ABSTRACT
The churches exercised a powerful influence on the accepted role of women in German society, and this influence - in the social, as against the spiritual sphere - was longer lasting than in comparable western European countries. Largely because of the predominantly political and constitutional bias of its historians, Germany has produced few historical studies dealing with women's position. The genre had an unprecedented popularity in late eighteenth century Germany: by the 1790s, for every novel published in England, eight were appearing in Germany. The old maxim, 'Women shall be silent in church', held good still in seventeenth and eighteenth century Germany, both in the Protestant north and the Catholic south. Advocates of women's rights were few in number in the nineteenth century, the object of indifference or derision to the majority of both sexes. However indifferent society in general proved to be, the economic facts were beginning to demonstrate the pressing need for some modification of women's role.
