Women's Roles and Reproductive Pressure in Nazi Germany

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.