Nancy Reagin analyzes the rhetoric, strategies, and programs of
more than eighty bourgeois women's associations in Hanover, a large
provincial capital, from the Imperial period to the Nazi seizure of
power. She examines the social and demographic foundations of the
Hanoverian women's movement, interweaving local history with
developments on the national level. Using the German experience as
a case study, Reagin explores the links between political
conservatism and a feminist agenda based on a belief in innate
gender differences.
Reagin's analysis encompasses a wide variety of women's
organizations--feminist, nationalist, religious, philanthropic,
political, and professional. It focuses on the ways in which
bourgeois women's class background and political socialization, and
their support of the idea of 'spiritual motherhood,' combined
within an antidemocratic climate to produce a conservative,
maternalist approach to women's issues and other political matters.
According to Reagin, the fact that the women's movement evolved in
this way helps to explain why so many middle-class women found
National Socialism appealing.