“Catholic feminists”? Catholic female politicians in West German democracy from the 1960s to the 1980s

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Martina Steber
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542588978

Although Catholic female politicians have shaped West German democracy since 1949, research has so far taken little notice of them and the specific type of politician they represented. Democracy, gender and Catholicism, however, have indeed been closely intertwined. Based at the University of Augsburg and the Leibniz- Institute for Contemporary History at Munich, the project takes the intricate interplay of democracy, gender and Catholicism as its starting-point, and uses the examples of the CDU politicians Aenne Brauksiepe (1912-1997), Hanna-Renate Laurien (1928-2010) and Rita Süssmuth (b. 1937) to examine models of doing female Catholicism in politics. The project is interested in how politically engaged women in the Catholic Church, political parties and the political public spheres presented themselves in the Federal Republic from the 1960s to the 1980s, and in the political strategies that they used. It focuses on the one hand on how the three female politicians from three different generations shaped their careers between church and party politics, working constantly on their political biography, their self-image, and their self-representation. It investigates how they positioned themselves politically and their priorities in those three decades, when numerous conflicts about equal rights for men and women in law, in politics, in society, and in the church had a great power to mobilize people. On the other hand, the project is interested in the perception of female politicians in the public spheres of West Germany, and thus in the construction and negotiation of being Catholic: in the Catholic Church, in the media, in the female public sphere of women’s associations, initiatives and communities. Brauksiepe, Laurien and Süssmuth represented the type of politically active Catholic woman or female Catholic politician that they were then also categorized as being. But can they be described as “Catholic feminists”, as at least Rita Süssmuth has been retrospectively described? The project explores (1) the semantics that characterized the political language used in female Catholic publics to describe being Catholic in the space of the political; (2) the practices that shaped political action and produced a specific habitus of being Catholic; and (3) the modes and communicative codes that were used to construct an “emotional community” (B. Rosenwein) of female political Catholicism. The project is guided by the thesis that the transformation processes of West German Catholicism from the 1960s to the 1980s saw the development of a form of doing female Catholicism in politics in the triangle of the Catholic Church, West German democracy, and the female public sphere, a form that contributed significantly to the democratization of society and the Church.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants