ABSTRACT
One of the features identified by observers of early twentieth-century life in the city was the challenge to gendered hierarchies of authority. This challenge is seen largely as a result of the long-term structural transformations of Germany’s economy and society, and was reinforced by the traumatic experiences of the First World War. Germany’s defeat in 1918 resulted in a crisis of masculinity, as it did in other revolutionary societies, while conversely it empowered women. In tandem with the march of 1920s modernity, women emerged from the confines of the home to assert themselves consciously in the public sphere, thereby calling into question the basis of male authority (Daniel 1997: 200–1, 250; Petro 1997: 43; Kaplan 1987: 429–49; Bridenthal 1987: 473–97). This altered state, heralding the ‘age of the emancipated woman’, seemed to symbolize the experience of modernity in the 1920s European city. As such, it was problematized by contemporaries and widely commented upon. Indeed, the ‘revolutionization of the woman’ was the title of a book by Erik Ernst Schwabach published in 1929 in Leipzig (Frevert 1999: 88, 98; idem 1989: 166–7; Kaes et al. 1994: 195–219). And the subject was noted in social inquiries of the period. Erich Fromm and Hilde Weiß from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, for example, noted the existence of a ‘new woman’ in their survey of attitudes among blue- and white-collar workers at the end of the 1920s (but only published in the 1980s).
