Mary Harris O’Reilly was a PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Michigan, studying with Professors Geoff Eley, Kathleen Canning, and Scott Spector. Her dissertation, Fashioning the Modern German Woman: Female Journalists and Discourses of the Self in Interwar Germany, was not completed when she died in 2009.

Mary described her dissertation as follows –

My dissertation contributes to the literature on modernity, gender and the visual culture of the Weimar Republic. Much of the work to-date on the “New Woman” in Weimar Germany has focused on the image of the sexually transgressive, empowered flapper as a myth constructed as an expression of anxiety over mass culture, permeable class boundaries and women’s increasing presence in the public sphere. My dissertation adds women’s voices to this discussion. How did women understand the changes going on around them and how did they, themselves, construct the modern German woman? Using a variety of sources – including magazine articles, fashion photography, unpublished booklets, letters and speeches – my dissertation compares the varied images of the fashionable woman as a means of exploring how Germans renegotiated the boundaries between masculine and feminine, and public and private. I suggest that during a period of tremendous change, the contest over the definition of the fashionable woman reflected, on the one hand, the blooming of a new consciousness of self among women, and on the other hand, an effort to reconcile that new awareness of self with long-standing identities as members of economic, national and political communities.

Mary did complete several chapters of the dissertation and she amassed a trove of research on women’s approach to modernity in Germany between 1920 and 1940. She also wrote a number of conference and seminar papers.

Her executors wish to make this writing and research public. We hope that it will be of interest to scholars and the interested public and that through comments and discussion her work may prove valuable to others in the field.

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Academic Work by Mary Harris O’Reilly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.