IRL 10, December 16, 2009

URL; http://campus.udayton.edu/~hst-102/fern.html (the text is the same color as the page so you need to highlight it to read it).

This is an essay written by a college student about the role of women in Nazi Germany, and it is titled "Individual vs. Society; Women In Nazi Germany". It mentions the way women were viewed in Germany prior to the rise to power of the Nazis. In 1918, women in Germany were given the right to vote, and after WWI, many women joined the labour force in factories and offices to replace the men who had been killed in the war, but it also says that this was short lived, because once the Nazis took over Germany, one of the first things they did (in 1921) was make it so that women could never hold positions of power in the Party, and this set the trend for the following years, and eventually women were stripped of everything except their ability to take care of their husband, children, and household and (hopefully) keep having children. The Nazi Party took from women everything they had worked for in the previous three decades, such as the right to vote. One other key fact that I picked out from that essay was that Hitler set up a National Socialist Women's Movement to ensure that women had help raising their children. While I did not know all of the facts mentioned, such as that women had previously been getting equal rights such as suffrage only to have them revoked by the Nazis, the basis of the essay is consistent with what we have learned in class - the Nazis saw women primarily as mothers, housekeepers, and the people who would raise the country's children. This adds value to what we learned in class because knowing that the women of Germany had been working for their rights prior to the Nazis shows me that the Nazis changed the way society viewed women and put them in a certain position - one that only allowed for housekeeping and the raising of children, which limited women's capabilities in the workforce as well and made women fill one specific role that the Nazis wanted women to fill. The only thing I'd really doubt about this source is that it was written by a college student and not by a professional writer or a historian, but then again the sources used were quoted at the bottom of the page in a bibliography. It's just difficult to determine the accuracy of the information, although for the most part it sounds plausible and consistent with what I have learned in class.