| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Elizabeth D. Heineman. What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany. (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, number 33.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999. Pp. xviii, 374. $45.00.

In this fine contribution to the burgeoning field of German women's and gender history, Elizabeth D. Heineman makes an excellent case for the significance of marital status as a crucial but highly fluid marker of identity and gender roles. Heineman traces the fluctuating meanings of the difference between married and single women, both legal and in everyday life, from the 1930s to the 1950s, concentrating on a comparative study of postwar East and West Germany. The book begins with a trenchant analysis of the contradictory (and long-term) consequences of National Socialist social, racial, and military policies. The Nazis aimed to improve the status of unwed mothers while also pronouncing many of them asocial; they valorized marriage but gave unprecedented opportunity to politically and racially acceptable single women. The increasing presence of foreign workers and prisoners of war on the home front meant that "The regime obsessed with racial purity had become the catalyst of an unprecedented number of relationships between Germans and foreigners" (p. 58). In an interesting generational division of labor that also shifted the "difference" a husband could make, the social work of mourning men and symbolizing marriage fell to older women, while younger married and single women did wage labor. Married women were widowed with children, and single women married soldiers with whom they would never live. War, defeat, and occupation exacerbated the instability of—and often rendered temporarily irrelevant—the marriage institution the Nazis had pledged to restore. . . .

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