Working Women and Motherhood: Failures of the Weimar Republic’s Family Policies

Abstract

This paper examines the Weimar Republic’s reaction to the population crisis after the First World War. The Reich government created welfare policies to boost the birth rate and decrease the infant mortality rate. These policies were often unrealistic or too exclusive for working-class women. As a result, they did not greatly impact the lives of working women or their procreation. The Weimar policies, therefore, failed in its efforts to increase the birth rate among working-class women