ABSTRACT
If control over fertility is a precondition of women's freedom of life choices, equal educational opportunity is also fundamental, especially for women aiming for a career requiring a formal qualification. But in the 1930s, for most German girls, education remained a grounding in literacy and numeracy, with little intellectual input. Hitler pronounced that in girls’ education, as in boys’, ‘the chief emphasis must be on physical training, and only after that on the promotion of spiritual and, finally, intellectual values. Future motherhood must be the unalterable objective of girls’ education’ (1936: 459–60). Nazi leaders endorsed conservatives’ view that women's ‘nature’ was unsuited to academic study. Not only was rational and theoretical academic work alien to women, with their inherently emotional and instinctual outlook [Doc. 1b], but, by opening absorbing career opportunities, it would divert them from motherhood. Accordingly, in state schools there was explicit preparation for homemaking. Further, ‘racial biology’ became compulsory for girls, as for boys, to instruct them in the ‘scientific’ basis of Nazi racial prejudices, which also perverted subjects like history, geography and mathematics. Additionally, girls were encouraged or obliged to undertake six months’ or a year's service, usually on leaving school, before embarking on employment or further education.
