Speech to the National Socialist

SPEECH to the NATIONAL SOCIALIST WOMAN'S ASSOCIATION in 1935

The Role of Women in the Nation According to Scholtz-Klink

According to Scholt-Klink, the principal role of women in the Reich was to support the nation by supporting their husbands. Women should fulfill their roles as homemakers and keep their men happy and well-fed and they should support one another in that goal. They should devote their energies to raising healthy children who will, in turn, also contribute to the Reich. Scholt-Klink referred to German women as being mothers of the German nation.

Lessons from the Maternity Service

One lesson from the Maternity Service at the time of the writing were that the German people were willing to be generous to support their mission, especially German of modest means, who contributed most willingly to the cause when asked. Another lesson from the Maternity Service was that women were so eager to contribute to the welfare of the nation that none of those involved in the program ever asked about salaries or pensions; they gladly agreed to serve their nation through the Maternity Service.

Unlike the lessons of the liberal era, the concept of womanhood and motherhood advanced by Scholt-Klink was that through marriage women become mother of the nation. The writer describes this as a conscious conviction that women must become supporters of the nation by supporting their husbands in their respective roles in society.

3. Women and Paid Employment

On one hand, Scholt-Klink acknowledged that a substantial portion of the nation's industrial labor would always have to be performed by women, by necessity, especially in war time. However, in principle, Scholt-Klink argued that the proper role for women is not in the workplace but in the service of their families and in the support of their husbands. Because the economic situation in post-World-War I Germany made it necessary for many women to work outside of the home, Scholt-Klink hoped to provide at least some well-deserved respite for some of them by assigning members of her group to fill in for them temporarily at factories and plants to enable them to enjoy a vacation and replenish their spirit of happiness.

4. The Difference between Scholtz-Klink's Ideas and Past Women's Movement

The most important difference between Scholt-Klink's ideas and past women's movements at the time was that Scholt-Klink's movement was relatively unconcerned with the welfare of individual women or with the progress of women as a group. Those were the aims of other contemporary and earlier women's movements, especially in relation to suffrage. Women's movements had previously almost always sought to equalize the rights of women in society and to establish the same kinds of rights for women as those already enjoyed by men.