Producing new women: work, consumer culture and Jewish clothing companies in Wilhelmine Germany

This dissertation investigates the involvement of Jewish commercial clothiers in the making of women’s modernity in turn-of-the century Berlin. Its focus is specifically on expressions of support for and collaboration with the first women’s movement, and on the promotion of feminine ideals that corresponded with the modern female type known as the New Woman, in a non-advertising context. The thesis explores how the public investment of clothing manufacturers and retailers in the middle-class women’s cause related to their roles as employers, pioneers of consumer culture, and profit-driven businesses, each of these areas intersecting with middle-class women’s modernity in different ways. Using a mixed methodology including ideas from discourse analysis and close reading, the author considers how these positions were inflected by class, gender and ethnicity. Importantly, the research suggests how the Jewishness of companies and their owners factored into the equation, among other things through politics and Jewish philanthropic practices.
The arguments draw on three original case studies, which also represent three arenas in which women’s modernity was manifested in Wilhelmine Berlin, the centre of the German clothing trade: the commercial company, the trade press, and the universal exhibition. The first chapter analyses the illustrated promotional albums published by Kaufhaus N. Israel, a family-run store and clothing manufacturer in Berlin. The findings show how the firm idealised the growing participation of women in modern life and connected this phenomenon to contemporary feminism. The second chapter examines how the journal Der Confectionair, as the leading trade publication of commercial clothiers, sided with the middle-class women’s cause while remaining sceptical about reform in the clothing industry, which through its manufacturing practices contributed to the marginalisation of working-class women. The third chapter addresses the central role played by commercial clothiers at the 1912 women’s exhibition “Die Frau in Haus und Beruf,” demonstrating for the first time how certain Jewish groups used the event as a platform to further Jewish interests.
The dissertation centers on the tension between commercialism and activism/political idealism, arguing that both phenomena are, in addition to other factors, simultaneously active in the examples discussed. The research raises questions about the lack of attention to commercial actors and the role of market liberalism in the annals of German feminism, which seems to correlate with the tendency to label Jewish women’s feminist activism as Jewish only in cases where it functioned as an expression of a Jewish religious identity. It connects the history of the Imperial German women’s movement with the histories of German business as well as the history of the Berlin-Jewish community. The text offers a cultural historical reading of the activities of German-Jewish clothiers, illustrating, in the process, how the impact of business and the people behind it extended into the social and cultural spheres of Wilhelmine German life. Ultimately, the thesis suggests how a predominantly male, Jewish cohort participated in the co-production of female modernity through commercial business, and how its efforts resulted in a particular female ideal: the productive (or producing) modern woman.

Keywords: Frauenbewegung
N. Israel
modernity
Die Frau in Haus und Beruf
modernisation
Konfektion
Hausvogteiplatz
halftone
Der Konfektionär
trade press
Leopold Schottlaender
German Jews
clothing company
Berlin
marketing
department stores
fashion
photography
women's exhibition
Wilhelmine Culture
L. Schottlaender &amp; Co.
New Jewish Man
New Woman
feminism
Jewish history
visual culture
Ellen Key
universal exhibition
women's movement
Der Confectionair
Advisor: Rechter, D