Women on the Weimar Right: The role of female politicians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP)

The DNVP, until 1930 the predominant party of the Weimar Right, attracted a crowd of able women politicians with experience in religious and professio nal leagues, housewives' associations, and nationalist pressure groups. The article examines to what degree these women partook in right-wing ideology and politics. It first presents statements by party women on the issues th at tended to split the party into a moderate and an intransigent wing and c oncludes that women usually committed themselves to party unity and to a st and on principle that tended to favour the intransigents. An inner view of women's activism in the DNVP then focuses on two programmatic statements, o ne from 1921 and one from 1933, and argues that the politics of DNVP women shifted emphasis from practical women's rights demands to radical right-win g ideology. The ideological parameters of 1933, however, were always presen t, whereas the equal rights demands of 1921 were increasingly condensed int he claim of women to make a contribution to the Nazi racial state not only as mothers and housewives. The evidence thus shows that women from the DNV P partook in right-wing ideology and politics, mostly by stressing racism a nd militarism, even though they rejected Nazism on the grounds of the Nazi' s hostility to women's rights.