German Studies Review

Abstract:

At the turn of the twentieth century, German hospitals employed both men and women in nursing, but men were increasingly under pressure to justify their presence and resisted the feminization of their work. Led by nurse and later Reichstag parliamentarian, Georg Streiter, the German Association of [male and female] Nurses posited that working-class solidarities could secure middle-class aspirations of socioeconomic security, masculinity, family, and citizenship. While the association shifted toward a more exclusive politics of masculinity and citizenship in the 1920s, its earlier history of effectively challenging class and gender roles in nursing complicates broader political assumptions about conservative, maternalist, and Social Democratic gender ideologies in late Wilhelmine Germany.