When Wombs Became Weapons: Women, Policy, and Propaganda in the Third Reich

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the Nazi State used visual forms of propaganda in order to convey certain gender-specific policy aims to women living in the Third Reich. This will be accomplished by using the novel scholarly approach (referred to as the New Intentionalist approach) that these policy aims were not only fulfilling a State-centered need, but they also were reflecting a desire and a voice of agreement within the German population of women. In other words, while these policies were certainly driven by the immediate political needs of the National Socialists, such policies could not and would not have succeeded had they not made use of pre-existing cultural sensibilities and a uniquely German sense of gender-specific possibilities, thereby allowing an "old but new" version of engendered socio-cultural goals, responsibilities, and even moral imperatives to emerge. The selected pieces of visual propaganda to be studied will be used as a point of scholarly access, thereby becoming a means of more deeply examining both the roots and the evolving nature of the National Socialist policy regarding German women and the role that they were assigned within the political sphere of the Third Reich.

Name thesis:degree_name

MA

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy

Year dc:date.available

2006

Author dc:creator

• Predis, Melanie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Charles T. Rubin
• Clifford Bob

• Ethnic Conflict
• Holocaust
• Population Policy
• Propaganda
• Women

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1061

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-2077