3 - Women and Finance Capital in Weimar Cinema

Summary

Abstract: Chapter 3 takes up a central paradox of financial markets. While market participants were almost entirely male, financial activity is historically associated with the feminine. This chapter discusses the gendering of financial exchange and the depiction of women as both agents and objects of exchange in Die Austernprinzessin (‘The Oyster Princess,’ 1919), the little-known Fräulein Raffke (‘Raffke's Daughter,’ 1923), and Die freudlose Gasse (‘The Joyless Street,’ 1925). It offers the counterexample of an early and atypical film that featured a female speculator, Die Börsenkönigin (The Queen of the Stock Exchange, 1916), in order to discuss the depiction of financial independence in terms of its importance to first-wave feminism and the German women's movement. Also introduced is the trope of ‘liquidity’ – a central theme of this book.

Keywords: Woman as Speculator, Woman as Commodity, Gender and Finance, Liquidity, Asta Nielsen, First-Wave Feminism

The New Woman as Speculator

Introduction

In the established discourse on Weimar cinema, women are usually discussed in terms of their role as objects rather than active agents of financial exchange. However, a close examination of the depiction of women speculators reveals a more complex picture. Public and private space in Wilhelmine Germany (and continuing into the Weimar years) was highly gendered, and characterized by a doctrine of separate spheres, with men taking an active role in public space, and women largely confined to the domestic sphere of the family. Gender roles conformed to the notion of Geschlechtscharakter (‘the character of the sexes’), which emerged in the eighteenth century and described ‘the mental characteristics which were held to coincide with the physiological distinctions between the sexes.’ After the First World War, women increasingly participated in the workforce but this shift in women's role was gradual in practice. In popular media, however, it was manifested as a much more urgent phenomenon, creating the impression of violent rupture in traditional gender roles. Evidence of the perception of the threat of an emergent ‘New Woman’ can be found in all cultural domains in the Weimar period and appeared in a variety of forms in the cinema.