5 - Women, Gender, and the Limits of Political History in the Age of “Mass” Politics

Summary

The problem discussed in this essay is this: It is still possible to write a general account of German history that excludes women. What happened in German “history,” that is, can be quite effectively explained with reference to events or categories that may be expanded to include female actors but that lose nothing of their force when assumed to be masculine (or indeed neuter). This is most obviously because the events that make up “history” (or at any rate, the framework around which historical accounts are constructed) are political events. This is acutely obvious in the case of modern Germany, where much historical analysis is concerned directly or indirectly with the seizure and maintenance of state power by the Nazis. More broadly, history is by definition the story of events that manifest themselves publicly and are acknowledged to be relevant to society understood as a public body or polity. The territorial or national state itself (another issue of particular relevance in the construction of German history), which provides the apparently unproblematic field for the study of history, is itself a Politikum first and last. By extension, class relations are acknowledged as a historical force or a locus of historically relevant power insofar as production is seen to be allied with politics through their common habitation of a public sphere. This construction of “history” not only privileges public identities and public forms of power over those that function in or are assigned to the private sphere; it also prejudices the criteria by which the adequacy of explanations is measured.