ABSTRACT
Emphasis on the maternal role had obvious ment In times of high unemployment. In fact, marriage loans were initially conditional upon the wife giving up work. The regime also blocked women's access to the labour market in other ways. They were prevented, for example, from working as judges or lawyers. And the campaign against women in public service, first instituted under Weimar in 1932, was steadily extended under Nazi rule. However, as Germany returned to full employment in the late 1930s, it made less and less economic sense to pursue measures of this sort; in wartime, it was positively counterproductive. But despite pressure from various power blocks within the Third Reich to achieve a full mobilisation of women, especially after the outbreak of war, the results were startlingly limited. In agriculture, the scale of women's participation grew, only this occurred largely by default. As more and more men were conscripted into the armed forces or left of their own volition for better paid jobs in factories, so the working of their holdings fell inevitably upon wives and mothers. The non-participation of many German women in the wartime labour force was compensated for by the drafting into the Reich of female workers from occupied territories. For them, as for many of the German women In agriculture, work was hard, conditions grim and the rewards minimal.
