Women's Role in Education and Society

The women's section of the party had its own ambitions.

In many schools and female boarding schools of secondary

education, female students adopted poor children as a

form

of social work.

The wives of teachers and other middle-class women

were encouraged

to do social work to assist large families.

The sarcastic phrase that circulated successfully in the

hallways

was, "The teacher's wife is cleaning the children's bottoms."

The female body was also explicitly a state

resource. The Ministry of the Interior's memoranda

on

childless civil servants, the deadlines that the Gauleiter set for

their officials to marry, the decrees that required written

statements on the absence of children all pointed to the same

logic. The womb of every German woman was a national

asset, and the state had the right to inquire why

it wasn't

producing.

That afternoon at home, while the broth simmered on the cookstove

and the

radio broadcast the news bulletin, the woman of the Reich

was simultaneously the guardian of the home and a link in the regime's

surveillance and biological production

machine.