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In Weimar Germany, there had been new opportunities for women. They experimented with their appearances, some took jobs and women were treated as equal citizens within the constitution, having the right to vote. However, there is debate about how many women experienced these changes. Life had altered in some ways, with some greater freedoms acquired but some women had experienced very little change. The Nazis had clear ideas of what they wanted from women. They were expected to stay at home, look after the family and produce children in order to secure the future of the Aryan race – the traditional role of the woman that had existed before the 1920s.

Hitler believed women’s lives should revolve round the three 'Ks':

Goebbels said: The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.

Marriage and family

Hitler wanted a high birth rate so that the Aryan population would grow. He tried to achieve this by:

• introducing the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage which gave newlywed couples a loan of 1,000 marks, and allowed them to keep 250 marks for each child they had
• giving an award called the Mother’s Cross to women who had large numbers of children
• allowing women to volunteer to have a baby for an Aryan member of the SS

Employment

Measures were introduced which strongly discouraged women from working, including:

• the introduction of the Law for the Reduction of Unemployment, which gave women financial incentives to stay at home
• not conscripting women to help in the war effort until 1943

However, female labour was cheap and between 1933 and 1939 the number of women in employment actually rose by 2.4 million. As the German economy grew, women were needed in the workplace.

Appearance

Women were expected to emulate traditional German peasant fashions - plain peasant costumes, hair in plaits or buns and flat shoes. They were not expected to wear make-up or trousers, dye their hair or smoke in public. They were discouraged from staying slim, because it was thought that thin women had trouble giving birth.