Die Arbeit der Frauen – die Krise der Männer Die Erwerbstätigkeit verheirateter Frauen in Deutschland und Schweden 1919–1939

Sammanfattning: In 1939 a law was passed in Sweden which forbade employers to dismiss female employees because of marriage or pregnancy. In Germany a law had been introduced already in 1932, which gave employers the right to dismiss a woman when she married. It also gave women right to end their employment for the same reason. The political decisions behind these legal changes were in both cases the result of an extended debate on the right of employment of married women. This debate occurred in most industrialised European countries in the interwar period.The increasing participation of women on the labour market was by some groups interpreted as a cause of mass unemployment. Economic crisis contributed to a crisis of masculinity, which then led to attacks on the rights of married women to paid employment. In Sweden there was a state commission set up in 1936 with the task of investigating women’s employment. This commission, kvinnoarbetskommittén, managed to demonstrate that dismissing women would not lead to a lowering of the unemployment figures for men, a task they accomplished through detailed studies of several labour market areas. The report of the commission guided the decision of parliament, a decision taken when the economic depression had already turned to a boom period. The composition of the commission as well as its work was a consequence of the strong influence of the Swedish women’s movement.In Germany the rights of women to paid employment was limited already in 1923 as the result of the financial crisis of the state. During the depression the attacks on married women’s right to employment became a political tool, which could be used both in foreign and domestic policy. Dismissing married women employed as civil servants was aimed to quash the demands of unemployed men. A prime target in the foreign policy was to convince the victors of World War I that reparations exceeded the ability of the German nation, a nation which had been badly stricken by economic crisis and unemployment. With this argument a solution of the unemployment issue was given second priority.