135 Jewish women for every 100 Jewish men, suggesting that more men fled abroad.

Sequel to Herland. Published serially in the author's monthly magazine, Forerunner, volume 7 (1916). Herland described an all-women utopia in a secluded high valley, where 3 adventurous young men visit by airplane. Eventually, 2 of the 3 are expelled, along with a young Herland woman who has married one of the men. With Her in Ourland continues as the husband and wife tour the world outside of Herland, interviewing people, taking notes and photographs, and discussing history, religions, war, child-rearing, the role of women, treatment of immigrants, women's suffrage, and more. The two novels together convey the author's social criticisms of our world at her time and her prescriptions to improve the human condition in the United States.