How German is she?

Erica Carter

The 1950s have passed into the history books as the period of the Federal Republic of Germany's so-called economic miracle; yet attention to women's roles in economic reconstruction has until now been negligible. In this book, Erica Carter explores how the development of a "social market economy" after 1949 gave a new centrality to consumers as key players in the economic life of the nation, and, in that process, gave women a new public significance. Public attention focused in particular on the nation's housewives, who were to train the populace for entry into a new world of consumer prosperity. Carter investigates this focus from two perspectives: in part 1, she tackles the political economy of postwar West German consumption, and in part 2 she looks at representations of the consuming woman across a range of popular cultural forms. Since visual imagery is discussed at length,...

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