6 - Everyday Life and Emigration: The Role of Women

Summary

Normally, women are mentioned all too infrequently in a volume such as this one. It appears that the refugee historians were nearly exclusively men. Nevertheless, questions arise which cannot be answered only by reflecting on “the historians” - the men - alone: How were refugee German academics able to survive the very first years of immigration? Who within the family provided the necessary income? Who made language instruction and occupational retraining possible? Who took care of the children, shopped for food, paid the rent, and so forth? While these questions appear to be of little relevance to theory, to the arts and sciences, they in fact constitute the very precondition for intellectual productivity. It is fitting that the émigré women be mentioned here, if only initially as the men's assistants - as the midwives, so to speak, of academic productivity in the field of history. To be truthful, a special volume devoted to the role of women in emigration would be necessary to really do the subject justice.

I am concerned here with the role of women in German-speaking, university-educated academic refugee families in the United States in general. I do not believe that the families of refugee historians differed significantly from the families of other academic refugees. However, it is striking that a relatively large number of émigré professors of history were able to obtain positions in the United States quite early on, in particular through the assistance of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars.