Balancing the Books: Valuing Household Work in Weimar Germany

Abstract

This article explores the way that bourgeois women academics and social reformers adopted the quantified language of economics to advance their own position in the Weimar Republic. As statistics and indices proliferated as measures of national recovery, women attempted to record and describe their own economic realities within the household. They promoted bookkeeping as an indispensable tool of household rationalisation. This article argues that these bookkeeping practices enabled prominent women, including Henriette Fürth, Alice Salomon and Erna Meyer, to delineate the household – in its role as both economic unit and unit of reproductive and care work – as a site of economic importance and a field of intervention in the nascent social welfare state. Furthermore, the article shows how in the 1920s and 1930s, the market intruded into domestic life to shape notions of value and worth.