LE3 .A278 2020

2020

Dennis, Michael

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

History

History & Classics

In this thesis, I argue that the representation of proletarian women and mothers in the artwork of Käthe Kollwitz can be used to explore the shifts in gender relations during the Weimar Republic. The ‘proletarian woman’ or ‘proletarian mother’ was one of Weimar’s most dominant Modernist tropes, becoming a powerful symbol at a time when motherhood was effectively politicized by male politicians and women reformers alike. Many representations of women pervaded the Weimar era in response to women’s growing sexual and economic autonomy. Women were politically mobilized en masse as they obtained enfranchisement, championed sex and welfare reform movements, and entered the workforce in droves. For women, the Weimar Republic marked the erosion of pre-war sexual mores and gender divisions –by 1925 around eleven million women worked, comprising roughly thirty-five percent of the total female population. Thus, Kollwitz’s artwork will be explored in order to analyse both idealized representations as well as everyday realities of working-class women. Kollwitz’s politicization and use of motherhood signifies her use of ‘maternal compassion’ in order to assert and legitimize her voice in the typically male sphere of political discourse. Both her political and artistic significance serve to reassert women as self-determining participators in the making of Weimar culture. However, despite struggling to liberate working-class women from their material conditions which she painfully sought to document in her art, Kollwitz’s depictions of proletarian mothers also served to reaffirm predominant stereotypes and ideas of women as self-sacrificing mothers naturally bound to the family and home. Ultimately, Kollwitz’s work was unable to transcend dominant tropes and liberate women from such constraints.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3358