Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926-1931
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Syracuse University SURFACE Full list of publications from School of Architecture School of Architecture 2013 The New Woman's Home, excerpt from Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926-1931 Susan R. Henderson [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/arc Part of the Architectural History and Criticism Commons, European History Commons, History of Gender Commons, Interior Architecture Commons, Modern Art and Architecture Commons, Social History Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Susan R. Henderson, The New Woman's Home, excerpt from Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926-1931 (Bern, Frankfurt, London, New York: Peter Lang, 2013). This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Architecture at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Full list of publications from School of Architecture by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 3 The New Woman’s Home Kitchens, Laundries, Furnishings These days many teachers, doctors, lawyers, merchants and others find it nec- essary to go without household help, and do their housekeeping and child- rearing themselves. [I]n a large house, the housewife becomes a slave to her work and is mortally crushed under a load of repetitive tasks. Who is unaware of the housewife’s lament that she hasn’t time to read a book, make music or in other ways be mentally active? To keep our people from becoming increas- ingly shallow, we must change. Every bit of formalism and superficiality, social propriety and the like, which flowed along with the slow tempo of life in our grandmothers’ time, we now only endure; it is not of our time. We must work with haste to achieve a sound solution, to fulfill the imperatives of our spiritual lives.1 —Ernst May, 1924 Established and active in the world and in the family, she can make her husband completely at home. From her own rich sphere of influence, there grows in her a clear understanding of his aspirations, his strug- gles and his work. She stands by his side no longer as a faithful and so- licitous handmaid, but rather as the warmly committed guardian of his ideals, as a companion in his struggles, as a comrade in his efforts and his exertions, giving and receiving intellectual and moral support.2 —Clara Zetkin In the standardized and flat-roofed houses of Praunheim and Römerstadt, women discovered that their sphere had also been reconfigured; delivered up replete with rationalized furniture, and rationalized kitchens and laundries. The kitchen was now the housewife’s “professional office,” the most sophisticated part of the house, its most publicized and most noticed aspect, beyond the flat roof. (Figure 3.01) The transformation of its technology depended, in turn, on the availability and 144 Building Culture Figure 3.01 The Frankfurt Kitchen. Grete Lihotzky, 1927. affordability of utility services providing gas and electricity to residential neighbor- hoods. The kitchen was also at the heart of the idea of nuclear family life: newly efficient, it enabled the wife and mother to lighten her housekeeping burden. Her role as nurturer now went beyond that of food provider to spiritual councilor. This rarefied status was a promise of a social policy called “female redomestication.” There was little interest in issues of women’s equality among polite German society in the years between 1890 and 1918; this was a battle waged within the political parties of the working-class, where party women called for recognition. Working-class women had fought for their men. They were a significant force The New Woman’s Home 145 in the anti-war movement, they joined demonstrations, gave speeches, created disturbances in food lines, and organized trade unions in munitions factories.3 Still, their comrades held steadfast in their belief in a “helpmeet” role for women. It was only under pressure from those like Clara Zetkin, the leader of the women’s branch of the SDP and Communist Rosa Luxembourg, that their reluctant par- ties adopted rights-for-women provisions. SDP women achieved a limited plank of separate-but-equal spheres before the war’s end.4 When the Social Democrats assumed power in 1918, the party fulfilled its political promise to enfranchise women, driven more from embarrassment than conviction. The Weimar Con- stitution declared women to be the equals of men and granted them the vote. Women quickly achieved a presence in state institutions and elective offices.5 With constitutional guarantees in place, the revolutionary phase of the wom- en’s movement was soon at an end. There followed years of retrenchment and decline. Young women increasingly viewed political activism as passé, and recruit- ment to the ranks of feminists fell, as did the number of women holding public office in the working class parties.6 In 1919, the SDP, USDP, and KP women numbered forty-eight among the three-hundred and fifty-member Frankfurt city council. As the decade wore on, the numbers of conservative women on the coun- cil grew, even as the overall number of women members dwindled, to thirty-three in 1929, and twenty-three in 1933. Meanwhile, the younger generation became acolytes of an alternative idea of womanhood, one enabled by independence and freedom from traditional roles. The term “New Woman,” coined in the nineteenth century, resurfaced in the 1920s as women matched the rising cult of modernity and their freedoms with a model of their own making. This modern woman was reflected in advertisements and American films in images of woman as a sexually- and socially-liberated free spirit. Her most visible manifestation was in her style: her short hair, her scanty and “unfeminine” dress. While the breezy lifestyle of the New Woman had a marginal reality at best, as a fantasy it resonated among many young working women who evinced little interest in having a family, scant enthusiasm for home- making, and extended their single years beyond the traditional leave-taking from home. When Frankfurt education reformer, Wilhelm Dienstbach, initiated week- ly evening classes for poor women looking to improve their job skills, he was flooded with applicants.7 The independence and fashionable style assumed by the New Woman was an anathema to the self-appointed conservators of the home. Socialists and conser- vatives alike feared for the future of family life, predicting a decline in the moral 146 Building Culture fabric, and the emergence of a new, unruly working-class born under her tutelage, ending in Germany’s economic and spiritual ruin.8 Demographic trends under- scored their fears. Women comprised 35 percent of the Weimar workforce. While post-war male unemployment was high, there was a rapid increase in the number of working women—many of them replacing men as a result of the rationalization of industry, as unskilled, low-wage labor.9 There was also a rising number women in the professions and the universities. By 1917, university women outnumbered men by 2.5 million.10 At the same time, a so-called “birth strike” retarded popu- lation growth among the working class. Experts blamed the dramatic drop in the birth rate—down to 3.9 births per household by 1925—on women’s selfish preoccupation with acquiring material comforts to the detriment of the family.11 Ever ambivalent about its commitments to women, the SDP felt pressure to reassert the concept of woman’s sphere. Industry had a need for women as cheap labor, but it also needed them to produce a new generation of workers. Long hours on the job, added to responsibilities at home, had resulted in a much higher mortality rate for young women as compared to men. The strain was at least par- tially to blame for the drop in the birth rate, and put industry in need of a way to maintain its double and contradictory agenda for women.12 Meanwhile, the mid- dle class bemoaned the declining number of women available to work as servants: with growing opportunities in industry, few working girls were attracted to the grueling routine, poor working conditions, and paltry benefits of home service. As early as the 1890s, there was an effort to establish a compulsory Weibliches“ Dienstjahr (woman’s service year) that would parallel men’s compulsory military service.13 Advocates suggested that the service year would acculturate working- class girls, shape them as servants and future housewives. Girls could “train” by working as farm maids, mother’s helpers or housemaids for little to no wages. The future outlined by the service year—that women prepare for lives as servile and menial laborers—was grim at best, yet the proposal resurfaced in the 1920s. and would eventually be instituted by the Fascists. In the meantime, its propo- nents found compensation in the institution of compulsory home economics training in the grammar schools, and the advent of the Frauenschulen, vocational secondary schools that trained women as “professionals” for service industries as seamstresses, laundresses, daycare, and nursery-school attendants and nurses. At the same time, women’s college programs during Weimar reverted to an almost exclusive concentration on social service professions, i.e., domestic science, teach- ing, social work, and nursing.14 The New Woman’s Home 147 This combination of factors—the veiled misogyny of the New Woman scare, the interests of industry and the middle class, constitutional promises, and the conflicted agenda of the SDP—resulted in the policy of female redomestication.15 With it, effort to improve the lot of German women quickly narrowed focus.”16 Rather than striving to apportion women the same “basic duties and rights” as men, redomestication sought to reassert a “professionalized” woman’s sphere.