Women's Question" and Gender Electoral Preferenc in the Weimar Republic

The article is devoted to the problem of social psychological attitudes of women of the Weimar Republic from the point of view of fight for the equal rights and duties with men, the role of these attitudes in political preferences and voting. The author comes to the conclusions that all political parties of the Weimar rRepublic reflected only two positions in "women's question". SDPG and KPG supported emancipation and active political and economic life of women, all other parties supported "traditional values". 50 to 60 percent of women (in relation to men) voted for the right block of the parties (NNP, NNNP, tBNP, NSDAP and Zentrum), and 40 to 50 percent for the left block (SDPG, KPG), which clearly shows that not only in a percentage ratio, but also in absolute figures female voters of the period of the Weimar Republic prevailed in right-wing parties. The problems of emancipation and equality were not supported by most of the German women over 20 as they rejected the increasing duties and supported the rooted ideals of traditional family values. The parties from the center to the right using slogans of traditional values received higher share of women's votes in comparison with men's. The left-wing parties with slogans of equal rights and expansion of women's participation in political and economic life could not receive additional women's votes. Moreover, if the left-centrist reformist SDPG received votes of women and men in equal shares, the Communist Party received seriously fewer women's votes. In general, women voted more for the center and right-wing parties with slogans presenting women as mothers, wives and keepers of the home hearth than for the left-wing parties which urged women to get a job on an equal basis with men. The working German women were forced to be in charge of housekeeping out of the main work and to raise children. This "threefold burden" made slogans that women's only work is home very attractive. In the early 1930s, Communists and Social Democrats forcedly recognized that most German women did not seek to go to work at plants, and they failed to impart the ideas of gender equality and to tear the German women off their households. Representatives of these parties were sure that women in large numbers voted for NSDAP as they agreed with the ideas of the Nazis that the house and family are the mission of the woman. At the same time, it is not correct to consider that Germany was worse in these questions than its neighbors and the so-called "countries of democracy", that its traditions of ideals of family and motherhood, division of male and female roles in family and society were stronger (and the nutritious soil for the corresponding ideology). A small number of women in the political system, unequal economic conditions were typical for all countries, even the most developed ones were still patriarchal societies during this period.

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