Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
- PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
- 5 Women, Gender, and the Limits of Political History in the Age of “Mass” Politics
- 6 Gender and the Culture of Work
- 7 Serving the Volk, Saving the Nation
- 8 Modernization, Emancipation, Mobilization
- PART THREE LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE
- PART FOUR THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
- Index
5 - Women, Gender, and the Limits of Political History in the Age of “Mass” Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
- PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
- 5 Women, Gender, and the Limits of Political History in the Age of “Mass” Politics
- 6 Gender and the Culture of Work
- 7 Serving the Volk, Saving the Nation
- 8 Modernization, Emancipation, Mobilization
- PART THREE LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE
- PART FOUR THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
- Index
Summary
The problem discussed in this essay is this: It is still possible to write a general account of German history that excludes women. What happened in German “history,” that is, can be quite effectively explained with reference to events or categories that may be expanded to include female actors but that lose nothing of their force when assumed to be masculine (or indeed neuter). This is most obviously because the events that make up “history” (or at any rate, the framework around which historical accounts are constructed) are political events. This is acutely obvious in the case of modern Germany, where much historical analysis is concerned directly or indirectly with the seizure and maintenance of state power by the Nazis. More broadly, history is by definition the story of events that manifest themselves publicly and are acknowledged to be relevant to society understood as a public body or polity. The territorial or national state itself (another issue of particular relevance in the construction of German history), which provides the apparently unproblematic field for the study of history, is itself a Politikum first and last. By extension, class relations are acknowledged as a historical force or a locus of historically relevant power insofar as production is seen to be allied with politics through their common habitation of a public sphere. This construction of “history” not only privileges public identities and public forms of power over those that function in or are assigned to the private sphere; it also prejudices the criteria by which the adequacy of explanations is measured.
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- Information
- Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern GermanyNew Perspectives, pp. 149 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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