ABSTRACT
The German League to Combat Women's Emancipation was founded in Weimar in June 1912. The goal of the organization, its leaders announced, was to warn the German public that women who demanded political rights, legal and occupational equality and access to the professions and higher learning posed a threat to the nation's moral integrity, social fabric and military security. The patriots who gathered in Weimar then branded the women's movement which championed these demands an offence to an order of things which nature had prescribed. The chapter explores the paradox which women's patriotic activism posed in imperial Germany. It surveys the efforts of German women to define a sector of the public sphere in which their activism might legitimately find an outlet. The chapter analyses the tensions that arose when women who styled themselves patriots attempted to broaden the purview of their public roles in a way which brought them into conflict with male patriots.
