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Women's Labor Service In Nazi Germany Summary

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Where Mason touches on the subjects of blue-collar, white-collar, and farm labor in regards to women, Jill Stephenson 's 1982 text "Women 's Labor Service in Nazi Germany" explores how work and the labor service changed for women during the course of the Nazi Regime.Stephenson, previously mentioned by Mason, is one of the frontier historians when it comes to women in Nazi Germany. This text goes more in depth into the study of the conscription of women to work in Nazi Germany. The Labor Service in Germany was created with the idea, and practice from 1925-1945, that young men and women would spend “between three months and a year working on community projects… in exchange for their keep and a little pocket money.” The Labor Service was broken up into the women’s and men’s sectors. One of the first things that Stephenson discusses is the idea of “voluntary” work. Much of the work that women did for the Women’s Labor Service (WLS) was voluntary, not necessarily meaning freely undertaking, but rather, unpaid. Stephenson argues that because the Regime failed to conscript women early on, and could not properly motivate women to help through the use of propaganda, that women’s contribution to the war …show more content…

She ends hers text describing the end of the Labor Service in 1945 with the remark about how the women’s branch “was remembered chiefly as-quite literally- a breeding ground for illegitimate children.” This was an unfounded statement because nowhere in her text does she discuss the breeding of illegitimate children within the WLS. While she does shed some insight into the working habits and lives of women of Nazi Germany, she still leaves a lot of the same gaps in knowledge that Mason does: the widows, younger women, older women; again, we really only get a sense of life for women of a marriageable

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