"Every Woman Needs Courage": Feminist Periodicals in 1970s West Germany

Abstract

This paper examines the role of national feminist periodicals in the West German women’s movement during the late 1970s. It focuses on how feminist ideas of autonomy were applied to magazine administration. As women’s centres began to decline, national publications worked as co-ordinating forces for the largely decentralized network of groups and institutions that made up the German women’s movement. Sources such as internal papers and letters are used in addition to the magazines themselves in order to examine the political goals and ideologies communicated by these periodicals and their editors. Each magazine’s organizational principles are assessed in terms of their influence on editorial development and relationship to political ideologies of the women’s movement. This paper shows that the autonomous organizational principles of national feminist periodicals were characterized by an anti-hierarchal impulse expressed through emphases on editorial fluidity and individual thought.