ABSTRACT
In the first third of the twentieth century there began in many respects a process of 'women's liberation' in Germany. Women were admitted to universities and the professions; they w ere granted the right to vote; and in everyday life outmoded notions of 'propriety and decorum' began increasingly to lose their significance. This 'women's emancipation' was accompanied by liberation of women's bodies: corsets were discarded and carried off to the museum while short hair and short skirts became fashionable. However, such 'liberation' from external constraints had its price; this was a growing internalization of ideals and disciplining of the body such as ever stricter norms of weight and size. New means of public transport as well as sporting activities like hiking and cycling allowed women greater freedom of movement; and sport, with its new credo of performance and competition, revolutionized ideas about the 'weaker sex'. Nevertheless, even in the 1920s resistance to women's sport had still not died out; on the contrary, using a great variety of moral, medical and aesthetic arguments, its opponents attempted to bar women from competitive sport and restrict them to their 'natural vocation' as wives and mothers.
