The Civil Code and the transformation of German society: The politics of gender inequality, 1814--191

This is the second full-length study of the relationship between political change and the law in nineteenth-century Germany. The author, Dr. Margaret Crosby, focuses more on the content of the laws as well as on the relationship between German liberalism and the movement to codify German customary law. This study makes a unique contribution to political history and gender history, by viewing the construction of gender relations as a product of political ideology. The study covers the period from 1814 to 1919 and examines how private law was used to secure liberal reform in German society.;The activities and writings of liberal legal scholars and lawyers are analyzed to give a detailed picture of the links between German liberal political ideology and the codification of German private law. Scholarship on private law reflected the growth of German republicanism in the early nineteenth Century---a republicanism that excluded women from public society. Through the introduction of civil codes, German liberals were able to reform unified Germany into the civil society they imagined during the early nineteenth Century. This study throws new light on the political ideology of German liberalism, the strength of German liberalism after 1848, the structural reform of the Kaiserreich and the significant reforms liberals were able to institute through the codification and introduction of private law. Dr. Margaret Crosby, argues that the Civil Code of 1900 was the high point of German liberalism and that the Code effected a legal revolution in German society.