University of Oxford
Producing New Women: Work, Consumer Culture and Jewish Clothing Companies in Wilhelmine Germany
This dissertation investigates the involvement of Jewish commercial clothiers in the making of women’s modernity in turn-of-the century Berlin. Its focus is specifically on expressions of support for and collaboration with the first women’s movement, and on the promotion of feminine ideals that corresponded with the modern female type known as the New Woman, in a non-advertising context. The thesis explores how the public investment of clothing manufacturers and retailers in the middle-class women’s cause related to their roles as employers, pioneers of consumer culture, and profit-driven businesses, each of these areas intersecting with middle-class women’s modernity in different ways. Using a mixed methodology including ideas from discourse analysis and close reading, the author considers how these positions were inflected by class, gender and ethnicity. Importantly, the research suggests how the Jewishness of companies and their owners factored into the equation, among other things through politics and Jewish philanthropic practices.
Angelina Palmén is a postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University researching the intersection of Jewish history, business, society, and culture in early twentieth-century Europe. She received her PhD from the University of Oxfofrd in 2024. Her dissertation, which concerns the involvement of Imperial German Jewish fashion company owners in promoting liberal feminist visions of modernity, was a finalist for the 2025 Coleman Prize for best dissertation by the Association of Business Historians. Palmén’s current project explores social entrepreneurship as a category of historical analysis through the case studies of Jewish women activists in Berlin and Stockholm in the early 1900s. Her article “Rethinking the Jewish Public Sphere” was also recently awarded the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Prize.