Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany

The title Women’s Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany might suggest that Melissa Kravetz has written a rather conventional history about a minority within the German medical profession. But this book is about much more than that. This original and thoughtful study analyses the experience of women doctors to ask fundamental questions about the opportunities and limits of women’s careers and agency in two very different political systems. In doing so, she looks at the ways in which the activities of women doctors both were shaped by and transformed important aspects of German biopolitics, which Kravetz understands as the processes of controlling both individual bodies and the collective body for the purposes of the state. As she argues, the work of female medical professionals was often confined to areas of medical practice where they could make plausible claims of expertise based on their experience as women and mothers, as well as on their medical training and scientific knowledge. Women’s maternalist claims were limiting as well as empowering. On the one hand, they limited women’s claims of expertise and work to areas for which they could make essentialist claims of competence, such as marriage counselling, women’s and infant health and breastfeeding. On the other hand, it was often precisely in such arenas in which different German governments recognized the work as important for the health and well-being of the German population as a whole or, in the case of Nazi Germany, for those sections of the population which were considered racially ‘valuable’. As Kravetz shows, official recognition did not just come as a matter of course. It was a result of women doctors’ active engagement with the changing biopolitical priorities of the Weimar republic and the Nazi regime. In both instances, women drew on essentialist arguments and maternalist discourses to lay claim to new areas of professional expertise with reference to their unique experiences.

Agency (philosophy) · Biopower · Competence (human resources) · Eugenics · German · Identity (music) · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Population · Social science · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Queer Lives across the Wall

  Open Access•Andrea Rottmann•Queer Lives across the Wall•2023

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