ABSTRACT
While parties of the left, centre and even right admitted women to formal political activity, and sometimes to prominent positions within them, after 1918, the NSDAP’s first general meeting in January 1921 unanimously resolved that ‘Women cannot be admitted to the leadership or the executive committee of the Party5. Those women present apparently supported this decision enthusiastically.1 Twentyone years later, in the depths of the Second World War, Hitler was to boast that he had consistently adhered to this resolution: ‘In no local section of the Party has a woman ever had the right to hold even the smallest post . . . ’ 2 At no time did the male leadership of the Nazi Party waver from its implacable opposition to feminism, although it insisted that this did not mean that it favoured the subordination of women to men; rather, in the Nazi view, there were men’s affairs and women’s affairs, and the latter did not include participation in politics. But, in reality, the result of this ‘equivalent but different’ theory was that while women might exercise some control over their own organisational activity, all that they did had to conform to specific policies dictated by the exclusively male leadership of the Party.
