Women and the state: Käthe Truhel and the idea of a social bureaucracy

Abstract

Käthe Truhel’s 1934 doctoral dissertation, prepared under the supervision of Karl Mannheim, repays detailed examination for a number of reasons. First, it serves as an important counter-example to commonplace generalities about the alleged incapacity of women social workers of Truhel’s generation, supposedly enmeshed in ideological myths about ‘motherliness’, to reflect on their power relations to a male-dominated society and state. Second, it offers an intrinsically interesting and subtle analysis of the emerging bargaining structure for negotiations between bureaucrats and social workers in the context of late Weimar, understood as a site of the crisis of modernity. Third, it illustrates the quality and range of empirical work fostered by Mannheim during his brief tenure in Frankfurt.