Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany

The Bund Deutscher Madel was the female section of Hitler Youth. Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany examines the way this Nazi organization linked up with the interests of contemporary German girls and young women. Recruiting its members systematically since the end of the 1930s, the BDM encompassed practically all German girls aged ten to fourteen by allowing them latitude for their own development while assigning them responsibilities that gradually integrated them into the National Socialist State. Historian Dagmar Reese illuminates the different experiences of these young women through two case studies: one of the BDM's work in the petty-bourgeois milieu of a Protestant garrison town, and the other immersed in the working-class milieu of Berlin's red Wedding neighborhood. Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany is the English translation of a major work of German history, one in a list of such works published in Michigan's field-defining series, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. It will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of German, cultural and gender history, as well as political theory.