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Shmeleva O.N. [Features of feminism in Germany] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2021, Vol. 12, No. 4. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/18SCSK421.pdf (in Russian).

Features of feminism in Germany

Shmeleva Olga Nikolaevna
State Fire Academy of EMERCOM of Russia, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: shmeleva_on@mail.ru
RSCI: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=483073

Abstract. The article covers the history of the feminist movement in Germany from its inception during the revolutionary events of 1848 till nowadays. Analyzing key milestones in establishing women’s political and civil rights, the stages of development of the feminist movement in Germany: the “first and second waves” of German feminism and their phases, the authors identify the features of the women’s movement at each stage.

The methodological basis for the work is an integrative approach that combines the principles of historicism, systematicity with methods of cultural analysis of German feminism.

Summarizing the findings of researchers about the feminist movement and socio-political processes in Germany, the author considers the following features of German feminism of the “first wave”: the struggle for the right to education as the starting point for female emancipation; the division of the feminist movement into bourgeois, oriented towards liberal values, and proletarian branches; the liberal women’s movement was divided into moderate and radical directions; the creation of a large number of women’s societies and organizations which were capable of unifying and enlarging, but the feminist movement of Germany in its scale was not so massive as, for example, in the UK and the USA, and its representatives, unlike their British and American like-minded women, were not militant and aggressive. The new rise of the feminist movement and the emergence of the “second wave” of feminism were influenced by political events that imprinted its features, while the second “second wave” took place only in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the radical branch developed most actively, but in the German Democratic Republic, as well as in the USSR, the “women’s issue” was considered to be resolved. The main feature of the development of West German feminism is its greater practical orientation and integration into other political movements. Here feminist theory turned out to be more pragmatic than in other Western countries, it is actively applied in practice, developing an alternative female culture by creating feminist publishers, feminist print medias, women’s libraries, a feminist documentation archive, reforming the German language in order to eliminate gender asymmetries and sexisms, etc.

The conclusions reached by the author of this paper point to the fact, that now feminist discourse in Germany has become a special kind of ideological discourse, since the social consciousness is actualized here in order to eliminate any type of gender inequality. Having achieved significant results, the women’s movement here does not lose its relevance and is experiencing a new rise or the so-called “third wave” of feminism.

Keywords: feminism; women’s social and political movement; women’s political rights in Germany

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