ABSTRACT
This was typical of the way weise Frauen (wise women) or Engelmacherinnen (angel makers), as the public or the authorities called them, advertised their abortion services in Weimar Germany. Advertisements were usually carefully worded. First, they had to steer clear of formulations that could lead to prosecution under Paragraph 219 of the German penal code; 2 secondly, they had to be explicit enough to attract potential customers. Although “menstrual blockage”, “delayed period”, “menstrual irregularities” were euphemisms for a suspected pregnancy, in the 1920s – before reliable pregnancy tests were available – these usefully ambiguous terms could equally apply to nothing more than a late period. Midwives featured frequently in such advertisements. For example, during the 1920s a certain Frau K. appeared almost daily in the small-ad section of all four local newspapers in her home town in the Ruhr, calling herself a “retired midwife” and promising “a kind welcome, advice and help for all single women and girls” and recommending “treatment of women’s complaints of all kinds”. 3 Although apparently typical, the advertisement at the top of this chapter is nevertheless of special interest to the historian of gender because Frau R. was in fact a man. It 144raises the question why he felt it paid to advertise as a wise woman rather than a wise man, as contemporaries often called male lay abortionists, 4 as well as why it paid to advertise as a lay practitioner at a time when German society seemed to have been thoroughly medicalized. 5 This in turn opens up two issues: the role of gender in situations when an abortion was desired and the relationship between lay practitioners and the medical profession. Both these issues address the question of power and the following discussion will attempt to disentangle this complex web of power relations.
