Dr Katherine Calvert

My research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century German-language women’s writing, political cultural production, twentieth century German cultural history, and feminist theory. 

My PhD research explored motherhood as a prominent theme in women’s writing from the Weimar Republic and sheds new light on the tensions between socially progressive policies which increased rights and opportunities for women during this period and the continued widespread support of conservative notions of gender across the political spectrum. 

My primary texts included non-fiction political and psychoanalytic writing, such as Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart and the women’s magazine of the Social Democratic Party, Frauenwelt, as well as women’s political and popular fiction, such as Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Lina: Erzählung aus dem Leben eines Dienstmädchens and Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi: eine von uns. 

I examined the portrayal of mother-daughter relationships and the reproductive choices of women of the post-World War I generation in these texts to analyse how the authors engage with contemporary debates around the rights of single mothers and women’s access to birth control and abortion. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory referenced in a number of my primary texts, I offer fresh insights into the ways in which women in Weimar Germany negotiated the boundaries between their public and private lives.