Mobilizing for nation and empire: A history of the German Women's Colonial Organization, 1896--1936

This dissertation presents the history of the German Women's Colonial Organization founded in 1907, the Deutschkolonialer Frauenbund. Its founding goals were to spread interest in colonialism throughout Germany and promote women's emigration to the country's overseas territories. This study traces the group's development at home and abroad under its four principal leaders and through three political eras: the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. The chapters on the Second Empire investigate how women became engaged in the hitherto male-dominated sphere of colonial affairs. Two central themes concern the position of the women's colonial organization within the women's movement, as well as its relationship to the men's colonial organization. Their relationship was dominated by conflict which will be examined as a reflection of wider anxiety about changing gender roles, part of the crisis which German society confronted on the eve of the First World War. This dissertation then continues by reconstructing the group's development after 1918, despite Germany's loss of its colonies as a result of the war. It will investigate the reasons for the group's surprising success during the Weimar Republic, especially focusing on its close cooperation with the Foreign Ministry in the country's former colonies. As during the Second Empire, the concept that women had particularly female responsibilities in the colonial movement was central to the group's development. This study concludes with coverage of the Nazi period, revealing how the group's leaders were unable to maintain a measure of independence for women's colonial activism despite their sympathy for the new regime. The National Socialists saw no such place for women in politics and were, in the end, uninterested in regaining the former overseas colonies. By examining the history of this organization over its entire existence, this dissertation addresses the position accorded to women in the public sphere under three different regimes and the expansionist aims of each, thereby offering a new vantage point from which to view German social and political history.