The new woman in Berlin

The “new woman” was the most renowned symbol of the sexual revolution of the 1920s. She had short hair, the famed Bubikopf; she was slender, athletic, erotic, and amaternal.
She smoked and sometimes wore men’s clothes. She went out alone, had sex as she pleased. She worked, typically in an office or in the arts, and lived for today and for herself, as Elsa Herrmann wrote in yet another of the Weimar books, So ist die neue Frau (This Is the New Woman), devoted to the topic. The woman of yesterday lived for her husband and her children and sacrificed for the family. The new woman believes in equal rights, and strives to be self-reliant in economic terms. The war, argued Herrmann, brought women no substantive gains, but it did “awaken . . . them from their lethargy and laid upon them the responsibility for their own fate.”

This was, of course, an idealized image that few German women, even in Berlin, actually lived. Few women could attain Hollywood-style glamour or financial independence. In 1925, about one-third of all women worked in the paid labor force, the vast majority at low-paying factory and office jobs. The new woman was in large part a class-bound image, of middle- and upper-class women who had the independence and the means to pursue their interests and desires.

For the preponderance of women, the sheen and glimmer of the good life lay very distant.

Though class-bound in its origins, as a style and a goal the new-woman image trickled down the social hierarchy and across the country, even into rural settings. Communists promoted their own

version, short-haired and slender, but more sober, less erotic, and, of course, committed to the proletarian cause. As hard as their lives were, at least some factory women displayed an independence and activism that signified a working-class version of the new woman.

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The image of the new woman—however limited its incarnation in real life—provoked a tidal wave of commentary, some supportive, some filled with loathing. The very notion that women could determine their own lives, might decide not to marry or might choose to have a variety of sex partners, and not all of them male, the display of female desire on the cinema screen and in pulp and even serious fiction—all that struck something very deep, in men and women. Like every other focal point of conflict in the 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes about the new woman were loaded onto the republic, which was seen as either the source of female emancipation (or at least its ally), or the very fount of immorality and evil. The hard-fought, often bitter discussions and commentary about the changing status of women raged on in every public venue, in newspaper columns and illustrated magazines, on the radio, from pulpits, and in the halls of government. The broad expansion of the public sphere in the 1920s and early 1930s, wrought by democratization and the new media, made the conflict over the new woman even more visible and contentious.

The passage above is by Eric D. Weitz, history professor at Minnesota University. Professor Weitz has written an important book about Weimar Germany.

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Link to professor Weitz' book on Amazon