scholarly journals The Multinational Working Class? Political Activism and Labour Migration in West Germany During the 1960s and 1970s

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goeke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Labour Migration ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Margaret A. Simons, Rebel at Heart

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-335
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Simons ◽  
Erika Ruonakoski
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Ideas

Abstract In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

Pro Familia and the reform of abortion laws in West Germany, 1967–1983

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-311
Author(s):  
Claudia Roesch
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Legal Abortion ◽  
The West ◽  
Reproductive Decision Making ◽  
Medical Emergencies ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This article investigates the role of the West German family planning association Pro Familia in the abortion reform of the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the question of legal abortion from the perspective of reproductive decision-making and asks who was to make a decision about having an abortion in the reform process—the woman, her doctor, or a counsellor. During the early reform suggestions of §218 in the 1960s, Pro Familia supported the West German solution of allowing legal abortion only in medical emergencies. Opinions within the organization changed as leading members witnessed legalization in Great Britain and New York. The feminist movement and the Catholic opposition to legal abortion influenced positions in the reform phase of the 1970s. Meanwhile, Pro Familia put emphasis on compulsory pregnancy crisis counselling as aid in decision-making for individual women and a tool for putting a decision into practice. Throughout the reform process, Pro Familia continued to perceive legal abortion not as way to enable women to make their own decision but as a pragmatic solution to emergencies.

Kitchen Debates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Weinreb
Keyword(s):  
Positive Impact ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Female Employment ◽  
Daily Food ◽  
East German ◽  
Home Cooking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Time And Energy

This chapter compares East German and West German attitudes toward women working outside of the home during the 1960s and 1970s. The two German states had radically different attitudes toward female employment. West Germany discouraged it, believing that women should remain out of the workforce to care for their families, especially their children. East Germany encouraged female labor as essential for meeting the country’s economic needs; women’s employment was seen as necessary for their self-fulfillment and as having a positive impact on their children’s health. Despite these differences, both countries perceived home cooking as women’s sole responsibility, as well as a vital necessity. This belief, among other things, determined the countries’ quite different school lunch policies. Ultimately, the normalization of home cooking and a “family meal” shaped women’s relationship to wage labor by demanding that their time and energy be dedicated to daily food work.

Localising the Social: The Rediscovery of Urban Poverty in Western European ‘Affluent Societies’

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTIANE REINECKE
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Urban Problem ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractConcentrating on the production of knowledge of poverty and homelessness, this article discusses how particular spatial settings influenced the construction of social problems in the 1960s and 1970s. Exploring the practices of three kinds of knowledge producers – social scientists in academic circles, ‘practitionerscumactivists’ engaging in advocacy research and experts in governmental committees – the analysis focuses on the early stages of a rediscovery of poverty in Western Europe as it was debated in international fora as well as in West Germany and France. It shows that the way in which poverty was represented as a new challenge to Western ‘affluent societies’ was in many respects an urban story, as the ongoing housing crisis and newly defined problem areas served as major points of reference for the revived interest in social deprivation. Moreover, urban actors – locally active NGOs and municipal authorities – played a preeminent role in launching debates on the apparent paradox of poverty in affluence. With their own work often grounded in particular urban problem zones, many contemporary observers tended to spatialise poverty. For them, poverty was bound to particular places; it was an exceptional sphere that helped generate a particular behaviour that made it difficult for ‘the poor’ to rise. While a growing part of the population had access to housing of a standard previously reserved to the middle class and had become able to choose where to live, life in peripheral shantytowns or dilapidated inner cities became the ultimate signifier of a social position beyond the established class structure.

scholarly journals John Lennon, autograph hound: The fan-musician community in Hamburg's early rock-and-roll scene, 1960–65

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sneeringer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Space ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the Beat music scene in Hamburg, West Germany, in the early 1960s. This scene became famous for its role in incubating the Beatles, who played over 250 nights there in 1960–62, but this article focuses on the prominent role of fans in this scene. Here fans were welcomed by bands and club owners as cocreators of a scene that offered respite from the prevailing conformism of West Germany during the Economic Miracle. This scene, born at the confluence of commercial and subcultural impulses, was also instrumental in transforming rock and roll from a working-class niche product to a cross-class lingua franca for youth. It was also a key element in West Germany's broader processes of democratization during the 1960s, opening up social space in which the meanings of authority, respectability, and democracy itself could be questioned and reworked.

Inventing New Forms of Political Theatre

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Red Army Faction ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Political Stance ◽  
Red Army ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Chapter 7, ‘Inventing New Forms of Political Theatre’, covers the 1960s and 1970s. It situates the chosen productions in the socio-political climate of the GDR—that is, within the discussions on the leadership of the Party—and in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the anti-authoritarian movement, the student movement, and the emergence of the Red Army Faction provide the context. The aesthetics of Benno Besson’s Oedipus Tyrant (1967, East Berlin), Hansgünther Heyme’s Oedipus (1968, Cologne), Hans Neuenfels’ Medea (1976), and Christoph Nel’s Antigone (1978, both in Frankfurt/Main) is evaluated in terms of their contribution to this discussion and their political stance. The last three productions serve as examples of how the Bildungsbürgertum—still the majority of the theatregoers in West Germany—wanted the politicization of theatre to be not merely justified but mandatory.

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